If you're worried that robots are coming for your job, you can relax -- unless you're a manager. A new survey-based study explains how automation is reshaping the workplace in unexpected ways. Robots can improve efficiency and quality, reduce costs, and even help create more jobs for their human counterparts. But more robots can also reduce the need for managers. The study is titled "The Robot Revolution: Managerial and Employment Consequences for Firms."

FROM Swedish retailer H&M being fined 35 million euros ($42 million) for recording employees' private data to Britain's Barclays bank accused of spying on its staff, workplace surveillance has come into the spotlight in recent months. On Wednesday, the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), the European Trade Union Confederation's research arm, said planned regulation by the European Union (EU) to improve privacy does not do enough to stop companies from snooping on their workers in the name of security and efficiency. As artificial intelligence (AI) technology becomes ever more accessible and sophisticated, here's why unions are worried: What kind of surveillance are we talking about? Employee monitoring today can involve software programmes for live monitoring, streaming and recording more than a dozen employees' computer screens at a time. Keystrokes, chat programmes, instant messaging and Skype dialogues may also be monitored and recorded in real time.

The significant increase in the number of individuals with chronic ailments (including the elderly and disabled) has dictated an urgent need for an innovative model for healthcare systems. The evolved model will be more personalized and less reliant on traditional brick-and-mortar healthcare institutions such as hospitals, nursing homes, and long-term healthcare centers. The smart healthcare system is a topic of recently growing interest and has become increasingly required due to major developments in modern technologies, especially in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). This paper is aimed to discuss the current state-of-the-art smart healthcare systems highlighting major areas like wearable and smartphone devices for health monitoring, machine learning for disease diagnosis, and the assistive frameworks, including social robots developed for the ambient assisted living environment. Additionally, the paper demonstrates software integration architectures that are very significant to create smart healthcare systems, integrating seamlessly the benefit of data analytics and other tools of AI. The explained developed systems focus on several facets: the contribution of each developed framework, the detailed working procedure, the performance as outcomes, and the comparative merits and limitations. The current research challenges with potential future directions are addressed to highlight the drawbacks of existing systems and the possible methods to introduce novel frameworks, respectively. This review aims at providing comprehensive insights into the recent developments of smart healthcare systems to equip experts to contribute to the field.

Outgoing Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ... [ ] Angel Gurria applauds as new Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Mathias Cormann, of Australia, takes over at the OECD headquarters in Paris, Tuesday, June, 1 2021. A recent study from the Pew Research Center showed that 53% of people in 20 countries feel that artificial intelligence has been a good thing for society. While over half the world's population has a positive view of AI, this means that one in every three people in these countries are concerned about the impacts AI can have on society. How do we ensure that AI is trustworthy and its benefits are shared by all? As the statistics show, while there is incremental improvement, there is still a level of hesitancy and suspicion towards AI among the citizens around the world.

Dr. Dhonam Pemba is the CEO and Co-Founder of KidX, he is a neural engineer by education, a former rocket scientist by work, and AI entrepeneur by entrepeneurship. He received his Biomedical Engineering undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University, and hi PhD from the University of California, Irvine also in BME, but worked on neural interface for his thesis. Can you me about the NASA JPL project and how it was related to your PhD work? My PhD work was building micro implantable neural implants. Very similar to the work that Elon Musks's company Neuralink is now doing.

