The Tokyo Metropolitan Government on Friday unveiled robots that will be used in two hotels housing those infected with the novel coronavirus. The metropolitan government aims to efficiently clean the hotels, which are to house asymptomatic patients or those with light symptoms, and lower the burden on staff members. The robots were unveiled at the Apa Hotel & Resort in the capital's Sumida Ward, and Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike came to inspect them. One cylindrical robot is programed to hand lunch boxes to patients and clean the hotel lobby. Another robot, a humanoid, is designed to interact with patients.

If you're a hospital exec, departmental lead, or run a clinical service, you've likely been approached by a gazillion AI vendors with all sorts of shiny new tech that's just bursting with promise. If so, I know the feeling. My inbox is full of the stuff every single day. To the uninitiated it can be hard to discern which ones are actually going to help (if at all), which are fads and which are just plain dangerous. The wheat needs careful separating from the chaff.

Mountain gorillas have been caught on camera as they "sing" during their supper, a behavior that has never before been documented on video. Filmmakers captured the astonishing footage of the primate crooners with a little help from a very special camera: a robotic "spy" designed to look like a young gorilla. The singing apes make their television debut on April 29 in the returning PBS series, "Nature: Spy in the Wild 2." Like its predecessor, which first aired in 2017, the program documents remarkable up-close glimpses of elusive wildlife behavior, seen through the "eyes" of robots that are uncanny lookalikes of the creatures that they film. But this time, the robot animals display an even greater range of realistic behaviors, enabling them to interact with the wildlife that they're spying on. Though human camera operators typically keep a safe distance from wild gorillas, the lifelike animatronic gorilla spy was able to infiltrate a troop and film their daily routines, which included an impromptu suppertime serenade. Footage of the singing gorillas is featured in the first episode of "Spy in the Wild 2" and shows the apes reclining amid dense foliage in a sanctuary in Uganda.

Artificial intelligence has become widely deployed across several industries. Of course, bad news always gets preference and catches people's minds. Some of the popular bad news in AI have been related to fake news generation, autonomous vehicles killing pedestrians, AI systems attacking a production facility and data biases creating problems in AI applications. Nonetheless, there are still some positive signs, we have seen innovative devices being deployed in hospitals, AI tools helping disabled people, robots being used in increasing set of domains as well as AI assistants and smart devices guiding people in day to day queries and chores. The speed of evolution, adoption, and research in artificial intelligence is accelerating.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been working its way into health technology for several years and, so far, AI tools have been a boon to physicians and health networks. Until now, though, the general view was that it was a supplemental tool for diagnosticians, not a replacement for them. But what if the AI was better at detecting disease than humans, including anatomic pathologists? Researchers in the Department of Dermatology at Heidelberg University in Germany have concluded that AI can be more accurate at identifying certain cancers. The challenge they designed for their study involved skin biopsies and dermatologists.

Face recognition, or facial recognition, is one of the largest areas of research within computer vision. We can now use face recognition to unlock our mobile phones, verify identification at security gates, and in some countries, make purchases. With the ability to make numerous processes more efficient, many companies invest into the research and development of facial recognition technology. This article will highlight some of that research and introduce five machine learning papers on face recognition. With a multitude of real-world applications, face recognition technology is becoming more and more prominent.

Deepfake videos and altered videos are getting so advanced that they are increasingly harder to spot. Many believe AI deepfake tools, that allow people to superimpose the face of a politician or actor onto a video and also convincingly replicate their voice, could be a real threat to democracy. In May 2019, Donald Trump posted a video that had gone viral of Nancy Pelosi appearing to drunkenly slur her way through a speech. The video was quickly debunked -- someone had altered the original footage to slow down Pelosi's speech while raising the pitch to make it sound like natural slow speech. The video was viewed millions of times and Trump, notably, didn't remove the video from his social media after it was debunked.

In November 2007, Google laid the basis to dominate the mobile market by launching Android, an open source operating system for smartphones. After eight years to the month, Android has an 80% market share and Google is utilizing a similar stunt, this time with artificial intelligence. Google later announced TensorFlow, its open source platform for machine learning, giving anybody a computer, internet connection and casual background in deep learning algorithms access to one of the most powerful machine learning platforms ever made. More than 50 Google products have embraced TensorFlow to harness deep learning (machine learning utilizing deep neural networks) as a tool, from distinguishing you and your companions in the Photos application to refining its core search engine. Google has become a machine learning organization.

Artificial intelligence (AI), as we have seen in the past, is already established in the enterprise. Some professions, like human resources, have taken to it easily while others, particularly regulated industries, have been slower to write AI into their future. The fact of the matter is that AI is still a very new technology and it is still not clear what it will bring to the enterprise, or if what it brings will be positive. In fact, it does not take much digging to find people that are cautious, or against the deployment of AI with many arguing that its negative aspects will outweigh its benefits. Gustavo Pezzi is a computer science lecturer at BPP University London and a fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

We've made our coronavirus coverage free for all readers. To get all of HBR's content delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Daily Alert newsletter. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, robots have been having a moment. Media outlets across the world have reported on robots successfully delivering on critical tasks in healthcare facilities and their effectiveness as contagion-proof workers in many other settings. Robots have even been extolled as "heroes" helping to "manage" the pandemic.