A Tokyo-based risk management firm is cautioning against a potential surge in coronavirus-related disinformation on April Fools' Day, alarmed by the recent spread of what it perceives to be baseless rumors on social media that the government is secretly preparing for the start of a Tokyo lockdown that day. Unsubstantiated rumors pertaining to COVID-19 have been swirling online for months, but gossip with a more urgent tone and more fear-mongering in nature has emerged in recent days, making digital literacy against false rumors more important than ever, according to Tokyo-based Spectee Inc. The firm says it uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to monitor, collect and analyze the deluge of online information. "Previously, the most common types of coronavirus-related misinformation and disinformation we would see were primarily medical and health-related, as in, 'granite has the power to kill the virus,' or'drinking lukewarm water is effective against the virus,'" said Kenjiro Murakami, head of Spectee. But as the number of COVID-19 cases has risen and the prospect of a citywide lockdown -- floated by Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike as a possibility -- loomed large over Japan last week, Murakami said the firm detected a rise in rumors over the weekend that go far beyond misguided health tips.

Autonomous technology continues to make an impact on the supply chain. The autonomous supply chain, as I am writing about it here, applies to moving goods without human intervention (to some degree at least). One of the more interesting examples I have seen is from the Belgian brewery De Halve Maan, which in an effort to reduce congestion on the city streets, built a beer pipeline under the streets. The pipeline is capable of carrying 1,500 gallons of beer an hour at 12 mph to a bottling facility two miles away. As we've written about here quite often, autonomous technology is mainly seen in warehouses, on highways, and in last mile deliveries.

The same survey reports that those that use these technologies are noticing improved customer experience performance and higher customer satisfaction. But what do these technologies look like in real life? And what retail innovations can we expect to see today as a result? We interviewed 5 retail innovation leaders at NRF 2020's Innovation Lab, and they showed us how they're using emerging tech to change customer experience in 2020 and beyond. The subject of inventory management may not evoke fun and excitement – at least not in the traditional sense.

Mr. Kant is a former firefighter, paramedic and emergency manager with a proven history of saving lives with innovation, applying operational expertise, and offering hands-on guidance at significant events and disasters worldwide. He serves as the disaster portal coordinator for the International Association of Emergency Mangers and works as an innovation entrepreneur. He has been recognized by the Department of Defense, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, NATO, DHS S&T and others for innovative thinking and applying expert analysis to complex cascading operational interdependencies. During his career, Mr. Kant has supported real-time command/control operations for multiple agencies around the world, including the Florida Night of Tornadoes, the World Trade Center Disaster, hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and many other significant events and disasters over the past two decades.

Alice decides to do some quick analysis on the trends using Kaggle Data Science survey to see what backgrounds do the current Data Science practitioners have. A majority of data scientists have college degrees, infact a majority of them have a Masters degree. So Alice would do well to go to college. But Alice is also curious of the importance of getting a degree if she wants her dream job in her dream country. Let's look at those patterns.

What seemed like science fiction a few short weeks ago is now very real. Movies such as Outbreak, Contagion and Virus are looking more like documentaries every day. As we battle COVID-19, a major issue that will only increase is disruption to supply chains. This disruption has been as devastating as it has been swift. There is unprecedented demand for some products (hand sanitiser has never been so popular), just as production of other products grinds to a halt due to lack of parts.

Databricks's A.I. tool lets businesses turn raw data into actionable insights, according to the company. Computer hardware company HP used the tool to analyze customer data from 20 million devices and improve customer service by anticipating their future needs. Founded in 2013, the San Francisco-based startup has raised $900 million in funding from venture capital firms including Andreessen Horowitz. Microsoft is also a backer, following a successful partnership in 2017 to create Azure Databricks, an analytics platform for Microsoft customers.

The explosion of breakthroughs, investments, and entrepreneurial activity around artificial intelligence over the last decade has been driven exclusively by deep learning, a sophisticated statistical analysis technique for finding hidden patterns in large quantities of data. A term coined in 1955--artificial intelligence--was applied (or mis-applied) to deep learning, a more advanced version of an approach to training computers to perform certain tasks--machine learning--a term coined in 1959. The recent success of deep learning is the result of the increased availability of lots of data (big data) and the advent of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), significantly increasing the breadth and depth of the data used for training computers and reducing the time required for training deep learning algorithms. The technology that animated movies like "Toy Story" and enabled a variety of special effects is the ... [ ] focus of this year's Turing Award, the technology industry's version of the Nobel Prize. The term "big data" first appeared in computer science literature in an October 1997 article by Michael Cox and David Ellsworth, "Application-controlled demand paging for out-of-core visualization," published in the Proceedings of the IEEE 8th conference on Visualization.

The 2010 decade sure had its challenges, but one positive change was the leap in technology capabilities. This holds true not only for consumers, but also for marketers. For example, the proliferation of smartphones with powerful cameras, loads of apps and high-bandwidth mobile networks has changed how we communicate and share ideas. Marketers can promote events on the go, livestream sessions, share pictures and essentially keep people informed -- globally and in real time. In short, we now have a multimedia studio in our hands.

Over recent weeks, the global business system has been heavily impacted by the outbreak of Covid-19, obliging companies to activate strategies in line with governments' directives. Decision makers have been tested by the increasing pressures stemming from the international arena, where uncertainties put them in a risky position along the supply chains, emphasizing that operating in such global environment certainly means getting access to a larger number of opportunities, as well as being victim of a domino effect in front of turbulent circumstances deployed far away. These changes could also lead to a rethink of some paradigms and dynamics that have typically characterized companies – even at the top level. In this framework, the technological trends that have transformed business realities over recent years could knock on the boardrooms' doors to strengthen their responsiveness and resilience before, during and after an emergency. Indeed, even if these bodies have been an under-researched "black box" for a long time, the moment to revitalize their role has come.