The US President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order creating the “American AI Initiative” - a high-level strategy, designed to guide AI development within the country, The Verge reports. The initiative will redirect federal funding and resources towards AI research, as well as call for the creation of US-led international standards in AI, and new research into the retraining of American workers.

Microsoft has decided to establish world's largest artificial intelligence (AI) and IoT lab and has reportedly chosen to do it in Shanghai. The announcement came after the district government of Pudong New Area and Microsoft (China) signed a strategic cooperation Memorandum of Understanding.

This month the AI4EU project officially starts, with a kick-off meeting among the partners in Barcelona tomorrow. As stated earlier the development of the AI4EU platform will bring together 79 top research institutes, SMEs and large enterprises in 21 countries that will build a focal point for artificial intelligence (AI) resources, including data repositories, computing power, tools and algorithms. To further facilitate access to AI technology the project team will work closely with the Digital Innovation Hubs for robotics and the future network of AI excellence centres.

US chip giant Qualcomm announced today its plans to launch a venture fund that will invest up to an aggregate of $100m in early-stage startups that work in AI. In particular, the so-called Qualcomm Ventures AI Fund, will target companies that are developing ways to do intensive processing on devices such as smartphones and security cameras, as opposed to those working in remote cloud systems. 

Vice-President for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip, will be in Berlin tomorrow to participate in the Platform Economy Summit as well as a seminar on artificial intelligence, which brings together decision-makers from across multiple sectors and countries with leaders of online platforms, government officials and investors.

As part of an ongoing reorganisation of its health care efforts, Google has announced that it will take over DeepMind Health, a part of its London-based AI lab DeepMind. From now on DeepMind's health unit will exist under the Google umbrella and it will be part of the company's newly-formed health subsidiary Google Health initiative. More specifically, the change will affect DeepMind's Streams app, which physicians in the UK have used to help treat their patients, since it will be moving over to Google, and the Google Health team will be working on expanding the app to more regions.

At the October plenary session, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) adopted its opinion that is backing the Commission proposal on the Digital Europe programme for 2021‑2027, tabled in June this year. In the opinion authored by Norbert Kluge and Ulrich Samm the Committee members pointed out that the Commission takes a step in the right direction by recognising the key role played by digital skills, but it could be more closely tied to social realities. They also asserted that the "digital dividend" must be equally distributed through appropriate policy measures.

The European Commission has set up a 'High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence," that will  have as a general objective to support the implementation of the European strategy on AI and robotics. This will include the elaboration of recommendations on future AI-related policy development and on ethical, legal and societal issues related to AI, including socio-economic challenges.

Decentralisation from the cloud to the edge is a key challenge of AI technologies applied to large heterogeneous systems, including ensuring timely and effective responses that are critical. Thus, the research and innovation DECENTER Project, led by a European and Korean consortium, aims to integrate a broad spectrum of technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial intelligence (AI), the cloud, edge, fog computing and smart contracts tied together with a secure blockchain.

A painting created by artificial intelligence (AI) smashed new boundaries, selling for $432,000 at the Christie's Prints and Multiples art auction in New York on Thursday. The art piece, called "Portrait of Edmond Belamy," is the first work of art created entirely by AI to go up for sale at a major art auction and the $432,000 haul was quite the shocker, since it was expected to fetch only between $7,000 and $10,000.