Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby's drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you may be talking to Tori -- an artificially intelligent voice assistant that will take your order and send it to the line cooks. "It doesn't call sick," says Amir Siddiqi, whose family installed the AI voice at its Arby's franchise this year in Ontario, California. And the reliability of it is great." The pandemic didn't just threaten Americans' health when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 -- it may also have posed a long-term threat to many of their jobs. Faced with worker shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate service sector jobs that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines couldn't easily provide the human contact they believed customers would demand. Past experience suggests that such automation waves eventually create more jobs than they destroy, but that they also disproportionately wipe out less skilled jobs that many low-income workers depend on. Resulting growing pains for the U.S. economy could be severe. If not for the pandemic, Siddiqi probably wouldn't have bothered investing in new technology that could alienate existing employees and some customers. But it's gone smoothly, he says: "Basically, there's less people needed but those folks are now working in the kitchen and other areas." Ideally, automation can redeploy workers into better and more interesting work, so long as they can get the appropriate technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But although that's happening now, it's not moving quickly enough, he says. Worse, an entire class of service jobs created when manufacturing began to deploy more automation may now be at risk. "The robots escaped the manufacturing sector and went into the much larger service sector," he says. "I regarded contact jobs as safe.

Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby's drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you may be talking to Tori -- an artificially intelligent voice assistant that will take your order and send it to the line cooks. "It doesn't call sick," says Amir Siddiqi, whose family installed the AI voice at its Arby's franchise this year in Ontario, California. And the reliability of it is great." The pandemic didn't just threaten Americans' health when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 -- it may also have posed a long-term threat to many of their jobs. Faced with worker shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate service sector jobs that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines couldn't easily provide the human contact they believed customers would demand. Past experience suggests that such automation waves eventually create more jobs than they destroy, but that they also disproportionately wipe out less skilled jobs that many low-income workers depend on. Resulting growing pains for the U.S. economy could be severe. If not for the pandemic, Siddiqi probably wouldn't have bothered investing in new technology that could alienate existing employees and some customers. But it's gone smoothly, he says: "Basically, there's less people needed but those folks are now working in the kitchen and other areas." Ideally, automation can redeploy workers into better and more interesting work, so long as they can get the appropriate technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But although that's happening now, it's not moving quickly enough, he says. Worse, an entire class of service jobs created when manufacturing began to deploy more automation may now be at risk. "The robots escaped the manufacturing sector and went into the much larger service sector," he says. "I regarded contact jobs as safe.

Embark co-founders Alex Rodrigues, left, and Brendon Moak with their fleet of autonomous semi-trucks at the startup's operations center in Ontario, California. Embark Trucks, a robotic tech upstart led by two young Canadian computer scientists, hired a key member of Tesla's Autopilot team to help its self-driving trucks better see and understand their surroundings and highway conditions. Zeljko Popovic, an engineer with a background in robotics who joined Tesla over six years ago and created and ran the Perception Team for Autopilot, is now Perception Lead for San Francisco-based Embark, the company said. He'll report to Embark CTO Brandon Moak and focus on boosting the accuracy and distance at which the cameras, radar and laser lidar sensors on its semi-trucks detect other vehicles, as well as leading mapping, localization and machine learning efforts. "Self-driving perception systems need huge amounts of data to train their machine learning algorithms, which means gathering high-quality data is key for Embark's perception team," said CEO Alex Rodrigues.

Embark co-founders Alex Rodrigues, left, and Brandon Moak with their fleet of autonomous semi-trucks at the startup's operations center in Ontario, California. Ask Embark Trucks CEO Alex Rodrigues how his small autonomous tech startup can compete with giants in the space like Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo or Uber and the confident 22-year-old is ready with an answer. "We're able to move really fast," he told Forbes aboard the cab of one of Embark's sensor-laden Peterbilt semi-trucks as it barreled down the I-10 on a sunny morning, hauling a commercial load from Ontario, California, to Phoenix. As required by law a safety driver's hands are on the wheel, but the big rig is driving itself down the busy highway. "Waymo may have the conglomerate advantage' of build once, use many times," he said, because its new robot truck program has the same tech that goes into its self-driving minivans.

Ontario is increasing support for students in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, including artificial intelligence, to continue to build a highly skilled workforce and support job creation and economic growth. Leading businesses from around the world choose Ontario because of its talented workforce, strong public education system and commitment to universal health care. These same qualities help to support an ecosystem that enables locally owned companies to succeed and grow. To bolster provincial competitiveness, the government plans to increase the number of postsecondary students graduating in the STEM disciplines by 25 per cent over the next five years. This initiative will boost the number of STEM graduates from 40,000 to 50,000 per year and position Ontario as the number one producer of postsecondary STEM graduates per capita in North America.

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ONTARIO, CA and NEWPORT BEACH, CA April 4, 2017 The Safariland Group ("Safariland"), the parent company of VIEVU and a leading global provider of safety and survivability products designed for the public safety, military, professional and outdoor markets, and Veritone, a leading provider of artificial intelligence solutions, today announced their intent to enter into an agreement to integrate their product offerings to apply artificial intelligence to uniquely extract and process crucial data from police body-worn camera footage. The Veritone Platform will be available to Safariland's law enforcement agency customers as a complement to VIEVU's body-worn cameras, accessories and software, later this year. The integration will allow VIEVU's customers to upload large volumes of video and audio recordings into the Veritone Platform and process them in near real-time, enabling law enforcement personnel to rapidly extract actionable information for use in investigations, monitoring and training, as well as to respond more quickly and efficiently to public record requests. "The Veritone Platform will enable law enforcement agencies to save thousands of hours of manual searching by using intelligent audio and video analysis, allowing them to focus time and resources on more mission-critical tasks," said Chad Steelberg, chief executive officer of Veritone. "The Veritone Platform uses more than 40 best-of-breed cognitive engines, ranging from transcription and face recognition to sentiment analysis to object recognition, which will provide VIEVU's users the ability to derive comprehensive, actionable insights from their body camera footage in near real-time.

Hughes Missile Systems (Tucson, Lear Astronics (Santa Monica and to "enter" the surgical area, as if they Ariz.) is providing intelligent character Ontario, Calif.) is combining neural were actually there. Cross/Blue Shield (New York, N.Y.) to enhance its Autonomous Landing FuziWare (Knoxville, Tenn.), a developer expedite the processing of medical Guidance (ALG) system. Empire will install the is using a neural network-based tools for business and engineering ICRs at its Yorktown Heights and massively parallel coprocessor for solutions, has received a patent from Manhattan offices, where they will be real-time image processing in the the U.S. Department of Commerce ALG system, which enables commercial Patent and Trademark Office for its used to process about 10,000 documents and military aircraft pilots to FuziCalc product, a fuzzy spreadsheet per day. The claims in the patent cover various fuzzy number The Boston Museum of Fine Arts Researchers at Georgia Tech (Atlanta, interface elements as well as the (Boston, Mass.) has developed a virtual Ga.) have created intelligent agent entire fuzzy number processing system. TOAK navigates and surgical equipment, has implemented through multiple networks and a virtual reality application a complex 3D model derived from across diverse computer systems to for technical design presentation.