Where does your enterprise stand on the AI adoption curve? Take our AI survey to find out. Opaque, a startup that helps organizations analyze encrypted data in the cloud, today announced that it closed a $9.5 million seed funding round led by Intel Capital with contributions from Race Capital, The House Fund, and FactoryHQ. Cofounder Raluca Ada Popa says that the funds will help to expand Opaque's ongoing contributions to the open source and data security communities. A majority of data sits in private hands.

Former U.S. secretary of state, Henry Kissinger has said that he's convinced of AI's potential to fundamentally alter human consciousness--including changes in our self-perception and to our strategic decision-making. Kissinger also slammed AI developers for insufficiently thinking through the implications of their creations. Now 96, he was speaking to an audience attending the "Strength Through Innovation" conference currently being held at the Liaison Washington Hotel in Washington, D.C. The conference is being run by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which was set up by Congress to evaluate the future of AI in the U.S. as it pertains to national security. Moderator Nadia Schadlow, who in 2018 served in the Trump administration as the Assistant to the President and as Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy, asked Kissinger about his take on powerful, militarized artificial intelligence and how it might affect global security and strategic decision-making.

The Rise Labs by Rise Networks, Nigeria's first AI-powered Learning, Research and Work Readiness Centre has launched the Artificial Intelligence Ideathon by calling for revolutionary ideas that have the potential of solving Nigeria's Education, agriculture, healthcare and financial inclusion problems using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning models and methodologies. The 2019 AI Ideathon is open to students, data scientists, working professionals, developers and academics across Nigeria who are passionate about becoming the early pioneers of groundbreaking innovative solutions to the challenges identified above by applying their knowledge and ideas in the realm of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Solutions while encouraging research and collaboration to drive industry-focused AI innovation and the uptake of AI-driven results across sectors. Winners of the Ideathon will get the rare opportunity of a veritable springboard to showcase and share their AI and ML models and applications to a broad community of stakeholders especially Policy Makers, Technology Experts and Organizations, Leaders in the Private Sector and Venture Capitalists to facilitate the scaling and execution of their ideas. They will also win world-class, brand new work tools and software which include an Apple MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2018) $1000, a Microsoft Surface Book 2 (13.5-inch), a 13-inch, 2018 MacBook Air along with a Publication of their Ideas in The Rise Labs National AI Innovation e-book, Mentorship Support by some the best AI Innovators & Experts within Nigeria & around the World, National Public Recognition & Opportunity to Network and fundraise at WORKPLAN: Africa's Action Plan on Education, Skills and the Future of Work for the Youth on November 23rd, 2019 and a Free 3-6months Workspace, Incubation and Technical support at The Rise Labs. Submission of entries for the Ideathon begins at 12:01 am on August 19th, 2019 and ends at 11:59 pm on September 20th, 2019 (West Africa Time).

Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. In this episode I spoke with Ion Stoica, cofounder and chairman of Databricks. Stoica is also a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, where he serves as director of the new RISE Lab (the successor to AMPLab). Fresh off the incredible success of AMPLab, RISE seeks to build tools and platforms that enable sophisticated real-time applications on live data, while maintaining strong security.