Jaimi has worked with Brendan's team enough to know how much talent acquisition professionals are craving to hire candidates quickly, fairly, and efficiently. At the same time, there has been explosive growth in the number of software tools that have been brought to market to help recruiters do just that. "On LinkedIn, you'll see a bunch of ads," Jaimi says, "for a bunch of different vendors that say, 'Hey, we can use machine learning to help you find the right candidate.'" She notes that often these companies also tout that their products eliminate human bias. "It sounds great," Jaimi tells Brendan, "and it's not to say that it couldn't be great, but there can be really serious unintended consequences that can cause a legal liability."

Luko, a France-based insurance tech startup that's using sensors, data, and machine learning to circumvent the need to make a claim in the first place, has raised €20 million ($22 million) in a series A round of funding led by Silicon Valley VC heavyweight Accel, with participation from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Europe's Speedinvest. Founded out of Paris in 2016, Luko offers a similar proposition to other modern, mobile-focused insurance companies such as New York-based Lemonade, insofar it promises to provide quick coverage with minimal friction. The company said that it takes just two minutes to secure coverage, two hours to receive payment for a claim, and two days for any damage to be repaired. But the company is going further than that, by trying to detect issues before they escalate -- Luko is pitching its product as a means to move away from a "reactive" claims-based model to one of prevention. "This is the first step to our true endgame -- avoiding home accidents altogether," Luko cofounder and CEO Raphael Vullierme said.

It can be a bit difficult to wrap your brain around what exactly neural interface startup Ctrl-labs is doing with technology. That's ironic, given that Ctrl-labs wants to let your brain directly use technology by translating mental intent into action. We caught up with Ctrl-labs CEO Thomas Reardon at Web Summit 2019 earlier this month to understand exactly how the brain-machine interface works. Founded in 2015, Ctrl-labs is a New York-based startup developing a wristband that translates musculoneural signals into machine-interpretable commands. But not for long -- Facebook acquired Ctrl-labs in September 2019. The acquisition hasn't closed yet, so Reardon has not spoken to anyone at the social media giant since signing the agreement. He was, however, eager to tell us more about the neural interface technology so we could glean why Facebook (and the tech industry at large) is interested. In short, Ctrl-labs wants us to interact with technology not via a mouse, a keyboard, a touchscreen, our voice, or any other input we've adopted. Reardon and his team expect that in a few years we will be able to use individual neurons -- not thoughts -- to directly control technology. Reardon has said many times that his company is tackling the "mother of all machine learning problems."

Five years from now, the U.S.' already overburdened mental health system may be short as many as 15,600 psychiatrists as the growth in demand for their services outpaces supply, according to a 2017 report from the National Council for Behavioral Health. But some proponents say that, by then, an unlikely tool--artificial intelligence--may be ready to help mental health practitioners mitigate the impact of the deficit. Medicine is already a fruitful area for artificial intelligence; it has shown promise in diagnosing disease, interpreting images and zeroing in on treatment plans. Though psychiatry is in many ways a uniquely human field, requiring emotional intelligence and perception that computers can't simulate, even here, experts say, AI could have an impact. The field, they argue, could benefit from artificial intelligence's ability to analyze data and pick up on patterns and warning signs so subtle humans might never notice them.

IBM power systems and Yamagata University collaborated to develop an AI-enabled cloud platform and geoscope that uncovered mysterious and ancient geoglyphs. Could robots become archaeological assistants, shuffling or trudging across sandy terrain like R2D2 and C3P0 in 1977's original " Star Wars?" Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine-learning algorithms, along with geospatial data, are being used to uncover mysterious and ancient geoglyphs, courtesy of a collaboration between IBM power systems and Yamagata University. And, using the new AI, scientists discovered a new formation of very large geoglyphs in the soil on the Nazca Lines in southern Peru-- the first to be found using AI. While straight lines dominate the Nazca desert landscape, figurative designs of animals and plants have evolved.

MUMBAI: Federal Bank is transforming its traditional HR practices by shifting almost the entire hiring process to a tool driven on artificial intelligence-arguably a first in the domestic banking space. FedRecruit, the new HR tool of the Kochi-based private sector lender, employs technology to drive the HR function to the fullest, under which the only human intervention of its multistage hiring process is the final round where top HR executives meet up with the new recruits. Federal Bank is arguably the first in the domestic banking space to almost fully switch to technology for hiring as its large peers like HDFC Bank, which uses a lot of tech for banking, employs AI only at the primary screening level. FedRecruit relies on a series of connected events or data points and goes beyond the conventional one-sided resume to construct a 360-degree narrative of the candidate. These data points are gathered through multiple stages--robotic interviews, psychometric and game-based assessments processes etc., Federal Bank HR chief Ajith Kumar KK told PTI.

Chatbots are one of the key opportunities to balance the budget-cuts, handle pressure to deliver services and manage the staff shortages. According to a survey by the Local Government Information Unit (LGiU), 64% of councillors in England believe that digital transformation will have a positive impact on the wellbeing of people in their areas over the next ten years. It strongly supports the increasing influence of artificial intelligence in public sector to streamline service delivery. By 2021, over 50% of enterprises will invest more on bots and Chatbot than traditional mobile app development, suggests Gartner. There are various applications to harness the Chatbot utility.

Microsoft intends to significantly simplify how people find organizational information through internal knowledge networks. It's via new technology set to appear next year, revealed as Project Cortex. If Project Cortex works as Microsoft envisions, it will streamline, or in many cases eliminate, the need for individuals to interrupt their work to search for internal information. Project Cortex, introduced at this month's Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, was a stealth effort in the works for more than two years. Project Cortex also promises to give Microsoft's vast partner ecosystem much to digest going into 2020, particularly as customers look to utilize it to enhance their collaboration and employee productivity efforts and Microsoft begins offering training and enablement for partners.

TOKYO: Cooking robots and tastier recipes: Japanese electronics giant Sony on Nov 20 launched a new artificial intelligence unit they hope will change the way we cook and eat. The new research arm, Sony AI, will operate in Japan, Europe and the United States and also focus on the traditional areas of gaming, imaging and sensor equipment, as well as "gastronomy". The firm that produced the PlayStation franchise and the Spider-man movie series is the latest multinational tech company wanting a piece of the pie in the food business, where data are increasingly driving new dishes to pique the palate. "AI and robotics will not replace chefs. We are aiming to offer new tools to expand their creativity with AI and robotics," Sony spokesman Shinichi Tobe told AFP. "The field of food requires a study of molecular structures. By using AI and its analytical capacity, we can create new things," Tobe said.

AI is transforming the world as we know it. Contextual awareness paired with AI is opening the door to many positive solutions for healthcare, environmental protection, conservation, smart cities and public safety. Enterprise AI applications also proliferate in marketing and sales, HR and recruiting, security, autonomous operations and financial services. On the other hand, the rapid advancement of AI also raises questions and concerns around data ethics, which are only beginning to be addressed. As a case in point, the New York Police Department (NYPD) has been challenged by AI bias concerns for its new crime analysis AI tool.