Technology is a tool that helps us live out our God-given callings. This is one of the most important things for us to learn as we engage the topic of technology and artificial intelligence. Because we often see the tremendous power that technology has over our lives, we are tempted to treat technology as more than a tool, as something with a value similar to our own if it is powerful enough or does enough work on its own. Technology will be misused and abused by broken people just like you and me. Nowhere in Scripture is a tool or a technology condemned for being evil.

Reporters Without Borders has found a radical new platform for distributing banned journalism in some of the world's most repressive countries: Minecraft. The advocacy group has opened a new virtual space on a dedicated server for the popular video game called'The Uncensored Library,' accessible to any of Minecraft's 145 million monthly players. Inspired by the neoclassical architecture of ancient Rome and Greece, the library will be filled with books containing the text of news stories that have been censored in their countries of origin. To begin with, the library will be stocked with stories from five countries that rank near the bottom of Reporters Without Borders' World Press Freedom Index, including Egypt, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam. The stories will be published in English and whichever language they were originally written in.

COVID-19 officially became a global pandemic on Wednesday. As public health officials and governments respond; businesses brace for losses; and events like trade shows, SXSW, and Google's I/O shutter around the world, the disease is also impacting scientific conferences. Ironically, a coronavirus conference got canceled this week, and on Tuesday the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), one of the fastest-growing machine learning conferences in the world, shared that it will now be a virtual event held entirely online. Papers will be presented in prerecorded five-minute videos with a slide deck, while researchers invited to make longer presentations can submit 15-minute videos. In a post about the change to an all-digital conference, organizers called the cancellation of an in-person event an "… opportunity to innovate on how to host an effective remote conference."

Players of a free-to-play game are divided into three main groups: non-paying active users, paying active users and inactive users. A State Space time series approach is then used to model the daily conversion rates between the different groups, i.e., the probability of transitioning from one group to another. This allows, not only for predictions on how these rates are to evolve, but also for a deeper understanding of the impact that in-game planning and calendar effects have. It is also used in this work for the detection of marketing and promotion campaigns about which no information is available. In particular, two different State Space formulations are considered and compared: an Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average process and an Unobserved Components approach, in both cases with a linear regression to explanatory variables. Both yield very close estimations for covariate parameters, producing forecasts with similar performances for most transition rates. While the Unobserved Components approach is more robust and needs less human intervention in regards to model definition, it produces significantly worse forecasts for non-paying user abandonment probability. More critically, it also fails to detect a plausible marketing and promotion campaign scenario.

Language recognition has been significantly advanced in recent years by means of modern machine learning methods such as deep learning and benchmarks with rich annotations. However, research is still limited in low-resource formal languages. This consists of a significant gap in describing the colloquial language especially for low-resourced ones such as Persian. In order to target this gap for low resource languages, we propose a "Large Scale Colloquial Persian Dataset" (LSCP). LSCP is hierarchically organized in a semantic taxonomy that focuses on multi-task informal Persian language understanding as a comprehensive problem. This encompasses the recognition of multiple semantic aspects in the human-level sentences, which naturally captures from the real-world sentences. We believe that further investigations and processing, as well as the application of novel algorithms and methods, can strengthen enriching computerized understanding and processing of low resource languages. The proposed corpus consists of 120M sentences resulted from 27M tweets annotated with parsing tree, part-of-speech tags, sentiment polarity and translation in five different languages.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will change the way we learn and work in the near future. Nearly 400 million workers globally will change their occupations in the next 10 years, and business schools are uniquely situated to respond to the shifts coming to the future of work. However, a recent study, "Implications of Artificial Intelligence on Business Schools and Lifelong Learning," shows that business schools remain cautious in adapting management education to address the changing needs of students, workers and organizations, writes Anne Trumbore in this opinion piece. Trumbore, one of the study's coauthors, is senior director of Wharton Online, a strategic digital learning initiative at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In the past few weeks, COVID 19 has moved hundreds of millions of students around the globe from physical to online classes.

AI is by far the biggest hype I have seen in my career, and for good reason. It could revolutionise customer experience at a time when experience and service are the final frontier in differentiation. In the entire digital transformation of the world, we are spending over $1.2 trillion next year, and $6 trillion over the next four years. Much of this spend will focus on technologies that allow the enterprise to differentiate in the market and deliver exceptional customer experience. An emerging Gen Z employee and customer base is changing engagement models with companies, using more channels and more self-service options.

Smartphone owners are being given new rights to have their device repaired under laws introduced by the EU that could put an end to'throwaway culture'. Manufacturers will made to fix broken electronic devices under the EU's new Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP), which will also cover the UK despite Brexit. The plan, unveiled on Wednesday by the European Commission, will give Europeans'the right to repair' by making devices easier to fix. The laws, which will also apply to tablets, laptops and printers, focus on a more circular economy – where electronic resources are kept in use as long as possible. Major tech companies making devices hard to fix, including Apple, Samsung and Huawei, is creating an electronic and electrical rubbish mountain – wasting resources and blighting the environment, say green campaigners.

Computers and robots are now learning to make decisions! Of course, "deciding" is a big word for machines that have no consciousness and whose level of "reasoning" is not even as evolved as that of a frog. But the latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are enough to frighten some and to arouse the fantasies of others. Between myth and reality, where exactly does the current research stand in this technology that threatens to disrupt all others? In its Wide Angle section, the Courier attempts to untangle the various paths of inquiry and offers some terminological signposts to help uninitiated readers to find their way through the fascinating but scary world of AI.

FinTech breaks down some of the key technologies behind the digital transformation of the insurance industry, and explores the startups behind their rapid adoption. As the technological transformation of the global business landscape continues, more and more industries are feeling the pressure to embrace the potential of digital solutions, or be consigned to the scrapheap. In the unending quest for legacy industries to stay agile and avoid disruption, leading edge technologies are fusing with existing business models to create new, tech-driven disciplines. Fintech has been one of the great success stories of this trend, as financial institutions harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI), big data and multi-platform customer experiences (CX) to meet the expectations of their customers. One subset of the fintech space that's proven to be ripe for innovation and disruption in the past few years is the insurance industry. As one of the oldest financial businesses, insurance has traditionally been a market that's slow to adopt, cautious and favours those with deep pockets who already have a seat at the table.