Some cafes put dressed mannequins in poses as if they were buying products or sipping coffee at counters in their empty businesses. In towns from north to south, many small business owners on Friday stood at a safe distance from each other on the sidewalk or in town squares, their shuttered stores or restaurants behind them, wearing black masks and holding placards highlighting their economic troubles. On Monday, restaurants and cafes can start offering takeout. Non-essential shops can reopen on May 18 if Italy's rate of contagion with COVID-19 doesn't sharply rise again.

If you've had your eye on an open world game like Marvel's Spider-Man, The Witcher 3 or Red Dead Redemption 2, but didn't think you'd ever have the time to play it, now might be your chance. Whether you like to explore every corner of a world, complete every side quest to score 100 per cent, or prefer to stick to the main quest, open world games pretty much let you do whatever you feel like, all at your own pace. Here we share a selection of the most absorbing open world games to explore and get lost in right now. With over 100 hours of core and side-quest gameplay, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is sure to keep boredom at bay. The dark fantasy game sees you play as Geralt of Rivia, mercenary Monster Slayer.

It's taken Google a surprisingly long time to make good earbuds. The original Pixel Buds from 2018 were a bulky, mushroom-shaped mess that made you look like Frankenstein's monster. The charging case was huge, the sound was middling, and when you finally worked up the courage to go outside with them, it felt like everyone wearing AirPods was laughing at you. My expectations were muted last fall when Google announced a revamped pair with the same name--this time with no wire connecting the buds, just like offerings from Apple, Samsung, and Amazon. They've got five hours of battery life, which is short, especially compared to the 11 hours you get with Samsung's buds.

As consumers demand more convenient fulfillment while technology improves and costs fall, the prospect for autonomous delivery is growing. The implications of the COVID-19 pandemic could create a perfect storm of factors that finally make things like drones and delivery robots ripe for adoption. "The pandemic has increased the viability of autonomous delivery," says Michael Ramsey, vice president and analyst who covers the automotive industry and smart mobility at Gartner. "It's one more box that they can check for in saying'this makes sense.'" No one is certain what the "new normal" will look like, but many agree that greater social distancing could be a part of our future.

"Alexa, what was the score of the Manchester United game yesterday?" If you've ever asked a question like that of your personal assistant device (such as Amazon Echo or Google Home), you are already enjoying the fruits of the deep learning revolution. As Ralf Herbrich, Director of Machine Learning & Managing Director of Amazon Development Germany explains, when you speak to your device, "features from a deep neural network are used to describe the audio stream in order to detect the wake-words… Once the wake-word is detected, neural networks are used to predict the sequence of phonetic states from the audio sequence of the whole microphone array." This same cutting-edge deep learning/neural network technology is already being used for a wide range of tasks, such as enabling the navigation of self-driving cars, colorizing old black-and-white films, assisting physicians in diagnosing illnesses, and beating the best human competitors at complex strategy games such as Go. But what, exactly, are deep learning and neural networks, and how do they work?

However, according to the USPTO's ruling, inventions can only be submitted (and depending on how philosophical you want to get, conceived) by a "natural person," as reflected in the language of patent law and also in previous federal court rulings. Speaking of philosophy, the ruling quotes a Federal Circuit court decision from 1994 that expounds on the nature of invention in a way that's certain to send your brain down the maze of reflexive self-awareness. "Conception is the touchstone of inventorship, the completion of the mental part of invention. It is the formation in the mind of the inventor, of a definite and permanent idea of the complete and operative invention ... [Conception] is a mental act ..." Patents that list DABUS as the inventor have also been denied in Europe and the UK for similar reasons related to personhood. The European Patent Office also raised the issue of who, exactly, would enforce the rights granted to an inventor under such a circumstance. Thaler, the mind behind DABUS, is a physicist and founder of Imagination Engines, a company that researches and develops artificial neural networks.

"Innovation drives this world and we are driven to innovate," says Anuj Agarwal, when describing the technology that he and his team Aeromobix Systems are developing to Auto Futures. One look at the impressive work that they have been doing to make drive-by-wire technology a reality on Indian roads, and you begin to see that what he says makes so much sense. Kolkata-based Aeromobix Systems was founded in March 2018 by CEO Anuj Agarwal, who happens to be an avid automotive enthusiast and an out-of-the-box thinker. Committed to deliver top notch solutions and services in the future mobility domain, the company is one of the only ones in India focusing on drive-by-wire technology. Speaking to Agarwal, you can clearly tell that he is a firm believer of making things simple and getting the mundane out of life.

The AI in healthcare market is projected to expand from its current $2.1 billion to $36.1 billion in 2025, representing a staggering compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 50.2 percent. That's according to new research from ReportLinker, which notes that the rapid increase in value will be driven largely by North American investment, with the United States at the forefront of innovation and spending. Hospitals and physician providers will be the major investors in machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions and services, the report predicts. "A few major factors responsible for the high share of the hospitals and providers segment include a large number of applications of AI solutions across provider settings; ability of AI systems to improve care delivery, patient experience, and bring down costs; and growing adoption of electronic health records by healthcare organizations," noted the summary of the report. "Moreover, AI-based tools, such as voice recognition software and clinical decision support systems, help streamline workflow processes in hospitals, lower cost, improve care delivery, and enhance patient experience."

Economics, money, and the way we make payments have undergone several changes since the time of the Stone Age. In a sense all these are key indicators of our progress as a species. The primitive methods indicated our primitive way of living. Similarly, the current payment methods powered by cutting-edge technology boast our technological achievements of today. Digitization of payments was a huge jump towards the goal to achieve an easy, convenient, fast, and secure payment method.

A new research collaboration between researchers at the University of Alberta and the University of Glasgow is exploring whether interaction with an AI-enhanced, socially intelligent robot can effectively distract children during painful clinical procedures, reducing their pain and distress. "Pain is much more than just a physical response; we also want to manage a child's stress, anxiety and distress," said U of A medical researcher and pediatric emergency physician Samina Ali. "We want to know if integrating a robot into the clinical setting can create a more positive, meaningful and less traumatic experience for children and their families." The three-year project builds on a series of smaller studies, supported by funding from the Stollery Children's Hospital Foundation, that used programmable humanoid robots named MEDi to deliver cognitive behavioural therapy-based interventions to children as they went through procedures involving needles. In those studies, the MEDi robot was remotely operated and followed a limited script.