Robots and drones equipped with infrared cameras could patrol holiday destinations and enforce social distancing rules under new EU plans to save the summer break. European Commission tourism proposals imaging'artificial intelligence and robotics [to] underpin public health measures', alongside infection tracing mobile apps. Automatons could appear in places like airports, beaches, resorts and restaurants to make sure that people keep at least 5 feet (1.5 metres) away from each other. On-board infrared cameras could allow the robots to measure people's temperatures from a distance and identify people with a fever that need to self-isolate. The plans come after Singapore employed a Boston Dynamics Spot robot to roam parks, broadcasting a message reminding pedestrians to keep their distance.

Elon Musk gave a simple response to the vice president of artificial intelligence at Facebook after being questioned about his knowledge of the technology – 'Facebook sucks.' The blunt response was to a tweet posted by Jerome Pesenti, who criticized the billionaire's warnings about the dangers of artificial general intelligence (AGI). 'I believe a lot of people in the AI community would be ok saying it publicly,' Pesenti wrote on Twitter. '[Musk] has no idea what he is talking about when he talks about AI. There is no such thing as AGI and we are nowhere near matching human intelligence.'

The virtual International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) was held on 26-30 April and included eight keynote talks, with a wide range of topics covered. Courtesy of the conference organisers you can watch the talks in full and see the question and answer sessions too. Africa has a population of over one billion people, over 3000 ethnic groups, and over 2000 different languages. This rich diversity offers an excellent opportunity to address complex research questions within the African continent. Research in Africa within the AI space can have global impact.

For years, the evolution of image sensors has been about packing in more pixels and slimming down their size to fit into smaller devices. Now, they're about to get smart. Today, Sony is unveiling the IMX500 and IMX501, two 12.3-megapixel sensors with onboard AI processing chips. They'll be able to handle "light" machine learning tasks -- like recognizing if a stray dog or cat enters your backyard -- on their own, without sending any video to the cloud or another system. Instead, they can deliver anonymous metadata pings to alert you about what they've seen.

Open Philanthropy recommended a total of approximately $2,300,000 over five years in PhD fellowship support to 10 promising machine learning researchers that together represent the 2020 class of the Open Phil AI Fellowship.1 These fellows were selected from more than 380 applicants for their academic excellence, technical knowledge, careful reasoning, and interest in making the long-term, large-scale impacts of AI a central focus of their research. This falls within our focus area of potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence. We believe that progress in artificial intelligence may eventually lead to changes in human civilization that are as large as the agricultural or industrial revolutions; while we think it's most likely that this would lead to significant improvements in human well-being, we also see significant risks. Open Phil AI Fellows have a broad mandate to think through which kinds of research are likely to be most valuable, to share ideas and form a community with like-minded students and professors, and ultimately to act in the way that they think is most likely to improve outcomes from progress in AI. The intent of the Open Phil AI Fellowship is both to support a small group of promising researchers and to foster a community with a culture of trust, debate, excitement, and intellectual excellence.

Resiliency and scalability of contact centers are the key factors to Business Continuity Planning. Contact centers built on legacy systems are expensive to maintain and do not scale well to handle increasing customer anxiety. Contact center operations face dips in agent productivity due to legacy technology and skill gaps. To overcome these business challenges, organizations must implement a flexible solution and leverage automation to enhance operational scalability. Join our upcoming webinar with guest speaker, Analyst Kate Leggett of Forrester Research to learn how to leverage a full suite of AI technologies, including Natural Language Processing and machine and deep learning to create a smarter, and more scalable contact center.

Verdict lists the top five terms tweeted on IoT in Q1 2020, based on data from GlobalData's Influencer Platform. The top tweeted terms are the trending industry discussions happening on Twitter by key individuals (influencers) as tracked by the platform. Tech innovations in the form of robotics, automated parking, and more, the use cases of artificial intelligence across industries such as retail, automotive, and smart cities, were popularly discussed in Q1 2020. According to a video shared by Evan Kirstel, a top B2B influencer, buyers can shop for they wanted at stores in just 14 seconds, much like the Amazon Go stores that allows cashierless shopping by infusing sensors all over the stores that tracks what customers maybe buying after scanning the app, after which buyers just walk away with their products. Mike Quindazzi, a digital alliances sales leader, further shared a video on new automated parking that saves both time and space.

In an opinion piece in The New York Times written just as the novel coronavirus pandemic was taking off in New York City, author David Brooks used the phrase "plague eyes" to describe the radically new perspective that had begun to inject itself into the consciousness of everyone facing the unprecedented health threat. One of the things worth turning those eyes toward is the challenge of accessing trustworthy information at a time when new problems call for fast and far-reaching decisions from government politicians and bureaucrats, enterprise executives, healthcare leaders, small business owners, and individual families. At the time Brooks' column was written, there was confusing and contradictory information coming out of the healthcare agencies, the Trump administration, the Chinese government, the mainstream media, the European media, and the media of the right, to name a few sources of real and alternative fact. What is clear This is what we can see clearly after some months of reading, watching, and listening to the pronouncements on the crisis from around the globe: Content challenges continue to dog AI. For example, should AI be able to create its own channel of authoritative information so that both fake-news people and alternative-facts people can access "unvarnished" truths?

Jean-Francois Gagne is the CEO of Elemental AI, a Montreal-based startup which develops artificial intelligence solutions for all kinds of businesses. Elemental operates in a tough market with serious competition from tech giants such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Yet thanks to its innovative training technique, which harnesses simulated data, it has created a unique proposition that has attracted an impressive roster of blue chip customers. Here Jean-Francois calls for a re-think on the assumptions built into the economic equation of international trade as well explaining why he thinks people will collaborate with machines to create new value. Elemental is a partner of the Global AI Summit, an event which will be hosted by Tortoise on May 15th 2020, that will examine the future of the world and look in depth at the role technology, and AI in particular, will play in shaping it. Which underlying assumptions about globalisation are going to withstand the pandemic, if any?

Are you looking to improve your vocabulary while you're stuck at home? Do you want to teach your kids new words while they're out of school? If so, you'll want to avoid ThisWordDoesNotExist.com. The new website offers an endless stream of AI-generated nonsensical words, accompanied by seemingly plausible dictionary definitions. For instance, ThisWordDoesNotExist.com will tell you that a dolecat is "a very large cat, especially a coniferous one," bastardole is the ancient Roman port of Tuscany and sclerotoxin is a toxin often used as an extratory agent in perfumery.