Are you a PhD student or researcher with an interest in science communication? We are recruiting AIhub Ambassadors to help us write about the latest news, research, conferences, and more, in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Ideally you would produce a series of blog posts on aspects of the field that interest you. You could write about some significant research, give a tutorial, or cover a session at a (for now, virtual) conference. You could draw attention to exciting new developments in the field, interview a researcher, or summarise recent social media commentary.

New York – With large portions of the U.S. population quarantined at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, the demand for video games to provide entertainment is growing dramatically. NPD Group's monthly report for March showed that all game-related purchases -- software, hardware and accessories -- totaled $1.6 billion, a 35 percent increase over the same month last year. The dollar figure was the highest recorded since $1.8 billion was spent in March 2008, according to the report. NPD Group executive Rob Liguori wrote Tuesday, "At NPD, we are tracking weekly consumer spending changes across entertainment due to COVID-19. With schools closing and shelter-in-place orders going out across multiple states, U.S. consumers' habits reflect the need to live primarily indoors for the foreseeable future. "While steep transaction declines are being seen across multiple industries during the pandemic, consumer (spending) on entertainment is strong, especially in video games." Software sales were up 34 percent to $739 million, the highest figure since $787 million was spent in March 2011, per NPD Group. Even with the big month, the first-quarter software sales in 2020 were down 8 percent from the first quarter in 2019, to $1.4 billion. Hardware sales reportedly jumped 63 percent to $461 million last month over March 2019. Per NPD Group, the Nintendo Switch set a sales record in March 2020, doubling sales from the same month a year ago. Xbox One and PlayStation 4 also saw their sales figures rise by more than 25 percent, and console purchases in the first quarter grew by 2 percent to $773 million. Game card and accessory purchases were up 12 percent to $397 million last month vs. March 2019. Leading all game sales for the month was Nintendo's new Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The title had the third-best opening month for a Nintendo game, trailing only Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Super Smash Bros. Brawl. "Animal Crossing: New Horizons … truly defined March 2020 for the video game market and the corresponding period of social distancing," NPD Group U.S. games industry analyst Mat Piscatella wrote in a blog post Tuesday. "There is a synthesis between this game and this time in history that will leave the two forever connected in the world of video games.

It is hard to underestimate the role of E-commerce in a world where most communications happen on the web and our virtual environment is full of advertisements with attractive products and services to buy. Meanwhile, it is obvious that many criminals are trying to take advantage of it, using scams and malware to compromise users' data. The level of E-commerce fraud is high, according to the statistics. With E-commerce sales estimated to reach $630 billion (or more) in 2020, an estimated $16 billion will be lost because of fraud. Amazon accounts for almost a third of all E-commerce deals in the United States; Amazon's sales numbers increase by about 15% to 20% each year. From 2018 to 2019, E-commerce spending increased by 57% -- the third time in U.S. history that the money spent shopping online exceeded the amount of money spent in brick-and-mortar stores. The Crowe UK and Centre for Counter Fraud Studies (CCFS) created Europe's most complete database of information on fraud, with data from more than 1,300 enterprises from almost every economic field.

Modern agriculture depends on bees. In fact, our entire ecosystem, including the food we eat and the air we breathe, counts on pollinators. But the pollinator population is declining according to Sabiha Rumani Malik, the founder and executive president of The World Bee Project. But, in an intriguing collaboration with Oracle and by putting artificial intelligence, internet of things and big data to work on the problem, they hope to reverse the trend. Why is the global bee population in decline?

MIT has terminated a research collaboration with iFlytek, a Chinese artificial intelligence company accused of supplying technology for surveilling Muslims in the northwestern province of Xinjiang. The university canceled the relationship in February after reviewing an upcoming project under tightened guidelines governing funding from companies in China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. MIT has not said why it terminated the iFlytek collaboration or disclosed details about the project that prompted the review, but it has faced pushback from some students and staff about the arrangement since it began two years ago. "We take very seriously concerns about national security and economic security threats from China and other countries, and human rights issues," says Maria Zuber, vice president of research at MIT. US companies and universities have built ties with Chinese tech firms in recent years. But the relationships have come under increasing scrutiny as relations between the two countries have soured.

Dialogue systems have recently become a standard in human-machine interaction, with chatbots appearing in almost every industry to simplify the interaction between people and computers. They can be integrated into websites, messaging platforms, and devices. Chatbots are on the rise, and companies are choosing to delegate routine tasks to chatbots rather than humans, thus providing huge labor cost savings. Unlike humans, chatbots are capable of processing multiple user requests at a time and are always available. However, many companies don't know where to start when developing a bot to meet their business needs.

Dialogue systems have recently become a standard in human-machine interaction, with chatbots appearing in almost every industry to simplify the interaction between people and computers. They can be integrated into websites, messaging platforms, and devices. Chatbots are on the rise, and companies are choosing to delegate routine tasks to chatbots rather than humans, thus providing huge labor cost savings. Unlike humans, chatbots are capable of processing multiple user requests at a time and are always available. However, many companies don't know where to start when developing a bot to meet their business needs.

Artificial intelligence is being used to spot the difference between human users and fake accounts on Twitter. Emilio Ferrara at the University of Southern California in the US, and his colleagues have trained an AI to detect bots on Twitter based on differences in patterns of activity between real and fake accounts. The team analysed two separate datasets of Twitter users, which had been classified either manually or by a pre-existing algorithm as either bot or human. The manually verified dataset consisted of 8.4 million tweets from 3500 human accounts, and 3.4 million tweets from 5000 bots. The researchers found that human users replied four to five times more often to other tweets than bots did.

It could be argued that scientists create superpowers in their labs. If Aram Galstyan, director of the Artificial Intelligence Division at the USC Viterbi Information Sciences Institute (ISI) had to pick just one superpower, it would be the ability to predict the future. What will be the daily closing price of Japan's Nikkei 225 index at the end of next week? How many 6.0 or stronger earthquakes will occur worldwide next month? Galstyan and a team of researchers at USC ISI are building a system to answer such questions.

I know thou wilt say "ay," And I will take thy word. Yet if thou swear'st Thou mayst prove false. At lovers' perjuries, They say, Jove laughs.