Mercer Bell is a customer experience agency. Technically, we were the first in this market as far as being a trademark CX agency. What does that mean nowadays? Nowadays it's a really big complicated broad church of things we do for our clients, including working with aspects of AI. That is everything from deploying it for our clients on an ongoing basis, helping clients message features of artificial intelligence to their clients, and then actually building bespoke things, particularly in the machine learning space for our clients on an ongoing basis.

BARCELONA, SPAIN – A growing push to put cities on a digital path to a greener future risks excluding groups like the poorest, disabled and elderly, and will fail to benefit those people unless technology is used to help meet their needs, rights advocates have warned. They also called for women to be given a bigger say in urban planning that is based on high-tech tools such as big data and artificial intelligence, while speaking at an international conference on "smart cities" in Barcelona this week. "My fear is that smart cities end up benefiting the elite white men," said Catherine D'Ignazio, an assistant professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the United States, she said, national politics and other social spheres are shaped by "the privilege hazard," in which a small, dominant group -- often of rich, older men -- make decisions for others whose lives and experiences they know little about. One way to counteract that is to produce and use data that dive into key areas of discrimination, such as gender and race, she added. Berkeley-based consultancy World Enabled, which works for the inclusion of people with disabilities, collaborated with the University of California to analyze nearly 1,200 projects with digital elements run by six international development agencies.

Arguably the most memorable scene in "The Devil Wears Prada" was Meryl Streep's searing monologue reprimanding the doe-eyed Anne Hathaway for having undermined fashion's profound influence on mass culture. In the movie, she's able to draw from her prolific knowledge of the industry to trace the origins of a certain cerulean blue hue, from the runways of Oscar de la Renta and St Laurent to the racks of department stores. Today, however, no one needs an impeccable memory to understand the life cycle of a colour du jour. In partnership with BoF, Google unveiled Thursday at the VOICES Conference an interactive online tool, free to use, to take a colour palette and pinpoint runway looks with the same colour schemes, drawn from nearly 4,000 fashion shows. Spearheaded by Google's artist-in-residence Cyril Diagne and announced in VOICES 2017, the project uses machine learning to map out these fashion palettes, and allows users to upload their own photos.

There's huge potential in autonomous driving -- even if it's not likely to become a widespread reality for years to come, according to an executive of Chinese venture capital fund Fosun RZ Capital. Driverless cars could have a big impact on the way people live and get around when they finally take off, Grace Liu, the co-chief of Fosun RZ Capital told CNBC's East Tech West conference in the Nansha district of Guangzhou, China on Wednesday. "For autonomous driving to come true for all scenarios, all conditions, it will be difficult -- maybe 5 to 10 years," Liu told CNBC's Deirdre Bosa. But she said the industry had "big potential," with companies like Alphabet's self-driving car company Waymo already able to provide such services from point to point. "Autonomous driving is a big market. Once it comes true, it will affect many people's lives. It will affect our way of transportation. So I think it's still great potential," Liu said.

LIKU baby humanoid robots are demonstrated on the Torooc Inc. stand on the opening day of the MWC... [ ] Barcelona in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday, Feb. 25, 2019. At the wireless industry's biggest conference, over 100,000 people are set to see the latest innovations in smartphones, artificial intelligence devices and autonomous drones exhibited by more than 2,400 companies. On February 11, 2019, President Trump signed an executive order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence and in February 2019, a survey by Protiviti called Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning indicated that only 16% of business leaders surveyed are getting significant value from advanced artificial intelligence (AI) in their companies. The report also found that companies of all sizes and across industries are investing heavily in advanced AI with an average of $36M spent in the fiscal year 2018. Of those same companies surveyed, 10% plan to increase their budgets over the next two years.

In a study, researchers designed an algorithm that analyzes data on drug-drug interactions listed in reports - compiled by the Food and Drug Administration and other organizations - for use in a possible alert system that would let patients know when a drug combination could prompt dangerous side effects. "Let's say I'm taking a popular over-the-counter pain reliever and then I'm put on blood pressure medicine, and these medications have an interaction with each other that, in turn, affects my liver," said Soundar Kumara, the Allen E. Pearce and Allen M. Pearce Professor of Industrial Engineering, Penn State. "Essentially, what we have done, in this study, is to collect all of the data on all the diseases related to the liver and see what drugs interact with each other to affect the liver." Drug-drug interaction problems are significant because patients are frequently prescribed multiple drugs and they take over-the-counter medicine on their own, added Kumara, who also is an affiliate of the Institute for CyberScience, which provides supercomputing resources for Penn State researchers. "This study is of very high importance," said Kumara.

Xero has created a short-term 30-day cash flow forecasting tool to give small business owners and their accountants a better view on their financial health to help them make informed business decisions. Following Xero's acquisition of Hubdoc, it has further accelerated its machine learning capabilities. Today, Hubdoc is able to extract 70 percent of all financial documents such as receipts, invoices and bills using machine learning. It is also processing double the documents a day than this time last year. This significantly reduces the data capture time for customers, with documents being processed quicker. In Singapore, Xero has partnered OCBC to roll out bank feeds for their joint customers.

New York (CNN Business)A secretive startup backed by Bill Gates has achieved a solar breakthrough aimed at saving the planet. Heliogen, a clean energy company that emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday, said it has discovered a way to use artificial intelligence and a field of mirrors to reflect so much sunlight that it generates extreme heat above 1,000 degrees Celsius. This is an existential issue for your children, for my children and our grandchildren." Essentially, Heliogen created a solar oven -- one capable of reaching temperatures that are roughly a quarter of what you'd find on the surface of the sun. The breakthrough means that, for the first time, concentrated solar energy can be used to create the extreme heat required to make cement, steel, glass and other industrial processes. In other words, carbon-free sunlight can replace fossil fuels in a heavy carbon-emitting corner of the economy that has been untouched by the clean energy revolution. "We are rolling out technology that can beat the price of fossil fuels and also not make the CO2 emissions," Bill Gross, Heliogen's founder and CEO, told CNN Business. Heliogen, which is also backed by billionaire Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, believes the patented technology will be able to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from industry. "Bill and the team have truly now harnessed the sun," Soon-Shiong, who also sits on the Heliogen board, told CNN Business. "The potential to humankind is enormous.

Now that Sony has revealed the technical specifications of its forthcoming console, including its powerful AMD Ryzen processor, SSD storage system for fast loading, 3D sound and 8K support, what everyone wants to know is – what will we be playing on the machine when it launches next year? Here are the rumours and expectations, some more fanciful than others, but each one a distinct and enticing possibility. It's been almost three years since the acclaimed post-apocalyptic, open-world adventure arrived – and its accompanying DLC, The Frozen Wilds, showed there was plenty more to explore in this glorious, machine-filled dystopia. Developer Guerrilla Games has a history of supporting PlayStation launches (latterly with its Killzone titles), so a Horizon Zero Dawn follow-up seems extremely likely. Ever since Rocksteady wrapped up its Arkham franchise with Arkham Knight in 2015, there has been endless speculation over a new Batman title set in the Arkhamverse from WB Montréal, the studio behind the spin-off Arkham Origins.

TLDR "In an effort to benchmark deep learning on smartphones in the ...#Android ecosystem, researchers from the #ETHZurich (#Swiss Federal Institute of #Technology in #Zurich) #ComputerVision Lab last year developed an #AI #Benchmark application to measure the AI readiness of more than 200 Android devices and 100 mobile SoCs collected in the wild."