Announcing the partnership, US chief technology officer Michael Kratsios said: "America and our allies must lead the world in shaping the development of cutting-edge AI technologies and protecting against authoritarianism and repression. "We are proud to join our special partner and ally, the United Kingdom, to advance AI innovation for the well-being of our citizens, in line with shared democratic values." Measures under the deal include "recommending priorities for future cooperation in R&D areas" and "coordinating the planning and programming of relevant research activities". It will also promote "public-private partnerships and promoting R&D in AI focusing on fundamental advances and challenging technical issues such as explainability and fairness." Last night a spokesman for the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said: "This will provide a solid basis for future collaboration with the US on artificial intelligence, and will help drive breakthroughs in this groundbreaking technology to the benefit of people in both countries."

The UK ranks second only to America in the new technology, says Oxford Insight's AI Readiness Index, although China may have already pushed us into third. AI is already widely used in Britain for such processes as online banking and is providing the backbone for Covid research. In May Britain was the first country to contribute a supercomputer to the Covid-19 High Performance Computing Consortium.The group runs calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics and molecular modelling to discover new treatments and a vaccine.However, the new US-UK partnership – which stemmed from a meeting between Prime Minister Boris Johnson and US president Donald Trump – was also prompted by fears that China may be on the track to become an AI superpower.In 2017 China's state council announced itsAI development plan which aims to connect and upgrade all industry within just five years, as part of a "Made in China 2025" push.Under the plan, AI will be used to control firms to balance supply and demand, while the technology will also be used to keep tabs on the population.Announcing the partnership, US chief technology officer Michael Kratsios said: "America and our allies must lead the world in shaping the development of …

The next version of Microsoft's SQL Server relational database management system is now available, and along with it comes a special offer designed specifically to woo Oracle customers. Until the end of this month, Oracle users can migrate their databases to SQL Server 2016 and receive the necessary licenses for free with a subscription to Microsoft's Software Assurance maintenance program. Microsoft announced the June 1 release date for SQL Server 2016 early last month. Among the more notable enhancements it brings are updateable, in-memory column stores and advanced analytics. As a result, applications can now deploy sophisticated analytics and machine learning models within the database at performance levels as much as 100 times faster than what they'd be outside it, Microsoft said.