New-age technologies such as Deep Learning and Machine Learning have become a synonym for innovation. With accelerating deployment of the digital voice-enabled assistant, Natural Language Processing's (NLP) linguistic innovations are growing at an exceptional rate. The wide adoption of face and image recognition technology across several industries for surveillance and monitoring purpose has given new meaning to Computer Vision applications. Even Self-Driving Cars, as observed, are not so far from now. Collectively, the growth of these technologies is contributing to the upsurge in the Artificial Intelligence market.

AI is fueling the next wave of transformative innovations that will change the world. With Azure AI, our goal is to empower organizations to apply AI across the spectrum of their business to engage customers, empower employees, optimize operations and transform products. These guiding principles enable us to fulfill our mission of empowering every developer and every organization to harness the potential of AI. With research centers that span the globe, from Redmond to Shanghai, we continue to achieve industry breakthroughs in areas such as vision, speech, language, advanced machine learning techniques, and specialized AI hardware. These innovations are now key components of several of our flagship products, like Office 365, Xbox, Bing and Dynamics 365.

Anyone looking for an illustration of how rapidly shopping habits changed when covid-19 hit needed only to glance at the top 10 search terms on Amazon in the week of April 12 to 18. In place of former mainstays like phone cases, phone chargers, and Lego sets were "toilet paper," "face mask," "hand sanitizer," "paper towels," "Lysol spray," "Clorox wipes," "mask," "Lysol," "masks for germ protection," and "N95 mask." People weren't just searching; they were buying, too--and in bulk. The majority of people looking for masks ended up buying the new Amazon #1 best seller, "Face Mask, Pack of 50." Nozzle, a London-based consultancy specializing in algorithmic advertising for Amazon sellers, captured the rapid change back in February in this simple graph.

Unemployment in May reached its highest levels since the Great Depression, but companies like Postmates and Uber have continued to hire new workers during the pandemic. If you're interested in this kind of gig, however, there's a good chance you'll need to pass an AI-powered background check from a company like Checkr. This might not be as easy as it sounds. Checkr is on the forefront of a new and potentially problematic kind of hiring, one that's powered by still-emerging technology. Those hoping to quickly get extra work complain that Checkr and others using AI to do background checks aren't addressing errors and mistakes on their criminal records reports.

Along with my CTO, Ido Ivri, I Co-Founded Zencity to help local governments make data-driven decisions based on their communities' priorities when creating policies and communicating them to their residents. The Zencity platform gathers and analyzes millions of anonymized, aggregated data points of community feedback from channels like social media, local broadcast media, and government customer service channels (such as 311 and call centers) and turns them into actionable insights about community trends and priorities for local government decision-makers. We analyze these millions of unstructured data points by using advanced AI and NLP algorithms to make the data structured and actionable for these organizations. The algorithms automatically classify data by relevance to the different departments in city hall and then run a sentiment analysis to determine if the data reflects positive, negative, or neutral feedback on a city-related topic. As trends emerge throughout cities or regions, our platform sends alerts to city officials so that they can take immediate action and be proactive.

The economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented crisis in journalism that could decimate media organizations around the world. The future of journalism -- and its survival -- could lie in artificial intelligence (AI). AI refers "to intelligent machines that learn from experience and perform tasks like humans," according to Francesco Marconi, a professor of journalism at Columbia University in New York, who has just published a book on the subject: Newsmakers, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism. Marconi was head of the media lab at the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, one of the largest news organizations in the world. His thesis is clear and incontrovertible: the journalism world is not keeping pace with the evolution of new technologies.

Your story "The Afterlife" opens as a group of passengers are riding a bus to the afterlife. When did that image first come to mind? I'm forced to admit that ninety per cent of this story came to me in a dream, in January this year. It was a semi-lucid dream, one in which I experience a kind of meta-commentary layer in which I thought about how much the elements might comprise a short story if I woke up and wrote them down. I've had that luck, if it is luck, just three or four other times.

As countries around the world are gradually reopening following lockdowns, government authorities are using surveillance drones in an attempt to enforce social distancing rules. In India, police are using AI-equipped drones developed by US start-up Skylark Labs to monitor evening curfews and the distance between people who are outside during the day. The drones are being flown in six cities in the northern state of Punjab, and are also being trialled in the southern city of Bangalore, says Skylark Labs CEO Amarjot Singh. Each drone is fitted with a camera and an AI that can detect humans within a range of 150 metres to 1 kilometre. If it spots people it can send an alert to police in the district located nearest to the sighting.

A Russian rocket used to launch a scientific satellite into space has broken apart after nine years in orbit - leaving a dozens of pieces of debris around the Earth. The Fregat-SB is a type of space tug and its upper stage was left floating after it helped deliver the Spektr-R satellite in 2011, according to Roscosmos. Spektr-R was a radio telescope launched by the Russian space agency but it stopped responding to ground control last year and was declared dead in May 2019. Roscosmos confirmed the breakdown of the rocket happened on May 8 between 06:00 and 07:00 BST somewhere above the Indian ocean. About two-thirds of the satellites orbiting the Earth are dead - about 3,000 of about 4,500 objects - and pose a'very big danger' to the planet - this also includes parts of the Russian rocket that disintegrated (artist's impression) The Russian space agency is studying data to find out how many parts it broke up into and where they are currently orbiting the planet.

In the latest in this series of posts, researchers from the EU-funded COMPRISE project write about privacy issues associated with voice assistants. They propose possible ways to maintain the privacy of users whilst ensuring that manufacturers can still access the quality usage data vital for improving the functionality of their products. "Tell me what you read and I tell you who you are." – Pierre de La Gorce Voice assistants, such as Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant, are becoming increasingly popular. Some users are, however, worried about their vocal interactions with these devices being stored in the cloud, together with a textual transcript of every spoken word. But is there an actual threat associated with the collection of these data? And if so, could such threats be prevented?