Banks Must Invest in Reskilling Their Workforces to Seize AI-driven Growth Opportunities, Accenture Report Finds Stronger commitment to AI could boost revenues 34 percent and employment 14 percent by 2022 NEW YORK; May 2, 2018 – Although bank leaders recognize that intelligent technologies are reshaping the core banking process and can transform customer experiences, few plan to significantly increase investments in reskilling their workforces to enable these technologies in the near-term, according to a report by Accenture (NYSE: ACN). Based on two surveys – one of 100 banking executives and another of 1,300 non-executive bank employees – the report, "Future Workforce Survey - Banking: Realizing the Full Value of AI," estimates that if banks invest in artificial intelligence (AI) and human-machine collaboration at the same rate as top-performing companies do, they could boost revenues by 34 percent and raise employment levels 14 percent by 2022. "As AI becomes more nuanced, its role in banks is moving beyond automation to elevating human capabilities," said Alan McIntyre, a senior managing director at Accenture and head of the company's Banking practice. "To benefit from the potential of AI, banks need to implement'applied intelligence' – combining technology and human ingenuity – across all areas of their core business. To achieve this, they will need commitment from the highest levels of leadership and an understanding that this evolution will require a dramatic change in their workforce."

The Economist recently published an irreverent piece about the one of the latest advancements in AI technology: assembling IKEA furniture. "Now that machines have mastered one of the most baffling ways of spending a Saturday afternoon," the magazine joked, "can it be long before AIs rise up and enslave human beings in the silicon mines?" Kidding aside, the article goes on to note that not only did these Singapore-based researchers train a robot to take care of a task that most of us would more than happily hand off, but that when it came down to brass tacks, the robot didn't actually perform the task all that well. "It took a pair of [IKEAbots], pre-programmed by humans, more than 20 minutes to assemble a chair that a person could knock together in a fraction of the time." Personally, I'd happily let the robot work at its own pace if it meant I didn't have to bother with a bunch of Allen keys and Swedish instructions.

Olivier Klein, Head of Emerging Technologies, Asia-Pacific, reveals how AWS is making it easier for organizations of all sizes to leverage Machine Learning tools in their business.Olivier Klein, Head Emerging Technologies for AWS- APAC asserts that in the digital age businesses should be on the'channel of the comfort of their consumers'. The customer should be able to connect via disparate channels with you be it online, mobile, call center, Facebook Messenger, We Chat or a chatbot. You need to enable that channel of comfort for your customer. Machine Learning and its components help enterprises enable that. Machine Learning is one of the many components that will make enterprises future ready. It helps create seamless experiences for the end consumers through voice, augmented reality, virtual reality and connectivity. It will enable create a frictionless customer experience by providing a 360-degree view of your customer, no matter what the channel is.

UAVs are tackling everything from disease control to vacuuming up ocean waste to delivering pizza, and more. Drone technology has been used by defense organizations and tech-savvy consumers for quite some time. However, the benefits of this technology extends well beyond just these sectors. With the rising accessibility of drones, many of the most dangerous and high-paying jobs within the commercial sector are ripe for displacement by drone technology. The use cases for safe, cost-effective solutions range from data collection to delivery. And as autonomy and collision-avoidance technologies improve, so too will drones' ability to perform increasingly complex tasks. According to forecasts, the emerging global market for business services using drones is valued at over $127B. As more companies look to capitalize on these commercial opportunities, investment into the drone space continues to grow. A drone or a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) typically refers to a pilotless aircraft that operates through a combination of technologies, including computer vision, artificial intelligence, object avoidance tech, and others. But drones can also be ground or sea vehicles that operate autonomously.

Japan's Preferred Networks Inc. has only one publicly available product, a whimsical application that uses artificial intelligence to automate the coloring of manga cartoons. Yet the four-year-old firm has become Japan's most valuable startup, with a venture capital funding that priced it at more than $2 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Toyota Motor Corp., its biggest backer, handed over $110 million on a bet its algorithms will help them compete with Google in driverless cars. Last February, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe posed for pictures with the firm's two young founders at his office, where they were awarded a prize for promising new ventures. What sets Preferred Networks apart from the hundreds of other AI startups is its ties to Japan's manufacturing might.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Lu Qi, who oversaw Baidu Inc's (BIDU.O) shift to artificial intelligence (AI) after a damaging ad scandal in 2016, is stepping down as chief operating officer, China's biggest search engine said on Friday. Lu, a former Microsoft executive and AI expert who joined Baidu in late 2016, is currently responsible for day-to-day operations in its AI unit, which has become the company's core focus in the past year. He will remain vice chairman of Baidu and Vice President Wang Haifeng will now oversee the company's AI projects, Baidu said in a social media posting, adding Lu was stepping back for "personal and family reasons." Lu is viewed as a top figure in the global AI industry, and joined Baidu at a time when the company was rebuilding investor confidence after a medical scandal linked to its search business led to strict new regulations that gutted the firm's ad revenue. Baidu, which saw revenue growth stall for several quarters following the new rules, has since regained momentum after closing or selling loss-making units and funneling resources into its AI and autonomous driving units.

Personal assistants such as Amazon's Alexa or the Google Assistant are growing in popularity, and children love them. Unfortunately, children have also been proven to abuse robots – so scientists in Seoul, South Korea are trying to teach kids that this isn't OK. Do we need to be worried about the way that we learn to interact with robots? Is there any risk that it will impact how we interact with other humans? And does that change when Google and the rest are also trying to make their artificial intelligences sound as deceptively human as possible?

People look at an underwater robot during an intelligence science and technology exhibition in north China's Tianjin, May 17, 2018. TIANJIN, May 18 (Xinhua) -- Machines that can impeccably synthesize the human voice, assist judges in sentencing, and tell customers whether a dress is a good fit, have been displayed at the second World Intelligence Congress in Tianjin. Riding the global waves of artificial intelligence (AI), China aims to improve the productivity and inject new momentum into its economy by encouraging more players to tap the fledging industry. By June 2017, about one-fourth of the world's 2,542 AI companies were in China, where around 15,700 AI patents were filed, ranking second after the United States, according to the China Internet Network Information Center. "China should seize opportunities to boost innovation in deep learning, smart algorithms and chips, and modernize industries with AI technologies," Lin Nianxiu, deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), told a room of entrepreneurs, researchers and policy-makers at the congress, which was held from May 16 to 18. NDRC is China's top economic planning agency.

By the end of 2018, something will be very different about the harbor area in the northern Chinese city of Caofeidian. If you were to visit, the whirring cranes and tractors driving containers to and fro would be the only things in sight. Caofeidian is set to become the world's first fully autonomous harbor by the end of the year. The US-Chinese startup TuSimple, a specialist in developing self-driving trucks, will replace human-driven terminal tractor-trucks with 20 self-driving models. A separate company handles crane automation, and a central control system will coordinate the movements of both.

UN Photo/Manuel Elias Sophia, a humanoid robot created by Hanson Robotics, participates in a meeting at UN Headquarters on "The Future of Everything – Sustainable Development in the Age of Rapid Technological Change." This article was exclusively written for the Sting by Mr Ahmed Rafay Afzal, a medical student from King Edward Medical University, Lahore, Pakistan, currently pursuing a career in United States. He is affiliated to the International Federation of Medical Students Associations (IFMSA). However, the opinions expressed in this piece belong strictly to the writer and do not necessarily reflect IFMSA's view on the topic, nor The European Sting's one. In the long forgotten lores of eastern medicine, the doctors were called "Hakeem". I happen to be a descendant of one of those hakeems.