Artificial intelligence has thrashed humans at chess. Now the bots are gunning for mahjong. An AI-powered program developed by Microsoft Corp has surpassed the average level of the top players in a recent competition in Japan, Harry Shum, executive vice-president of the companys artificial intelligence and research group, said in Shanghai on Thursday. To those friends who usually lose money in mahjong, this is good news to you, Shum said to laughter at the World AI Conference. The bot player developed by Microsoft can deal with high uncertainty, presenting instincts akin to human, projection and deduction capabilities as well as a sense of overall consciousness.

TECHNOLOGY has advanced so much that one can now produce or alter audio or video content to show or present something that actually didn't happen. With deepfake technology (which combines "deep learning" with "fake"), one can, for example, superimpose someone's face over another person's to create a video to support his or her own agenda. The video is then circulated online, with disastrous consequences on the victim if the purpose is vile in nature, such as the sex video that is currently doing its rounds on social media in Malaysia. Deepfake is artificial intelligence (AI) at work, and there is little you can do to prevent it from happening to you, as highly-paid Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson lamented. The subject of a fake porn video, she told the Washington Post (Dec 31, 2018): "The truth is, there is no difference between someone hacking my account or someone hacking the person standing behind me on line at the grocery store's account. It just depends on whether or not someone has the desire to target you. "Obviously, if a person has more resources, they may employ various forces to build a bigger wall around their digital identity.

Lawmakers and regulators, still grappling with the downsides of the Internet and social media era, are now trying to balance the promises and perils of artificial intelligence.

PETALING JAYA: Dagang NeXchange Bhd (DNeX), via subsidiary Genaxis Sdn Bhd, has signed a joint-venture (JV) and shareholder agreement with Agorai Pte Ltd to provide artificial intelligence (AI) consulting services. Under the agreement, both companies will set up a JV company in Switzerland with an operating office in Malaysia, which will provide AI-related consulting services on a global scale. The JV company will be 50% owned by DNeX. DNeX will invest US$5mil in this exercise, where the company will receive a minority convertible equity investment in Agorai, as well as an enterprise development licence to Agorai's AI toolkit, which includes deep learning, machine vision and natural language understanding tools.

YEARS ago, we were munching on popcorn or in our pyjamas at home watching movies about Artificial Intelligence (AI), awed by how smart technology was. Today, AI has become a reality and countries are racing to be advanced in the technology, with the application of AI said to greatly enhance levels of economic and social development, among others. AI is developed to learn and think more like humans, and is used in specific fields including medical diagnosis, voice recognition, autonomous driving and smart city administration. This technology will soon change the job landscape as well as impact data privacy, both now a debate among technology experts, organisations, governments and the general public. ''Artificial Intelligence is set to become a major technological revolution over the next few years.

ARTIFICIAL Intelligence (AI) is developing faster than we imagined. If we look closely, our lives are being enhanced by AI or at least with technologies and applications using algorithms that monitor and learn from our behaviour. Applications such as Google, Facebook, Spotify, Uber and Netflix use machine learning to extract street names from photos, recognise and tag friends, find favourite songs, estimate arrival times and pick-up locations, and recommend movies. As AI is developed to learn and think more like humans and to replace lower-skilled roles, its impact on future employment and data privacy has become a point of contention among technology experts, organisations, governments and the general public. In response, the University of Southampton Malaysia (UoSM) will be hosting Prof Dame Wendy Hall in a public lecture on The Artificial Intelligence Revolution on Sept 30 at The Majestic Hotel Kuala Lumpur.

Nvidia Corp dominates chips for training computers to think like humans, but it faces an entrenched competitor in a major avenue for expansion in the artificial intelligence chip market: Intel Corp. Nvidia chips dominate the AI training chip market, where huge amounts of data help algorithms "learn" a task such how to recognise a human voice, but one of the biggest growth areas in the field will be deploying computers that implement the "learned" tasks. Intel dominates data centres where such tasks are likely to be carried out. "For the next 18 to 24 months, it's very hard to envision anyone challenging Nvidia on training," said Jon Bathgate, analyst and tech sector co-lead at Janus Henderson Investors. But Intel processors already are widely used for taking a trained artificial intelligence algorithm and putting it to use, for example by scanning incoming audio and translating that into text-based requests, what is called "inference". Intel's chips can still work just fine there, especially when paired with huge amounts of memory, said Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, chief technology officer of Nexar Inc, an Israeli startup using smartphone cameras to try to prevent car collisions.

You're settling into your window seat, bound for a summer vacation, when the flight attendant wishes you a happy birthday or commiserates about the lousy weather that delayed the last leg of your trip. It might feel like the flight crew has been scouring your recent social media posts, but at some airlines, that wouldn't be necessary. Carriers like United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Southwest Airlines are giving gate agents and flight attendants access to more customer data in hopes of giving passengers more personalized service. Still, there's only so much a birthday greeting can do to make up for a lost bag or late arrival, particularly when airlines want to steer clear of conversations that feel too personal. While in-cabin recognition might be the most visible way airlines are working to do more with the troves of data they collect, behind-the-scenes efforts to mine stats on everything from collisions between airport vehicles to turbulence touch almost every piece of a passenger's trip.

LOS ANGELES: According to the founder of artificial intelligence outfit ScriptBook, Sony Pictures could have saved a fortune from 2015 to 2017 by using the company's algorithms instead of human beings to reject or greenlight movies. In a presentation at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, ScriptBook founder Nadira Azermai said that by analysing screenplays, ScriptBook retroactively identified as box-office failures 22 out of the 32 Sony movies that lost money in that period, during which Sony released a total of 62 movies. "If Sony had used our system they could have eliminated 22 movies that failed financially," said Azermai. Welcome to the brave new world of AI and machine learning as it applies to Hollywood. Many see in ScriptBook and similar AI systems the potential to destroy a major part of the film production and distribution ecosystem, displacing script readers and saving much of the money studios spend on test screenings, focus groups and market research. At its most basic, ScriptBook, founded in 2015 and based in Antwerp, Belgium, has created a tool that analyses the text of screenplays to produce financial forecasting, or as Azermai grandly puts it, "Our mission is to revolutionise the business of storytelling by using AI to help producers, distributors, sales agents and financiers assess their risk."

Artificial intelligence is here to take your jobs and steal your privacy. With the advent of facial recognition technology in products like iPhones, and recent data breaches at major companies such as Facebook, concern over the effects of AI in daily human life is as strong as ever. A survey released last week by Washington-based Brookings Institute shows America's fear of automation is alive and well. The national study, which polled more than 1,500 adults aged 18 or older, showed serious concerns about AI, a technology that has a growing presence in a number of industries. Of those polled, 39% expressed worry about the overall impact of AI, while 38% said AI will lead to fewer jobs for humans.