As one of Canada's Big Five banks, the Bank of Nova Scotia is taking an approach to data, analytics, and AI intended to better understand and serve customers, said Grace Lee, its chief data and analytics officer. Her charter is to advance business growth, customer experience, and operational efficiency through the use of AI, machine learning, and data-driven insights at the bank better known as Scotiabank. The stakes in customer retention are high: Scotiabank has more than 10 million retail, small business, and commercial customers in Canada, as well as 10 million retail and commercial customers in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Central America. The bank has about 90,000 employees and assets of about $1.2 trillion. Over the past couple of years, Scotiabank has engaged in an AI strategy that is very focused on last-mile execution, Lee said.

Despite recent improvements in computer vision, artificial visual systems' design is still daunting since an explanation of visual computing algorithms remains elusive. Salient object detection is one problem that is still open due to the difficulty of understanding the brain's inner workings. Progress on this research area follows the traditional path of hand-made designs using neuroscience knowledge. In recent years two different approaches based on genetic programming appear to enhance their technique. One follows the idea of combining previous hand-made methods through genetic programming and fuzzy logic. The other approach consists of improving the inner computational structures of basic hand-made models through artificial evolution. This research work proposes expanding the artificial dorsal stream using a recent proposal to solve salient object detection problems. This approach uses the benefits of the two main aspects of this research area: fixation prediction and detection of salient objects. We decided to apply the fusion of visual saliency and image segmentation algorithms as a template. The proposed methodology discovers several critical structures in the template through artificial evolution. We present results on a benchmark designed by experts with outstanding results in comparison with the state-of-the-art.

A machine can understand human activities, and the meaning of signs can help overcome the communication barriers between the inaudible and ordinary people. Sign Language Recognition (SLR) is a fascinating research area and a crucial task concerning computer vision and pattern recognition. Recently, SLR usage has increased in many applications, but the environment, background image resolution, modalities, and datasets affect the performance a lot. Many researchers have been striving to carry out generic real-time SLR models. This review paper facilitates a comprehensive overview of SLR and discusses the needs, challenges, and problems associated with SLR. We study related works about manual and non-manual, various modalities, and datasets. Research progress and existing state-of-the-art SLR models over the past decade have been reviewed. Finally, we find the research gap and limitations in this domain and suggest future directions. This review paper will be helpful for readers and researchers to get complete guidance about SLR and the progressive design of the state-of-the-art SLR model

Recent infectious disease outbreaks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Zika epidemic in Brazil, have demonstrated both the importance and difficulty of accurately forecasting novel infectious diseases. When new diseases first emerge, we have little knowledge of the transmission process, the level and duration of immunity to reinfection, or other parameters required to build realistic epidemiological models. Time series forecasts and machine learning, while less reliant on assumptions about the disease, require large amounts of data that are also not available in early stages of an outbreak. In this study, we examine how knowledge of related diseases can help make predictions of new diseases in data-scarce environments using transfer learning. We implement both an empirical and a theoretical approach. Using empirical data from Brazil, we compare how well different machine learning models transfer knowledge between two different disease pairs: (i) dengue and Zika, and (ii) influenza and COVID-19. In the theoretical analysis, we generate data using different transmission and recovery rates with an SIR compartmental model, and then compare the effectiveness of different transfer learning methods. We find that transfer learning offers the potential to improve predictions, even beyond a model based on data from the target disease, though the appropriate source disease must be chosen carefully. While imperfect, these models offer an additional input for decision makers during pandemic response.

As electronics get smaller and manufacturers come under greater pressure to improve efficiency and throughput, the traditional hand soldering method is no longer up to scratch. In 1896, a patent for electric heating apparatus, now commonly known as a soldering iron, was granted. The process of soldering has remained much the same since then. But, that's about to change. In this article, Nigel Smith, CEO of TM Robotics, international distributor of Shibaura Machine, formerly Toshiba Machine, industrial and soldering robots, explains three reasons why you should automate the soldering process.

