Politics Trump's Trade War Is the Latest Middle Finger to Senate Republicans It was about to be a good week to be a GOP candidate. Then Trump did what Trump does. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. Welcome to this week's edition of the Surge, which was off last Saturday so will now catch you up on the previous week's news: . August "silly season" continues with the usual slapstick stories about international trade wars and a possible Russian attack against NATO.

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We're already talking with several advanced data science engineering teams that are working on amazing open source projects that form the glue between different platforms, and we're looking to roll them under the Alliance." Of course, with so many moving parts to coordinate, fostering these emerging links hasn't been without challenges, and the AIIA is looking to learn from the missteps of similar precedents so that they can avoid making the same mistakes. "We've got to make sure that everyone sees the bigger picture and works together -- a rising tide lifts all boats," said Jeffries. "We don't want this to turn into a meaningless reference architecture. We don't want everyone in the Alliance pushing and pulling so hard that it warps the stack all out of proportion or collapses to individual interests. The trick here is to focus on mutual benefits -- every member of the Alliance must ask themselves how the Canonical Stack can help the Alliance as a whole. We also don't want governance by pure committee.

More than 20 AI startups have banded together to create the AI Infrastructure Alliance in order to build a software and hardware stack for machine learning and adopt common standards. The alliance brings together companies like Algorithmia; Determined AI, which works with deep learning; data monitoring startup WhyLabs; and Pachyderm, a data science company that raised $16 million last year in a round led by M12, formerly Microsoft Ventures. A spokesperson for the alliance said partner organizations have raised about $200 million in funding from investors. Dan Jeffries, chief tech evangelist at Pachyderm, will serve as director of the alliance. He said the group began to form from conversations that started over a year ago.

Having just returned from yet another extremely productive Jefferies BattleFin conference in Miami, our team was reflecting on several themes we observed occurring in the financial services and hedge fund artificial intelligence ("AI") market. With 470 attendees, the Jefferies BattleFin conference is the premier event to observe, hear, and meet with experts related to alternative data and AI for hedge funds. The conference itself continues to grow in size, and in the diversity of data providers and technology services relevant to the technology-driven investor. We were excited to participate in a panel discussion yet again this year about a topic we have a high degree of conviction and experience, and it was extremely productive to meet with so many new and familiar industry experts. An overview of these themes from this year's event include: An emerging theme that was very prevalent this year was the acceptance of outsourced data engineering or Data-Engineering-as-a-Service.

On May 17th, I attended the 4th Rise of AI conference in Berlin. The conference grew from 17 participants in 2015 to 70 in 2016, 300 in 2017, and this year 700. Although many more interested people wanted to participate, the event organisators, Veronika and Fabian Westerheide, announced that the conference next year will be capped at around the same amount of people to not loose the personal touch – in my opinion, a very good decision. I had the chance to give a presentation on my own. I talked about my team's learnings with regards to the data science process, the obstacles we faced and still facing, and the concepts & solutions we have been developing to get around those issues and to make the data science process smoother.