Residents of the largest retirement community in the US will soon have the option to have their drug prescriptions delivered to them partly by air. Starting this May, UPS and CVS plan to use autonomous drones to shuttle medicine to people in The Villages, Florida, giving them a high-tech way to practice social-distancing. As it has done in the past, UPS will use Matternet M2 quadcopters to deliver the prescriptions (pictured above). At first, the aircraft will drop off the orders at a pickup location, with a human driver on the ground moving them the rest of the way. One CVS pharmacy will take part in the program initially, though there's the potential for two more locations to join in the future.

What if we could treat the Earth like a computer, a system with an ever-flowing set of data that can be tracked, analyzed, and potentially even predicted. That's the gist of Microsoft's latest environmental initiative, which it's dubbed a "Planetary Computer." The company foresees a world where we can track just about anything happening in the world -- a forest fire in California, the river tides in Uganda -- and have all of that data readily accessible on a single AI-driven platform. If Microsoft succeeds it could reshape our relationship with the Earth entirely. Lucas Joppa, Microsoft's first chief environmental officer, boiled down the concept succinctly in an interview for the Engadget Podcast: "It's a platform that is intended to accelerate our ability to monitor, model and then ultimately manage Earth's natural systems to ask questions like, 'Where are the world's forests? Where are the world's wetlands? How fast are they changing?' And hopefully, what are the sorts of benefits that we are gaining from those ecosystems? What are the services that those ecosystems provision to people?"

BROOKLYN, New York, Monday, April 27, 2020 – Likes, shares, followers, and comments are the currency of online social networks. Posts with high levels of engagement are prioritized by content curation algorithms, allowing social network "influencers" to monetize the size and loyalty of their audience. Yet not all engagement is organic, according to a team of researchers at New York University Tandon School of Engineering and Drexel University, who have published the first analysis of a robust underground ecosystem of "pods." These groups of users manipulate curation algorithms and artificially boost content popularity -- whether to increase the reach of promoted content or amplify rhetoric -- through a tactic known as "reciprocity abuse," whereby each member reciprocally interacts with content posted by other members of the group. The researchers also developed a machine learning tool to detect posts with a high likelihood of having gained popularity through pod engagement.

Although Turing awardee and backpropagation pioneer Geoffrey Hinton's interests have largely shifted to unsupervised learning, he recently co-authored a paper that takes a look back at backpropagation and explores its potential to contribute to understanding how the human cortex learns. Hinton and a team of researchers from DeepMind, University College London, and University of Oxford published the paper last Friday on Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Their main idea is that biological brains could compute effective synaptic updates by using feedback connections to induce neuron activities whose locally computed differences encode backpropagation-like error signals. Backpropagation of errors, or backprop, is a widely used algorithm in training artificial neural networks using gradient descent for supervised learning. The basics of continuous backpropagation were proposed in the 1960s, and in 1986 a Nature paper co-authored by Hinton showed experimentally that backprop can generate useful internal representations for neural networks.

In this thirteenth episode, Tom Stubbs, Co-Founder/CEO of Chronomics starts with introducing epigenetics. He describes the technology and expertise that he's brought together to create the only company in the world advancing the forefront of epigenetic biomarkers. He explains how their A.I. based health biomarker engine will be used to reduce your risk of future illness. Thank you for having me on the show. Pleasure to be here and looking forward to chatting with you. Tom: We are very much focused on measuring health so people can avoid disease. Lee: Measuring health so that people can avoid disease, that sounds a little bit cryptic. I mean, essentially we're focused on providing people with objective measures that capture the broader definition of health. So not merely health being the absence of disease, but actually as defined by the World Health Organization over 70 years ago, health being the complete physical, mental and social wellbeing of a person. And we think that this is super important, because with the rise of aging populations and the growth in chronic conditions globally, such as heart disease and type two diabetes, there's a growing need for healthcare to shift towards prevention. And to enable this shift, we need measures to capture the largest risk factors for these conditions ahead of time so that people can prevent through action. Lee: So I think I was one of the first users of Chronomics. I had contacted yourselves at the end of 2018 and took a whole genome sequence and an epigenetic test. We first were putting the product out 2018, and yes, you were among one of the first users of the product. Pleasure to have had you and still have you as a customer, Lee. Lee: And I remember yourselves very favorably, because I was a little bit skeptical because Tommy Woods had informed me that the business model of quite a few companies in the OMIC space is to give you a large questionnaire, apply AI to it, and I've had it demonstrated now to me that based on a simple questionnaire, AI can derive a lot of information about you on the health front, predictive, way more than the OMICS can in some cases. And these companies are doing this heavy OMICS data acquisition, not so much to give you data at the moment, I mean, information, but in order that may be in 5, 10 years, that vast sum of data that can then do something with. And so, I was skeptical at Chronomics maybe doing that, and I said, please make a special case for me. Give me my results without the questionnaire. Tom: Yeah, I do remember this, Lee. And then I said, hey look, if I'm doing a whole genome sequence, I actually want a copy of it. So send me every letter.

