These aquatic apex predators can reach up to 100 pounds. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Flathead catfish () may look like they are perpetually smiling, but these five foot-long fish are no laughing matter in regions where they do not belong . The opportunistic predators are now one of the top predators in Pennsylvania's Susquehanna River, creating a major threat to the local food web. Without any natural predators to keep them in check, these enormous fish can alter a river system in only a matter of years.

In the final article of a three part series* focusing on what AI startup founders are doing to navigate the fast growth AI industry, Information Age spoke to 16 founders of some the UK's leading AI startups and scaleups to understand their artificial intelligence trends for 2021, including its growing use in a variety of industries, the importance of data and talent, the impact of Covid-19 and the democratisation of AI. "Fundamentally, AI is becoming more accepted and utilised across all areas of life and people are experiencing the benefits," says Mark Nicholson, CEO, Vivacity Labs. This growing use and acceptance of AI has been driven, in part, by the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. "More and more businesses that are not fully digitalised want to undergo a digital transformation. The healthcare sector, including drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry, has experienced a tremendous challenge over the last year. But, AI is increasingly being used in the medical sector to help tackle the virus "by analysing and interpreting data on the virus's spread," according to Dr Alex Young, founder and CEO at Virti. "It is also being used in healthcare to help with treatment and medical training.

The AMRC is helping lead a revolution in the UK. Inside its glass-walled, state-of-the-art Factory 2050 facility in Sheffield, the centre develops digital-driven solutions that employ AI, Internet of Things (IoT), robotic and other emerging technologies, all with the aim to solve real-world manufacturing problems. Once considered futuristic, these solutions are ready for full scale deployment today, helping UK manufacturers increase their performance while fueling the Fourth Industrial Revolution. "The whole ethos behind the AMRC is to maintain UK competitiveness in global manufacturing," explains Tom Hodgson, Theme Lead, Inspection and AI, AMRC. "We take ideas that come out of the universities, where they've been developed to a prototype level. Then, with our partner companies, we conduct research projects to transition those technologies into production environments."

The digital secretary has said he will question Grindr and Tinder about how they protect children after an investigation claimed they are put at risk of sexual exploitation. More than 30 cases of child rape have been investigated by police since 2015 after victims evaded age checks on such apps, the Sunday Times found. Jeremy Wright described it as "truly shocking". Grindr and Tinder said they have measures to prevent minors using them. A Freedom of Information request by the Sunday Times also showed 60 further instances of child sex offences - including grooming, kidnapping and violent assault - through online dating services.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are being regularly used by 18% of organisations, according to consumer information management firm Callcredit Information Group in its Fraud & Risk report. With take-up of AI on the rise, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) recently predicted that global gross domestic product (GDP) will be 14% higher in 2030 because of artificial intelligence. This is the equivalent of an additional $15.7trn, or more than the current output of China and India combined, according to PwC research. Data analytics AI technology is in the early stages of deployment but is already set to transform financial markets and could act as a key differentiator in performance, Matthew Hodgson, CEO of Mosaic Smart Data, tells GTNews. Two of the key areas within financial services that are making huge advances in AI are fraud prevention and lending and leasing.

Apple has shed new light on its top-secret driverless car project, as chief executive Tim Cook described the challenge of building autonomous vehicles as "the mother of all" artificial intelligence projects. Cook said Apple was ploughing resources into developing technology to control driverless vehicles, although he refused to rule out the Silicon Valley firm building its own car at some point. The Apple boss spoke as shares in his company and other US tech firms came under pressure this week amid investor concerns that a sector-wide boom is losing steam. Cook attempted to restore faith in Apple's ability to strike out into new territory by giving his most detailed comments yet about a car venture that has been shrouded in secrecy. "We're focusing on autonomous systems," said Cook in an interview with Bloomberg TV.

Apple has finally confirmed the worst-kept secret in Silicon Valley: it's working on self-driving car technology. "We're focusing on autonomous systems,"chief executive Tim Cook told Bloomberg News. "Clearly one purpose of autonomous systems is self-driving cars. "We sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects," Cook added. "It's probably one of the most difficult AI projects actually to work on." However Cook declined to elaborate on what, exactly, Apple intended to use the tech for. "We're not really saying from a product point of view what we will do, but we are being straightforward that it's a core technology that we view as very important." The news that the company is working on a self-driving car will come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. It's even confirmed as much itself, in regulatory filings necessary to earn it permission to test the vehicles on public roads. In December, Steve Kenner, Apple's director of product integrity, wrote to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: "The company is investing heavily in the study of machine learning and automation, and is excited about the potential of automated systems in many areas, including transportation." But the key question that still goes unanswered is whether Apple is building an actual car, or merely the technology required to make a self-driving car work in partnership with a traditional manufacturer. Its hiring for the plan, which is known internally as Project Titan, suggests that it has at least considered the former option, bringing on experts in manufacturing and vehicle design as well as machine vision and automation engineers. Whichever route it decides to go down, it will be arriving late to the field, according to analysts. "They were slow to begin testing autonomous systems, and they now have a considerable innovation gap to close," says ABI Research's James Hodgson. "Previous attempts by Apple to address personal mobility and automation have been marred by high turnover in specialist staff.

Driving a car is an extremely complex activity -- somehow we manage to control all that technology and keep our eyes on many things going on around us. We manage to do it well enough that there are not many accidents. But how much can we rely on software to control a car? It ought to be smarter, but does that make driving safer? A fatal accident in May 2016 involving a Tesla Motors car on autopilot made it clear that we can't fully trust it yet, even if, as Tesla CEO Elon Musk says, one fatality in 130 million miles of autopilot relates well to one fatality in 94 million miles of conventional driving.

Harold Cohen was already an acclaimed artist when he represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale back in 1966, and his work subsequently appeared in top-ranked galleries and museums around the world. So in 1969, when he began dabbling in computers, his intent was simply for the machines to help him create his drawings and paintings. I thought of designing a program as a kind of assistant, he recalls. I was to think up the heavenly paradigm and it was to do the earthly instantiation. But as Cohen found himself devoting less and less time and energy to his own paintings, his computerized alter ego, dubbed Aaron, began to take on a career of its own. In 1983, Aaron took up a pencil in its robotic hand and tirelessly produced drawing after drawing for an audience of captivated visitors to the Tate Gallery in London. It didn't matter to them that Cohen had to add color to the drawings with his own hand; many an onlooker walked out with one of the new drawings tucked under his arm. By last year, when the Computer Museum in Boston devoted an entire exhibit to Cohen's stepchild, Aaron had mastered paintbrush and palette and, once Cohen set up the apparatus, produced whole paintings, many of them quite pleasant to look at. Cohen's success with his computer program raises the question: Who is the creator of these paintings? The answer is by no means clear. Perhaps the creative intelligence is Cohen's because, after all, Aaron merely does what he programs it to do.

On the west coast of Australia, Amanda Hodgson is launching drones out towards the Indian Ocean so that they can photograph the water from above. The photos are a way of locating dugongs, or sea cows, in the bay near Perth--part of an effort to prevent the extinction of these endangered marine mammals. The trouble is that Hodgson and her team don't have the time needed to examine all those aerial photos. There are too many of them--about 45,000--and spotting the dugongs is far too difficult for the untrained eye. Deep learning is remaking Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon.