With TV companies battling for market share, differentiation is important to get those all-important viewers, and retain ad revenue. And AI is the tool to attract television companies to AI solutions and help them prepare for the future. Like every other industry, television has been significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic as viewers moved to consume far greater amounts of content than before. But now creators face massive challenges when it comes to managing, producing and distributing TV content. Costa Mesa, CA-based AI solutions company Veritone has recently released its pulse check on AI adoption report.

Michael Hawley, a computer programmer, professor, musician, speechwriter and impresario who helped lay the intellectual groundwork for what is now called the Internet of Things, died on Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. The cause was colon cancer, said his father, George Hawley. Mr. Hawley began his career as a video game programmer at Lucasfilm, the company created by the "Star Wars" director George Lucas. He spent his last 15 years curating the Entertainment Gathering, or EG, a conference dedicated to new ideas. In between, he worked at NeXT, the influential computer company founded by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in the mid-1980s, and spent nine years as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, a seminal effort to push science and technology into art and other disciplines.

In January, Detroit police arrested and charged 42-year-old Robert Williams with stealing $4,000 in watches from a retail store 15 months earlier. Taken away in handcuffs in front of his two children, Williams was sent to an interrogation room where police presented him with their evidence: Facial recognition software matched his driver's license photo with surveillance footage from the night of the crime. Williams had an alibi, The New York Times reports, and immediately denied the charges. Police pointed to the image of the suspect from the night of the theft. "I just see a big black guy," he told NPR.

Meeting someone you connected with online can be awkward. It's even worse when that person looks nothing like their photos. Tinder's Photo Verification feature prompts a user to pose for two real-time selfies and uses AI to compare them with their existing pictures. If it's a match, they get a blue checkmark on their profile, which should provide some level of assurance that the person isn't a catfish. The feature has been available in select US markets since January, but starting today, it's rolling out across the UK, too.

Boston has become the second-largest city in the US to bar police and other local agencies from using facial recognition software (via WBUR). The city's 13-member council voted unanimously to ban the technology outside of use in specific criminal cases. The bill also prevents any city official from obtaining the technology through a third-party. The bill was put forward in part to protect the city's minority residents. "Boston should not use racially discriminatory technology that threatens the privacy and basic rights of our residents," said councilor Michelle Wu, who co-sponsored the bill alongside councilor Ricardo Arroyo.

Talking about racism and it's impact on robotics and roboticists was the first conversation in our new biweekly online discussion series "Society, Robots and Us" on alternate Tuesdays at 6pm PDT. It was a generous, honest and painful discussion that I hope has left a lasting impact on everyone who listened. There is systemic racism in America, and this does have an impact on robotics and roboticists in many many ways. The US Senator Elizabeth Warren in conversation today with Alicia Garza from Black Futures Lab said, "America was founded on principles of liberty and freedom, but it was built on the backs of enslaved people. This is a truth we must not ignore. Racism and white supremacy have shaped every crucial aspect of our economy, and our political system for generations now."

Klassify Technology, a vendor in Data Classification, Data Discovery and Compliance domain, announced partnership with Bengaluru headquartered Happiest Minds – a next-generation digital transformation, infrastructure, security, and product engineering services company. Under this partnership agreement, Happiest Minds will sell Klassify flagship Data Classification, Data Discovery & Compliance, and Card Data Discovery Suite solutions in APAC, Europe, Middle East, and US markets. Vishal Bindra CEO Klassify said, "We are pleased to welcome Happiest Minds to Klassify Technology elite Partner Club. We continue to expand our reach globally by adding more potential partners to our existing channel base. With this sign up with Happiest Minds we look forward to further increase footprints in global geographies."

Italian medical implant manufacturer REJOINT is introducing mass customization and therapy personalization through a combination of Electron Beam Melting (EBM) and computerized analysis of intraoperative and post-operative data collection through IoT-connected sensorized wearables. The market for knee implants is now estimated at around five million implants per year worldwide. In advanced markets, already in 2011 the number of surgical procedures was 150 per 100,000 inhabitants, with peaks of 250 in some markets such as Austria and Switzerland. The strongest annual increase (7%) occurred in patients 64 years and under 1. The knee arthroplasty market until recently solely consisted of standard prosthetic systems, with a limited range of sizes available.

Boston City Councilors voted unanimously to ban the use of facial-recognition technology by police -- technology the Boston Police Department currently doesn't use anyway due to its unreliability. All 13 councilors voted in favor of the order authored by Councilors Ricardo Arroyo and Michelle Wu to ban the city from using technology that matches people's faces. Mayor Marty Walsh's office said the mayor would review the legislation, not committing to whether he'd sign it or not. "It puts Bostonians at risk for misidentification," Arroyo said. A recent MIT study found that the technology was wrong more often when trying to identify darker-skinned people.

Many dimensionality and model reduction techniques rely on estimating dominant eigenfunctions of associated dynamical operators from data. Important examples include the Koopman operator and its generator, but also the Schr\"odinger operator. We propose a kernel-based method for the approximation of differential operators in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces and show how eigenfunctions can be estimated by solving auxiliary matrix eigenvalue problems. The resulting algorithms are applied to molecular dynamics and quantum chemistry examples. Furthermore, we exploit that, under certain conditions, the Schr\"odinger operator can be transformed into a Kolmogorov backward operator corresponding to a drift-diffusion process and vice versa. This allows us to apply methods developed for the analysis of high-dimensional stochastic differential equations to quantum mechanical systems.