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Robots finds a welcome reception among China’s finance and tax services

In addition to Deloitte, the other remaining big-four accounting firms – including EY, KPMG and PwC – have introduced the technology-driven services in China to businesses ranging from banking, technology, and consumer services.


Mainland based accountants are embracing automation to lower office administration costs and enhance efficiency, moves which are opening the door to a wider embrace of artificial intelligence (AI).

Delixi Electric, a manufacturer of low-voltage electrical products, is banking on robotics to trim time needed for tax invoice issuance by 75 per cent. The Zhejiang province-based company needs to issue more than 5,000 value-added-tax invoices to more than 600 clients nationwide monthly.

A human needs 20 minutes to issue each invoice, which entails information collection, verification and recording. However, the same work can be done in five minutes by a robot, according to Deloitte, the robot supplier.

Department of Transportation releases new self-driving vehicle guidelines

Today, U.S. Depart of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao released the DoT and National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration’s new guidelines for automated driving systems. This is version 2.0 of a federal policy on self-driving cars, and Chao said it’s a “living document,” with plans already for version 3.0 to arrive in 2018.

These guidelines are called “A Vision for Safety 2.0,” which Chao says reflects their importance in terms of addressing the rising rate of traffic deaths in the U.S. Chao cited the most recent stats, which include the stat that 94 percent of serious motor vehicle accidents in the U.S. are due to human error, in presenting the new guidelines at an event today.

The new guidelines are designed to unify development of automation features, including full autonomy and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and to help unify industry, local, state and federal government efforts to that end. It’s voluntary guidance, but it focuses on SAE Levels 3 through 5 automation, and it clarifies that companies don’t need to wait to begin testing and deploying their automated driving systems, and streamlines the self-assessment process for companies and organizations.

Google’s AI AlphaGo Is Beating Humanity At It’s Own Games (HBO)

Go is an ancient, aristocratic Chinese board game that’s reputed to have as many possible moves as there are atoms in the universe. And Google recently trained an artificial intelligence computer to play against one of the best human players in the world. The computer won.

At Google’s Future of Go Summit, 19-year-old Chinese Go prodigy Ke Jie was defeated by the AI AlphaGo in a three-match series.

AI evangelists are happy with the win, but AI doomsayers are worried it’s coming for our jobs next. And China is just mad that an American company beat the world at a Chinese game.

VICE News reports on what the competition really means for AI development.

Check out VICE News for more: http://vicenews.com

‘Inspirational’ robots to begin replacing teachers within 10 years

R obots will begin replacing teachers in the classroom within the next ten years as part of a revolution in one-to-one learning, a leading educationalist has predicted.

Sir Anthony Seldon, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, said intelligent machines that adapt to suit the learning styles of individual children will soon render traditional academic teaching all but redundant.

The former Master of Wellington College said programmes currently being developed in Silicon Valley will learn to read the brains and facial expressions of pupils, adapting the method of communication to what works best for them.

How computers learn to recognize objects instantly

Ten years ago, researchers thought that getting a computer to tell the difference between a cat and a dog would be almost impossible. Today, computer vision systems do it with greater than 99 percent accuracy. How?

Joseph Redmon works on the YOLO (You Only Look Once) system, an open-source method of object detection that can identify objects in images and video — from zebras to stop signs — with lightning-quick speed. In a remarkable live demo, Redmon shows off this important step forward for applications like self-driving cars, robotics and even cancer detection.

The Future of Machine Learning in a Connected World

Ariadna Font Llitjós of IBM Emerging Technology, Director of Emerging Technology Experiences at IBM Experiences, moderated the MIT Venture Capital + Innovation Conference at the MIT Sloan School of Management on June 2017. The main question of this panel was “What do Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence mean for our future?”

Experts * S. Somasegar of Madrona Venture Group * Karl Iagnemma of NuTonomy, CEO of Nutonomy and Principal Research Scientist at MIT * Gareth Keane of Qualcomm Ventures * Saikat Dey of GuardHat, Co-Founder of GuardHat.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink Gets $27 Million to Merge Humans and Machines

Not much is known about Neuralink beyond Musk’s few public comments about the potential of brain-computer interfaces to accelerate human evolution. Musk sees real danger in artificial intelligence — he’s called AI a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization” — and believes that the best way to keep pace with machine intelligence is to upgrade human intelligence.

“Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence,” Musk told audience members at the World Government Conference in Dubai, proposing a high-bandwidth digital interface that can be interlaced with the brain to transmit data at the speed of thought.

Musk elaborated on the brain-computer interface — also known as a neural lace — in an interview published on the blog Wait But Why. In it, he said that the immense creative capacity of the human brain is constrained by the need to compress our highly complex thoughts into speech or typed text.

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