Singapore park-goers have been reminded of their social distancing obligations by Boston Dynamics' yellow "dog". The robot hound is equipped with numerous cameras and sensors, which it can use to detect transgressors and broadcast pre-recorded warnings. The authorities have reassured locals it is not a quadruped data-collection device. In Milton Keynes a recently expanded fleet of six-wheeled robots has been delivering food and small supermarket shopping consignments to hungry residents. The town's large network of cycle paths makes it ideally suited to the knee-high machines, which trundle along at a top speed of 4mph.

SpaceX has sent Nasa astronauts into space in a historic mission. The Falcon 9 rocket carried the astronauts into orbit in SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule. Minutes after launch, the rocket detached and landed safely on a drone ship while the capsule continued to carry the astronauts on to the International Space Station. The successful launch is the first time that humans have been shot into space from US soil since the Space Shuttle programme ended in 2011. And it is the first time that humans have been sent into space by a private company, a feat only previous achieved by the space agencies of the US, Russia and China.

Natural language processing, or NLP for short, is best described as "AI for speech and text." The magic behind voice commands, speech and text translation, sentiment analysis, text summarization, and many other linguistic applications and analyses, natural language processing has been improved dramatically through deep learning. The Python language provides a convenient front-end to all varieties of machine learning including NLP. In fact, there is an embarrassment of NLP riches to choose from in the Python ecosystem. In this article we'll explore each of the NLP libraries available for Python--their use cases, their strengths, their weaknesses, and their general level of popularity.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an increasingly important technology within the investment management industry.1 AI has been used in a variety of ways--including as the newest strategy for attempts to "beat the market" by outperforming passive index funds that are benchmarked against the S&P 500, despite the long-standing finding that index funds consistently win that contest.2 Investment advisers who use AI should consider the unique issues the technology raises in light of an adviser's fiduciary duty to its clients. In this client alert, we provide an overview of how AI is being used by investment advisers, the fiduciary duties applicable to investment advisers, and particular issues advisers should consider in designing AI-based programs, to ensure they are acting in the best interests of their clients.3 Under federal law, an investment adviser is a fiduciary to its clients.8

Many machine learning algorithms perform better when numerical input variables are scaled to a standard range. This includes algorithms that use a weighted sum of the input, like linear regression, and algorithms that use distance measures, like k-nearest neighbors. Standardizing is a popular scaling technique that subtracts the mean from values and divides by the standard deviation, transforming the probability distribution for an input variable to a standard Gaussian (zero mean and unit variance). Standardization can become skewed or biased if the input variable contains outlier values. To overcome this, the median and interquartile range can be used when standardizing numerical input variables, generally referred to as robust scaling.

In the last few weeks there were a lot of discussions around clearview.ai. The company that scrapes image data from Facebook and other social sites and uses facial recognition to identify people. As the New York Times reported they claim that "the app helped identify [...] a person [..] whose face appeared in the mirror of someone else's gym photo". Much of the public outrage was about the privacy aspect. Little however was about the fact that those algorithms might just be wrong.

You may even be using one to read this article. Wi-Fi has become essential to our personal and professional lives. The smartphone and the internet we use today wouldn't have been possible without wireless communication technologies such as Wi-Fi. In 1995 if you wanted to "surf" the internet at home, you had to chain yourself to a network cable like it was an extension cord. In 1997, Wi-Fi was invented and released for consumer use.

Back in March, shortly after the coronavirus had been deemed a national crisis, I walked into a 7-Eleven to pick up a late-night snack. Taped to the door was a makeshift sign warning not to touch the Slurpee machine to limit the risk of viral spread. I glanced at the coolers full of soft drinks, the touchscreen payment reader beside the cash register, the plastic surface of the smartphone case I'd touched perhaps 2,600 times that day. Maybe the Slurpee machine was riskier by some small degree than these other surfaces, but by how much? The whole strange episode called me to wonder if people would recall this time as the death knell of public touchscreens, or at least the dawn of a new era in conversant interfaces, an age in which our voices, not our hands, would help us navigate the world.

The quartet, consisting of Kircoff, her husband Andrew Kephalidis, who works in Reflector's animation department, public relations manager Noémie de Rothschild and marketing head André Vu, is now watching some aspiring student game developers attempt to answer their question. With help and mentorship from the team at Reflector, eight students at the video game design school ISART Digital Montréal are racing to complete a 10-minute-long game as part of their graduation project. It will be judged in June by a panel of professionals in the game industry.

Three Overwatch League franchises have publicly condemned the Minneapolis police this week for the death of George Floyd, who died Monday after a white police officer pressed his knee on Floyd's neck in a prolonged manner while detaining him. In a widely-shared video of the incident, Floyd can be heard gasping: "I can't breathe." It's the first time teams in the league have spoken publicly on racism and police brutality, and a rare instance of a franchise commenting on an event with sociopolitical implications.