Brooklyn, New York, June 22, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to a new market research report published by Global Market Estimates, the Global Artificial Intelligence in Banking Market is projected to grow at a CAGR value of 24.5% during the forecast period of 2021 to 2026. The rising launch of advanced technologies such as AI-based core banking software for retail and commercial banks, also with increasing demand for hassle-free online and mobile banking services, and the increasing trend of offering customer-centric services will drive the market from 2021 to 2026. Browse 151 Market Data Tables and 111 Figures spread through 181 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Global Artificial Intelligence in Banking Market - Forecast to 2026"

If you drive in the United States, chances are you can't remember the last time you bought a paper map, printed out a digital map, or even stopped to ask for directions. Thanks to Global Positioning System (GPS) and the mobile mapping apps on our smartphones and their real-time routing advice, navigation is a solved problem. If you live in a place like Doha, Qatar, where the length of the road network has tripled over the last five years, commercial mapping services from Google, Apple, Bing, or other providers simply can't keep up with the pace of infrastructure change. "Each one of us who grew up in Europe or the US probably cannot understand the scale at which these cities grow," says Rade Stanojevic, a senior scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), part of Hamad Bin Khalifa University, a Qatar Foundation university, in Doha. "Pretty much every neighborhood sees a new underpass, new overpass, new large highway being added every couple of months." As Qatar copes with this rapid growth--and especially as it prepares to host the FIFA World Cup in 2022--the bad routing advice and accumulating travel delays from outdated digital maps is increasingly costly. That's why Stanojevic and colleagues at QCRI decided to try applying machine learning to the problem. A road network can be interpreted as a giant graph in which every intersection is a node and every road is an edge, says Stanojevic, whose specialty is network economics. Road segments can have both static characteristics, such as the designated speed limit, and dynamic characteristics, such as rush-hour congestion. To see where traffic really is going--rather than where an old map says it should go--and then predict the best routes through an ever-changing maze, all a machine-learning model would need is lots of up-to-data data on both the static and dynamic factors. "Fortunately enough, modern vehicle fleets have these monitoring systems that produce quite a lot of data," says Stanojevic.

The development and adoption of advanced technologies including smart automation and artificial intelligence has the potential not only to raise productivity and GDP growth but also to improve well-being more broadly, including through healthier life and longevity and more leisure. Alongside such benefits, these technologies also have the potential to reduce disruption and the potentially destabilizing effects on society arising from their adoption. Tech for Good: Smoothing disruption, improving well-being (PDF–1MB) examines the factors that can help society achieve such benefits and makes a first attempt to calculate the impact of technology adoption on welfare growth beyond GDP. Our modeling suggests that good outcomes for the economy overall and for individual well-being come about when technology adoption is focused on innovation-led growth rather than purely on labor reduction and cost savings through automation. This needs to be accompanied by proactive transition management that increases labor market fluidity and equips workers with new skills. Technology for centuries has both excited the human imagination and prompted fears about its effects. Today's technology cycle is no different, provoking a broad spectrum of hopes and fears.

Although board games and video games have been studied for decades in artificial intelligence research, challenging word games remain relatively unexplored. Word games are not as constrained as games like chess or poker. Instead, word game strategy is defined by the players' understanding of the way words relate to each other. The word game Codenames provides a unique opportunity to investigate common sense understanding of relationships between words, an important open challenge. We propose an algorithm that can generate Codenames clues from the language graph BabelNet or from any of several embedding methods - word2vec, GloVe, fastText or BERT. We introduce a new scoring function that measures the quality of clues, and we propose a weighting term called DETECT that incorporates dictionary-based word representations and document frequency to improve clue selection. We develop BabelNet-Word Selection Framework (BabelNet-WSF) to improve BabelNet clue quality and overcome the computational barriers that previously prevented leveraging language graphs for Codenames. Extensive experiments with human evaluators demonstrate that our proposed innovations yield state-of-the-art performance, with up to 102.8% improvement in precision@2 in some cases.

The business use cases for chatbots are nearly endless, but there are also interesting and impactful ways that chatbots can be used for social good around the world. In particular, our favourite technology is a fantastic medium for improving access to much-needed education in emerging international markets. In many emerging markets access to a smartphone is much more common than access to a laptop or desktop computer. And while there are still gaps in ownership between the women and men of some emerging markets, many people will share a smartphone in order to access the apps and information they require. In order to improve access to education and support services, the smartphone will play a crucial role.