But also: 'AI will deepen my research and bring it a step further than it is now.' There is a wide range of opinions. Nevertheless, four out of five Dutch scientists foresee that AI will have a considerable impact on society. Two thirds also believe that AI will have a radical impact on science. The figures come from a survey that the editorial board of Research commissioned among researchers in various disciplines at Dutch knowledge institutions.

Customer expectations are constantly changing in the business landscape due to digitization. Before, a website or a mere digital presence was enough to separate you from your nearest competitor. But today, businesses have to continuously innovate and ensure they are providing new, exciting digital experiences– or risk being left behind. Case in point, an HBR report cites the number one reason more than half (52 percent) of the Fortune 500 have disappeared since the year 2000 is their failure to achieve digital change. Though a relatively new term, the Connected Customer describes those customers that interact with brands through digital channels such as websites, apps or Alexa skills.

The future for contactless product delivery is already here, and a pandemic seems to already be moving this trend forward. It just needs companies to implement and customers to accept the new delivery and tracking methods, along with other innovations, that will make this so. When this happens, we may one day look back and quietly thank the lowly coronavirus for catapulting us into a brighter future. One of the more iconic images from the early days of this disease comes from late March 2020, during San Francisco's citywide coronavirus lockdown, when "aspiring drone racing pilot" David Chen delivered a single roll of much-needed toilet paper to his friend Ian Chan in another part of the city. Chan captured the delivery on video and posted it to his Twitter feed, which ironically went viral.

General AI (Artificial Intelligence) is coming closer thanks to combining neural networks, narrow AI and symbolic AI. Yves Mulkers, Data strategist and founder of 7wData talked to Wouter Denayer, Chief Technology Officer at IBM Belgium, to share his enlightening insights on where we are and where we are going with Artificial Intelligence. Join us in our chat with Wouter. Yves Mulkers Hi and welcome, today we're together with Wouter Denayer, Chief Technology Officer at IBM. Wouter, you're kind of authority in Belgium and I think outside the borders of Belgium as well on artificial intelligence. Can you tell me a bit more about what you're doing at IBM and What keeps you busy?

As the world gets to grips with the health and humanitarian emergency resulting from the spread of the coronavirus (Covid-19), the knock-on economic effects have also been stark. In an increasingly global economy, we have seen how fragile some supply chains have become. Our team quickly built a simple tool so organisations with great need could gain rapid access to our supplier insights, in order to help with shortages of critical supplies. The free service provides help to organisations performing emergency sourcing of critically needed medical equipment and supplies including surgical masks, hazmat suits, swabs and tubes etc. Until 30 April, organisations (such as NGOs, public bodies, local and national governments and healthcare providers) struggling to source urgently needed supplies can make a request for our AI powered supplier search at scoutbee Covid-19 Emergency Supply Chain Support.

But it won't replace lawyers, yet.

Albert Hsiao, M.D., and his colleagues at the University of California, San Diego (USCD) health system had been working for 18 months on an artificial intelligence program designed to help doctors identify pneumonia on a chest X-ray. When the coronavirus hit the U.S., they decided to see what it could do. The researchers quickly deployed the application, which dots X-ray images with spots of color where there may be lung damage or other signs of pneumonia. It has now been applied to more than 6,000 chest X-rays, and it's providing some value in diagnosis, said Hsiao, director of UCSD's augmented imaging and artificial intelligence data analytics laboratory. His team is one of several around the country that has pushed AI programs developed in a calmer time into the COVID-19 crisis to perform tasks like deciding which patients face the greatest risk of complications and which can be safely channeled into lower-intensity care.

But advances in natural language processing, or NLP, a branch of artificial intelligence that allows computers to understand spoken or typed remarks, are prompting healthcare organizations to leverage that field. In areas such as voice-activated assistants and speech recognition platforms, NLP is creating better experiences by expanding patient access to information, cutting transcription costs and delays, and improving the quality of health records. Providers also report the tools can lower stress and allow more face time during appointments. That's because speech offers unique distinction. "It's more detailed and nuanced, and it's the more natural way to convey what you're thinking," says Dr. Genevieve Melton-Meaux, a professor of surgery and health informatics at the University of Minnesota.

Amazon today announced the general availability of Multi-Capability Skills for Alexa, a way to combine smart home and custom Alexa apps into single, unified voice apps. Starting this week, developers can publish and maintain an Alexa app that enables both internet of things and third-party features for their devices, extending built-in smart home commands with custom voice interaction models to support nearly any feature without forcing customers to enable and invoke two separate apps. Before the advent of Multi-Capability Skills, Alexa developers had to publish and maintain multiple apps to enable custom features: a smart home app to leverage built-in smart home capabilities and a custom app to support capabilities not included in the Alexa smart home API. Now, they don't -- and customers don't have to remember two different app names. In this way, Multi-Capability Skills make it easier for developers to create better Alexa experiences.

As more online brands look for ways to move beyond third-party cookies as a way of gaining more direct insights about their users and customers, a startup that has developed a platform to help them has raised a big round of funding. Bluecore, a marketing technology firm that uses data gained from direct marketing like email, social media, site activity and combines that with machine learning to make better predictions about who might want to buy what among its customers, is today announcing that it has raised $50 million. The funding will be used to build the next generation of the Bluecore platform, expected later this year, which will tap into aggregated engagement data (but not actual browsing individuals) from "hundreds" of brands, which customers can combine with their own first-party data -- based on consent-based, first-party customer IDs -- to develop better targeting insights. "There are a lot of systems that focus on customer data and transactional data but no system that focuses on the product and product catalogue, which we think is the key asset," said Fayez Mohamood, the co-founder and CEO, in an interview. He says that the company manages over 200 million products and SKUs, second only to Amazon's and bigger than Walmart's, that companies can matches with consumer identities (from email and other direct channels).