For anyone who has ever misplaced their iPhone, Apple's "Find My" app is a game-changer that borders on pure magic. Sign into the app, tap a button to sound an alarm on your MIA device, and, within seconds, it'll emit a loud noise -- even if your phone is set on silent mode -- that allows you to go find the missing handset. Yeah, it's usually stuck behind your sofa cushions or left facedown on a shelf somewhere. You can think of SArdo, a new drone project created by researchers at Germany's NEC Laboratories Europe GmbH, as Apple's "Find My" app on steroids. The difference is that, while finding your iPhone is usually just a matter of convenience, the technology developed by NEC investigators could be a literal lifesaver.

An academic and a lawyer have teamed up to develop a robot lawyer, which, if successful, will make legal advice affordable to people from all backgrounds, while revolutionising the legal sector. Robots could take on significant parts of a lawyer's work, reducing the costs and barriers to access to legal services for everyone, rather than just those who can afford the high costs. The project, at the University of Bradford, is initially working on a machine learning-based application to provide immigration-related legal advice, but if successful, it could be replicated across the legal sector. The idea has received government backing in the form of a £170,000 grant from Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Partnerships. Legal firm AY&J Solicitors is providing a further £70,000 as well as the vital knowledge of lawyers.

Farmers Edge Inc, an AI startup to help growers increase crop yields, plans to go public on Canada's largest Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "FDGE". The company seeks to raise CAD 100 million (approximately USD 79 million). Founded in 2005, Farmers Edge uses AI technology to collect and analyze local weather, soil moisture and satellite data to help farmers improve crop efficiency and yield. Besides the Canadian Prairie, the company currently hosts offices in the United States, Australia, Russia, Brazil and Ukraine. As of the end of 2020, more than 3,000 growers have used the Farmers Edge products, covering more than 23 million acres of land in six countries.

The information presented in Lega-Tech Artificial Intelligence Market Report 2021 includes qualitative and quantitative insights. Under the qualitative analysis part, manufacturing base, raw materials data, Lega-Tech Artificial Intelligence status, trends, SWOT analysis, PESTEL Analysis, distribution channels, driving factors, and a competitive structure is presented. Under the qualitative analysis part, market value/volume, production analysis, consumption data, import-export data, or each region and country are explained. Also, industry size by Lega-Tech Artificial Intelligence type, application, demand and supply scenario, and economic status are explained. Also, comprehensive information on the latest product development, growth opportunities, industry strategies, cost structures, and recent policies are enlightened in the Lega-Tech Artificial Intelligence report.

In 2017, I returned to Canada from Sweden, where I had spent a year working on automation in mining. Shortly after my return, the New York Times published a piece headlined The Robots Are Coming, and Sweden Is Fine, about Sweden's embrace of automation while limiting human costs. Although Swedes are apparently optimistic about their future alongside robots, other countries aren't as hopeful. One widely cited study estimates 47 per cent of jobs in the United States are at risk of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence. Whether we like it or not, the robot era is upon us.

IMAGE: A computer created facial images that appealed to individual preferences. Researchers have succeeded in making an AI understand our subjective notions of what makes faces attractive. The device demonstrated this knowledge by its ability to create new portraits on its own that were tailored to be found personally attractive to individuals. The results can be utilised, for example, in modelling preferences and decision-making as well as potentially identifying unconscious attitudes. Researchers at the University of Helsinki and University of Copenhagen investigated whether a computer would be able to identify the facial features we consider attractive and, based on this, create new images matching our criteria.

On the 27th of January, DIHNET revealed the winners of the 2020 DIH Champions Challenge at the virtual EDIH Conference 2021 "Gearing up towards European Digital Innovation Hubs". The awards ceremony gathered more than 1176 participants including Digital Innovation Hubs, designated EDIHs, regions and Member States, representatives of EEN, Clusters, SME associations, among other stakeholders. DIHNET.EU was pioneer in launching the annual DIH Champions Challenge for identifying mature Digital Innovation Hubs in Europe. Begoña Sanchez, Innovation Systems and Policies manager at Tecnalia, and member of the DIHNET consortium, explains that the main purpose of this initiative is "to provide the DIHs community with a process for identifying good practices, showcase and support success stories of Mature DIHs that can inspire and guide other DIHs in their development." In this second edition, four DIHs were shortlisted as finalists: the am-LAB, the Basque Digital Innovation Hub (BDIH), the FZI Research Center for Information Technology and the ITI Data Hub (The Data Cycle Hub). The DIHNET consortium revised the proposals with the contribution of two external evaluators: Jan Kobliha, Ministerial Counsellor at the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic, and Thorsten Huelsmann, manager of the Digital Hub Logistics Dortmund, winner of the 2019 DIH Champions Challenge.

Artificial intelligence is becoming good at many "human" jobs--diagnosing disease, translating languages, providing customer service--and it's improving fast. This is raising reasonable fears that AI will ultimately replace human workers throughout the economy. Never before have digital tools been so responsive to us, nor we to our tools. While AI will radically alter how work gets done and who does it, the technology's larger impact will be in complementing and augmenting human capabilities, not replacing them. Certainly, many companies have used AI to automate processes, but those that deploy it mainly to displace employees will see only short-term productivity gains. In our research involving 1,500 companies, we found that firms achieve the most significant performance improvements when humans and machines work together. Through such collaborative intelligence, humans and AI actively enhance each other's complementary strengths: the leadership, teamwork, creativity, and social skills of the former, and the speed, scalability, and quantitative capabilities of the latter. What comes naturally to people (making a joke, for example) can be tricky for machines, and what's straightforward for machines (analyzing gigabytes of data) remains virtually impossible for humans.

Dutch cress grower Rob Baan has enlisted high-tech helpers to tackle a pest in his greenhouses: palm-sized drones seek and destroy moths that produce caterpillars that can chew up his crops. "I have unique products where you don't get certification to spray chemicals and I don't want it," Baan said in an interview in a greenhouse bathed in the pink glow of LED lights that help his seedlings grow. His company, Koppert Cress, exports aromatic seedlings, plants and flowers to top-end restaurants around the world. A keen adopter of innovative technology in his greenhouses, Baan turned to PATS Indoor Drone Solutions, a startup that is developing autonomous drone systems as greenhouse sentinels, to add another layer of protection for his plants. The drones themselves are basic, but they are steered by smart technology aided by special cameras that scan the airspace in greenhouses.

You've heard the saying "time is money"? Well nothing is closer to the truth than when looking at the impacts of unplanned downtime on your mainframe budget, business initiatives and a potentially negative experience for your customers. A 2019 Forrester survey of 100 US IT groups found that the average cost of a minute of an unplanned "outage" was $9,108. Simple math would result in almost $1.4 Million lost if an enterprise experienced ten outages throughout the year at 15 min each. This doesn't even factor in operational resilience fines levied to banks from the UK-based Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for the inability to maintain the safety and soundness of their infrastructure and, by extension, their customer's data, and funds.