MIT recently trained a machine learning model to accurately predict the spread of COVID-19. According to the AI, we should be seeing a plateau where the amount of new cases begins to level off in the US and Italy in the next week. This good news, however, comes with a dire warning: relaxing quarantine measures too soon will be catastrophic. The engineers behind the AI explain the results as being very similar to the situation that happened in Singapore where quarantine and social distancing efforts managed to almost completely flatten the curve before an ill-advised return to business as usual caused a massive resurgence in COVID-19 cases. The MIT team trained the AI to extrapolate publicly-available data for insights into the disease's spread, taking into account how different governments handled social distancing and quarantine orders as well as other standard epidemiology parameters.

Companies using artificial intelligence (AI) across their business units should consider creating a C-suite position to oversee how AI is used and guard against the risk of making bad decisions based on biased algorithms, experts say. Only a few companies, like Levi Strauss & Co, have established a chief artificial intelligence officer (CAIO) position, and fewer have created a C-level position dedicated solely to AI ethics. Brian Kropp, chief of research in the HR practice at Gartner, said chief technology officers and chief information officers will struggle with handling AI-related decisions and ethical dilemmas. "CTOs and CIOs are going to be thinking about the role through the lens of how they can make the technology work," Kropp said. However, "artificial intelligence is not a question of how you get the technology to work; it's a question of how do you think through the implications of the technology?"

Innovations such as AI and automation have been tipped to kickstart the Fourth Revolution. While the technology is being widely adopted, it is constantly evolving. Therefore, there is uncertainty surrounding its overall impact, particularly on professional roles within the supply chain. Some fear that the technology will replace its human counterparts, while other experts suggest it will work in unison with humans, supporting them to focus on higher value opportunities. Amidst all of this uncertainty one thing is for certain: AI and automation will change how we operate.

Can human ingenuity assisted by new and emerging technologies overpower Covid-19? Will faster processing of more--and more relevant--data, analyzed with the right models, yield better insights into mitigating the spread of future pandemics, designing effective treatments, and developing successful vaccines? A number of promising initiatives were announced in recent weeks aiming to enlist data, AI algorithms, supercomputers, and human expertise in the fight with our global predicament. Supercomputers and quantum computers crunching lots of data are at the core of recent initiatives to ... [ ] fight the Coronavirus The Digital Transformation Institute, a new research consortium established by C3.ai, Microsoft, a number of leading universities, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), announced its first call for proposals for "AI techniques to mitigate pandemics." In addition to a total of $5.8 million in cash awards, recipients will be provided by Microsoft and C3.ai with significant cloud computing, supercomputing, data access, and AI software resources and technical support.

Velodyne Lidar, Inc. today announced a multi-year sales agreement with NAVYA, a leading company in autonomous driving systems. Since 2015, NAVYA has been using Velodyne lidar sensors in production for its autonomous shuttle fleet that provides mobility services to cities and private sites. This press release features multimedia. Since 2015, NAVYA has been using Velodyne lidar sensors in production for its autonomous shuttle fleet that provides mobility services to cities and private sites. NAVYA plans to pursue the worldwide expansion of its shuttle with Velodyne's state-of-the-art sensors for precise real-time localization and object detection.

How AI and data science are helping to understand and tackle the COVID-19 crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our daily lives in ways we could not have imagined just over a month ago. For many of us, our lives now happen within four walls. Around the world, restaurants, shops and theatres have been closed. Millions of people are in an increasingly precarious financial situation.

A novice painter might set brush to canvas aiming to create a stunning sunset landscape -- craggy, snow-covered peaks reflected in a glassy lake -- only to end up with something that looks more like a multi-colored inkblot. But a deep learning model developed by NVIDIA Research can do just the opposite: it turns rough doodles into photorealistic masterpieces with breathtaking ease. The tool leverages generative adversarial networks, or GANs, to convert segmentation maps into lifelike images. The interactive app using the model, in a lighthearted nod to the post-Impressionist painter, has been christened GauGAN. GauGAN could offer a powerful tool for creating virtual worlds to everyone from architects and urban planners to landscape designers and game developers.

Researchers demonstrated the mathematical impossibility of representing social networks and other complex networks using popular methods of'low-dimensional embeddings.' Models and algorithms for analyzing complex networks are widely used in research and affect society at large through their applications in online social networks, search engines, and recommender systems. According to a new study, however, one widely used algorithmic approach for modeling these networks is fundamentally flawed, failing to capture important properties of real-world complex networks. "It's not that these techniques are giving you absolute garbage. They probably have some information in them, but not as much information as many people believe," said C. "Sesh" Seshadhri, associate professor of computer science and engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. Seshadhri is first author of a paper on the new findings published on March 2, 2020, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For this week's ML practitioner's series, Analytics India Magazine got in touch with Arthur Llau. Arthur is a Kaggle master, who is currently ranked in the top 100 on the global leaderboard that hosts more than 1,30,000 participants. He is a mathematician from heart, who happened to run into machine learning. We bring to our readers Arthur Llau's fascinating journey into the world of data science. A lifelong Parisian, Arthur Llau has a dual masters degree in Theoretical Mathematics (Probability) and in Statistics & Machine Learning from Sorbonne University campus of Université Pierre & Marie Curie.

Sales and business development are suffering and AI-powered sales performance solutions can help. So-called propensity models can identify which customers are most likely to buy a product or service from a company, says Dr Tom Davenport, president's distinguished professor of information technology and management at Babson College, Massachusetts. These models can help those working in sales improve their productivity and effectiveness, by showing them which customers to prioritise. "For brands, having insight into what their customers think and want has always been a key priority, but the COVID-19 pandemic has made this understanding even more critical," says Chris Colley, principal of customer experience at Medallia. But he notes, at the same time, collecting data on what customers think has become more challenging.