The New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) has helped launch a transformational artificial-intelligence-based online learning program to increase the number of Registered Nurses able to handle the explosion of COVID-19 patients in New York City's Intensive Care Units (ICUs). Leveraging its global network of expertise, the NYAS identified a cutting edge online learning company, Sweden's Sana Labs, that was willing to donate its team pro bono to meet New York's need. The world renowned Mount Sinai Health System, one of the largest in New York with eight hospital campuses, jumped at the chance to "upskill" their heroic nurses and provided Sana with curricula drawn from the American Association of Clinical Care Nurses and Mount Sinai itself. In record time, this material was transformed into a 16 hour course that can be taken in short batches during break time or at home on personal computers. So far, about 100 nurses in a pilot program at Mount Sinai Hospital System have used this innovative learning platform.

In 2013, the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford published a paper studying activities over the spectrum of employment that could potentially be automated by computers. While this is certainly contentious, given its potential impact on the human workforce, many businesses have already begun to take the road towards automation. For example, outside of the industrial sector, Pizza Hut has experimented with robotic servers, Amazon has opened several grocery stores with no checkout staff, while China has pioneered'cloud hospital' telemedical services as well as, more recently, robot-serviced field hospitals for coronavirus patients. One of the original premises of the IoT was to introduce a higher level of automation; while the impact of this was limited up until now, the pandemic will certainly lead many enterprises to examine what, and how processes can be automated in order to reduce any future business impact from similar wide-ranging events. Gregory Gundelfinger, CEO of Telna advises that "businesses will need to adapt their business models in order to remain operational and relevant in our rapidly changing society. This means adopting technology that supports automation and reliable connectivity."

Almost 20 years ago, I was implementing a Fraud Management product for Telecom operators around the world. It included wireline long distance call operators as well as Mobile operators. The product created accumulators that triggered alerts when pre-determined criteria were met. For example: numbers of calls in the last hour/day, calls from two or more locations in a short period of time. However, we soon realized fraudsters were getting more creative. Implementing new accumulators and rules to combat them was not easy to achieve that quickly.

The graph represents a network of 973 Twitter users whose recent tweets contained "Thomas_Harrer", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets, taken from a data set limited to a maximum of 18,000 tweets. The network was obtained from Twitter on Friday, 17 April 2020 at 22:49 UTC. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 7-day, 21-hour, 30-minute period from Friday, 10 April 2020 at 00:30 UTC to Friday, 17 April 2020 at 22:01 UTC. Additional tweets that were mentioned in this data set were also collected from prior time periods. These tweets may expand the complete time period of the data.

The incorporation of new technologies into architectural designs has been expanding design possibilities over the last few years. Automation in construction processes can be used both in large scale city strategies, and smaller-scale demands like in the construction of residences. One of the more recent ways that technology has been integrated into the design of workplaces is through the incorporation of artificial intelligence, which uses data that can "teach" the machines how to work in several levels of autonomy. The way that artificial intelligence can be incorporated into the daily function of the workplaces depends on the type and amount of data used to fulfill the projects, and how it can contribute to the evaluating the efficiency of construction, simulation of human movement reflected in the drawings, structural calculations, and other design opportunities. Here, we've compiled a short list of projects that effectively utilize artificial intelligence below: Philips Lighting Headquarters located in Eindhoven, Netherlands, takes advantage of understanding how lighting could become a center point of a design project.