General Motors Co. and Honda Motor Co. will jointly develop affordable electric vehicles in major global markets, dramatically expanding a partnership that already spans gas-powered models, batteries and self-driving technology. The automakers plan to create a new architecture based on GM's Ultium EV battery that will be used primarily for small crossover SUVs, with the first models available in North America in 2027, they said in a statement Tuesday. The project is intended to produce EVs that will be priced below GM's planned $30,000 Chevrolet Equinox and similar future offerings from Honda, the companies said on a call with journalists. "GM and Honda will share our best technology, design and manufacturing strategies to deliver affordable and desirable EVs on a global scale, including our key markets in North America, South America and China," GM Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra said in the statement. The collaboration marks a major move toward democratizing electric vehicles, most of which are expensive and beyond the reach of many consumers.

Two centuries after Charles Darwin put the theory forward, a new study finally shows that birds living near the equator are more colourful. Scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify the amount of colour in photos of over 24,000 preserved birds from the Natural History Museum's collection. Tropical birds living near the equator are roughly 30 per cent more colourful than non-tropical birds living nearer the poles, the scientists found, but they don't know exactly why. The long-held theory, first suspected by Charles Darwin and other naturalists in the 18th and 19th centuries, hasn't been proven until now, the experts say. Research from the University of Sheffield found tropical birds living near the equator are roughly 30 per cent more colourful than non-tropical birds living nearer the poles.

The deep learning revolution incited by the 2012 Alexnet paper has been transformative for the field of computer vision. Many problems which were severely limited using classical solutions are now seeing unprecedented success. The rapid proliferation of deep learning methods has led to a sharp increase in their use in consumer and embedded applications. One consequence of consumer and embedded applications is lossy multimedia compression which is required to engineer the efficient storage and transmission of data in these real-world scenarios. As such, there has been increased interest in a deep learning solution for multimedia compression which would allow for higher compression ratios and increased visual quality. The deep learning approach to multimedia compression, so called Learned Multimedia Compression, involves computing a compressed representation of an image or video using a deep network for the encoder and the decoder. While these techniques have enjoyed impressive academic success, their industry adoption has been essentially non-existent. Classical compression techniques like JPEG and MPEG are too entrenched in modern computing to be easily replaced. This dissertation takes an orthogonal approach and leverages deep learning to improve the compression fidelity of these classical algorithms. This allows the incredible advances in deep learning to be used for multimedia compression without threatening the ubiquity of the classical methods. The key insight of this work is that methods which are motivated by first principles, i.e., the underlying engineering decisions that were made when the compression algorithms were developed, are more effective than general methods. By encoding prior knowledge into the design of the algorithm, the flexibility, performance, and/or accuracy are improved at the cost of generality...

The state of artificial intelligence is promising, and it is increasingly ready for real-life enterprises. But there are shortages of talent, lack of diversity in the field, and concerns about the handling the data that fuels ever-more-sophisticated algorithms. These are some of the observations of Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth, prominent investors in artificial intelligence, who released their fourth annual and densely packed "State of AI" report reviewing developments in the field over the past year. While the report focuses on AI academia and specific advancements in medicine and other areas, there are important developments raised for those seeking to leverage AI and machine learning to move forward in building intelligent enterprises. "The under-resourced AI-alignment efforts from key organizations who are advancing the overall field of AI, as well as concerns about datasets used to train AI models and bias in model evaluation benchmarks, raises important questions about how best to chart the progress of AI systems with rapidly advancing capabilities," Benaich and Hogarth state.

Why, I wondered, was the enthusiasm so high at this week's Techonomy Climate conference in Mountain View? So I asked a smart friend why climate action suddenly commands so much passion. "The pandemic helped people realize a disaster can strike everyone on the planet all at once," they answered. "Almost none of us really thought it was possible before." It was as good an explanation as any.