New Delhi: Vivekanand is country manager, India and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) of Singapore-based GreyOrange, a company that designs, manufactures and deploys advanced robotics systems for automation in warehouses. GreyOrange's marquee solutions are the Butler (goods-to-person for inventory storage, picking and consolidation) and Linear Sorter (modular system for automating sorting processes in fulfilment centres). In an interview last week, Vivekanand spoke about how robotics can help companies improve their supply chain, among other things. How is robotics transforming warehouse processes and efficiency? With the ongoing e-commerce boom, customer expectations are at an all-time high, and supply chains need to be faster and more efficient.

Unfairly trained Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems can reinforce bias, therefore AI systems must be trained fairly. Experts say AI fairness is a dataset issue for each specific machine learning model. AI fairness is a newly recognized challenge. The big cloud providers are in the process of developing and announcing tools to help address AI fairness. Facebook announced internal software tools development to search for bias in training datasets in May 2018.

Artificial intelligence technologies are capable of disrupting every aspect of society and the United States must do more to maintain leadership in the area, the leaders of a House panel said in a report released Tuesday. Artificial intelligence "has the potential to disrupt every sector of society in both anticipated and unanticipated ways," according to a report authored by Reps. "In light of that potential for disruption, it's critical that the federal government address the different challenges posed by AI, including its current and future applications." The federal government must "increase spending on research and development to maintain American leadership with respect to AI," including spending on education and training programs so American workers can gain skills in such technologies, Hurd and Kelly wrote. The report is the result of a series of hearings that Hurd and Kelly held in the past few months on artificial intelligence technologies.

Artificial Intelligence is not giant robots or world-governing machines with intelligence beyond that of a human; AI is basically the development of programs and computer systems to automate tasks with minor interference by an individual. With the availability of an incredible amount of data, AI is the power that will help bipedal tame it. It is gradually transforming every industry, even the Public Relations industry.

Britain has successfully trialled using AI to scan for hidden attackers in a mock urban battlefield environment in Montreal, Canada. The AI, called SAPIENT, was developed in the UK with the aim of using sensors to detect potential unseen dangers to soldiers. SAPIENT is more efficient than manually scanning live feeds and frees up more soldiers to be used for operational means elsewhere. Canada and the UK maintain a close security partnership as part of the so-called'Five Eyes' alliance which also includes Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. SAPIENT was tested alongside other high-end military technologies including exoskeleton suits and new surveillance and night vision equipment.

During the opening ceremony of Alibaba's 2018 computing conference last week, Simon Hu, president of Alibaba Cloud, invited the MC to taste some tea on the stage--but, first, to distinguish between tea roasted by hand and by machine. While the MC stared helplessly at two saucers filled with nearly identical-looking tea leaves, Hu pulled out his smartphone. He took a photo of each saucer and fed them into an app developed by Tmall, one of Alibaba's e-commerce platforms. Using an algorithm specially trained to tell the difference between different kinds of tea leave, the app solved the problem. It was a small example of the interplay between Alibaba's research on fundamental technologies and the demands of its business.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Earlier this month I was in Denmark speaking at the R-18 robotics fair. Denmark is quite remarkable as, despite its size, it had two exits of robotics startups over US $100 million: Universal Robots and MiR, both acquired by U.S. electronics testing equipment maker Teradyne (currently valued around $7 billion). The talk I gave covered our observations at HAX over the past five years from investing in over two dozen robotics startups and meeting hundreds.

Translation apps are getting better, but they're still not perfect, particularly for minority languages. Can artificial intelligence and deep neural networks help iron out the glitches? During the World Cup in Russia this summer there was a dramatic spike in the use of Google Translate, the company says, as fans tried to strike up conversations with their hosts and fellow fans from around the world. The words for "stadium" and "beer" were in particularly high demand. These days the traditional phrasebook is on the way out.

The machines won't be taking over the world anytime soon, because doing the most basic of tasks still confounds them. I mean, have you thought lately about how hard it is to pick a ripe bell pepper? But researchers in Israel and Europe certainly have. They're developing a robot called Sweeper that can autonomously roam a greenhouse, eyeballing peppers to determine if they're mature enough before sawing them off the plant and placing the produce in a basket. Think of Sweeper like a self-driving car, only with a saw on its face and a hunger for peppers.

Octopai, the leader in metadata management automation for BI, has been recognized in Gartner's September 2018 "Cool Vendors in Data Science and Machine Learning" report by analysts Peter Krensky, Svetlana Sicular, Jim Hare, Erick Brethenoux and Austin Kronz, as one of 5 Cool Vendors According to Gartner, "Data and analytics leaders should engage with vendors in areas such as data management, unstructured data analysis and model operationalization." "We are very honored to be named a Gartner Cool Vendor for 2018," said Amnon Drori, Co-founder and CEO of Octopai. "The growing complexity of data management environments has created a need for modern and disruptive metadata management automation tools. We believe Octopai's inclusion in the Gartner report highlights this need." According to the report, "as citizen data science, enabled by augmented analytics, dramatically increases the volume of models created, discipline in data management and operationalization becomes even more critical."