I am currently serving as Principal, IQMS, part of Dassault Systèmes. Previous positions include product management at Ingram Cloud, product marketing at iBASEt, Plex Systems, senior analyst at AMR Research (now Gartner), marketing and business development at Cincom Systems, Ingram Micro, a SaaS start-up and at hardware companies. I am also a member of the Enterprise Irregulars. My background includes marketing, product management, sales and industry analyst roles in the enterprise software and IT industries. My academic background includes an MBA from Pepperdine University and completion of the Strategic Marketing Management and Digital Marketing Programs at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Food plays a big role in our health, and for that reason many people trying to improve their diet often track what they eat. A new wearable from researchers in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science helps wearers track their food habits with high fidelity. FitByte, a noninvasive, wearable sensing system, combines the detection of sound, vibration and movement to increase accuracy and decrease false positives. It could help users reach their health goals by tracking behavioral patterns, and gives practitioners a tool to understand the relationship between diet and disease and to monitor the efficacy of treatment. The device tracks all stages of food intake.

The virtual assistants that inhabit our smartphones are helpful, sure, but they're not going to pass the Turing test any time soon. They're designed for understanding specific commands and actions like checking on restaurant reservations or getting updates on the weather, rather than, say, carrying on an in-depth conversation with a human. But chatbots could soon become far more loquacious thanks to Facebook, which this morning released a startlingly lifelike chatbot that it's been developing, dubbed Blender, as an open-source resource for AI research. Facebook has been pouring money and resources into its Natural Language Processing technologies for a few years now and those efforts appear to have paid off. The company claims that Blender is the single largest open-source chatbot created to date.

If you were hoping to set iRobot's robotic lawn mower, Terra, free on your lawn this summer, we have bad news. The company, which also makes Roomba vacuums, announced yesterday that it is suspending plans for Terra indefinitely due to COVID-19. It looked something like a heavy-duty Roomba, and unlike other robotic lawn mowers, which require boundary wires, it allowed users to mark the perimeter with wireless beacons. The app offered more control, with settings for grass height and specific off-limits areas. The bot could handle inclement weather and hilly terrain, and it would return to its docking station when it was low on power. The company originally committed to launches in Germany and the US, but it hadn't set a date or a price.

Artificial intelligence is getting down in the weeds. An AI-powered robot that can distinguish weeds from crops and remove them could eventually be used as an alternative to chemical insecticides. Kevin Patel and Nihar Chaniyara at tech start-up AutoRoboCulture in Gandhinagar, India, have created a prototype of the device, called Nindamani, specifically for cauliflower crops. The robot is powered by a pre-existing image-recognition algorithm.

The reopening of schools in England is expected to take place in a "phased manner", says the Education Secretary Gavin Williamson. He told the Education Select Committee the date for opening would depend on scientific advice - but schools would get "as much notice as possible". But when pupils start returning it could just be for some year groups. "All schools returning on day one with a full complement of pupils would not be realistic," he told MPs. With schools closed by the coronavirus outbreak, the education secretary faced questions on a timetable for re-opening and how to support the disadvantaged, while pupils were meant to be learning online from home.

The primary method of soliciting donations will be via podcast. Fils-Aimé will join longtime New York games journalist Harold Goldberg in a seven-episode series, Talking Games with Reggie and Harold, which will feature interns being helped by the program, as well as high-profile executives and developers in the video game industry. Goldberg is a freelancer who has written previously for The Washington Post.

Andrew Clark is a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of a machine learning assurance company called Monitaur. Monitaur solves a key problem that has been preventing wide-spread machine learning adoption: the lack of a holistic approach to machine learning risk management. Monitaur has created a risk management and regulator friendly'SIEM' system that records all model predictions with an understandable description of why a transaction has occurred. Andrew received a B.S. in Business Administration with a concentration in Accounting, Summa Cum Laude, from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, an M.S. in Data Science from Southern Methodist University, and is a Ph.D. student in Economics at the University of Reading. He also holds the Certified Analytics Professional, American Statistical Association Graduate Statistician, and AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate certifications.

The H-1 robot covered with the electronic skin developed by the researchers. Researchers at Technische Universität München in Germany have recently developed an electronic skin that could help to reproduce the human sense of touch in robots. This e-skin, presented in a paper published in MDPI's Sensors journal, requires far less computational power than other existing e-skins and can thus be applied to larger portions of a robot's body. "Our main motivation for developing the e-skin stems from nature and is centered on the question of how we humans interact with our surrounding environment," Florian Bergner, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "While humans predominantly depend on vision, our sense of touch is important as soon as contacts are involved in interactions. We believe that giving robots a sense of touch can extend the range of interactions between robots and humans--making robots more collaborative, safe and effective."

The archaic, paper-based world of trade finance looks set to take a further leap into the digital future, as trade finance distribution platform Tradeteq begins a collaboration with the Singapore Management University (SMU) to explore quantum computing-based solutions for the industry. Supported by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) under its artificial intelligence and data analytics (AIDA) grant scheme, the research project, titled Exploring the advantages of a quantum system for machine learning applied to credit scoring, aims to build a predictive machine learning model implemented on a quantum computer in order to tackle inefficiencies in approving trade finance. "Currently, many small and-medium-sized businesses are unable to grow their companies due to a lack of funding as they are deemed'too risky' by current credit rating models," says Pang Hwee Hwa, dean of the SMU School of Information Systems. "With shorter processing time, more businesses could be scored and with greater accuracy thereby creating more trust and providing greater access to finance for companies than ever before." Quantum computing is still very much in its infancy, and the technology doesn't yet exist to build a large-scale quantum computer.