Olis Robotics, a leader in next-generation AI-driven software for remote robotics in dynamic environments in subsea, terrestrial, and space applications, today announced that it has been selected by Maxar Technologies to provide robotic operator planning software for Maxar's Sample Acquisition, Morphology Filtering, and Probing of Lunar Regolith (SAMPLR) robotic arm. The arm will be mounted to a yet-to-be-named lander as one of 12 payloads that NASA selected as part of its Artemis program to send the first woman and the next man to the Moon by 2024 in preparation for a human mission to Mars. Olis Robotics' operator planning software will solve for the extreme latency experienced while operating robotics on the lunar surface by enabling operators to simulate and plan movements from the ground. Olis' software will provide a 3D visualization of the lunar environment and intuitive controls for operators on Earth, providing enhanced control during exploration missions. "The moon provides an excellent proving ground for our robotic operator planning software, allowing operators on Earth to successfully complete more complex missions faster and safer than ever before," explained Olis Robotics CEO Don Pickering.

Human resources are key to the running of any business, and the HR department is increasingly looking to technology to make recruitment a fair non-biased procedure, while using bots to help onboard new recruits and to automate many of the simple processes that all workers go through. Using bots and new technology allows HR to focus on driving the business forward through progressive strategies and finding the best people to help. Making the news recently, a Swedish recruitment firm has started using a robot to conduct job interviews, highlighting the rise of AI in recruitment. The technology packed head sits on an office desk and conducts the interviews on behalf of the recruitment agency. This comes as a stark counterpoint to the growing tales of bias, sexism, old-boys networks and other twists that can skew the outcome of a hiring process, leaving the best people for the role far behind.

Machine Intelligence For You (MIFY) is a Benin company which is specialized in Artificial Intelligence, Internet-of-things, Embedded Systems, and their applications. It is the organizer of MIFY Artificial Intelligence Contest (MAIC). MAIC is a yearly international artificial intelligence competition in which the participants find the best algorithm to play a turn-taking strategy game with a time limit for each decision. This game is a society game from Africa and through the world. By this way, MIFY aims to promote artificial intelligence and these games. MAIC is organized in 3 main phases: Group phase, Semi-final, and Final.

Raytheon has delivered an experimental new anti-drone weapon to the Air Force. The High Energy Laser Weapon Systems (HELWS) prototypes will be put through a year of testing and training by Air Force personnel overseas before finally being ready for live use on the battlefield. The HELWS can be powered by either a standard 220-volt outlet or a generator. Operators that aren't great shots can take comfort in the fact that the energy efficient device can fire'a nearly infinite number of shots.' The laser also comes with a sophisticated targeting system, with an infrared sensor to track and identify enemy drones, according to a report from Gizmodo.

Tinder's interactive choose-your-own-adventure series will expand to users globally after a successful roll out. According to a report from CNN, the dating service's first-ever foray into pre-recorded content, called'Swipe Night', translated to a 26 percent increase in matches over a typical Sunday night with a 12 percent increase in messages. The company reportedly plans to expand outside of the US to all of its users across the globe starting February 2020. The series, which'aired' on the app this month, allows users to match with other dating hopefuls by clicking their way through an interactive narrative. It's designed to match users based on the choices they make during a short'first-person apocalyptic adventure.'

BERT is now the go-to model framework for NLP tasks in industry, in about a year after it was published by Google AI. When released, it achieved state-of-the-art results on a variety of NLP benchmarks. It's referred to as a framework because BERT is not a model per se, but in the words of the authors themselves, it is a "method of pre-training language representations, meaning that we train a general-purpose "language understanding" model on a large text corpus (like Wikipedia), and then use that model for downstream NLP tasks that we care about (like question answering)." For the purpose of this blogpost, when we refer to a BERT model, we mean a model based on the BERT architecture and fine tuned for a particular task using pre-trained weights. Several papers have attempted to explain it, and created a field that the people at HuggingFace call Bertology .

This ebook, based on the latest ZDNet / TechRepublic special feature, looks at the outlook for business leaders in 2020 and where they are spending their tech dollars. Gartner's outlook for the next five years revolves around the idea that artificial intelligence will augment human decisions, emotions and relationships. The big question is whether Gartner's prognostications will play out in the next five years. At the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo, analyst Daryl Plummer outlined the trends to expect in the years ahead. By 2025, half of the people with a smartphone without a bank account will use a cryptocurrency account.

From my first homemade computer to pushing the boundaries of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the world's most popular real-time 3D simulation engine, I have been fortunate to always have had the opportunity to work at the very forefront of computing infrastructure and its application. Not only does it reach 1.5 Billion people using Apps based on the Unity engine, but through massive cloud-based simulations we are able to train AI on scenarios that easily exceeds humanity's collective experience in specific areas. Tracing the technologies I have worked on seems to depict a forward looking trajectory that carries a lot of promise in creating a better world for all, but it also raises some responsibilities that we as engineers need to take seriously. I see computer infrastructure rapidly spreading its tentacles deeper into the physical world while concurrently expanding into the virtual as well. The integration of large-scale computational and physical components enables new revolutionary scenarios ranging from self-driving cars over automated farming and healthcare to even scientific work itself.

Abstract: Marginalized People are "Expert" (not "Other") in Design The technologies we build often have unanticipated consequences. These can be particularly deleterious for people from marginalized populations––people considered non-normative "others." A conspicuous wearable device that helps navigate a person who is blind may make them a target for street robbery or harassment. In this talk, I draw from my research with the blind and transgender communities to argue that members of marginalized populations are experts. For example, a blind person is an expert in voice interaction; imagine what their expertise might lend the design of voice interfaces like Amazon Echo.

It's no secret that an unequal number of women in leadership roles remains a huge topic of discussion – and it should. I've been reflecting on the PR industry paradox: despite the fact that women make up between 60 to 80 percent of the PR workforce, only 20 percent of the senior leadership positions at PR agencies are held by women. March serves the tech industry specifically because of our fascination with and belief in the power of technology to shape lives; but tech can only serve a population as diverse as its designers. Last week, March supported our client Affectiva at their third Emotion AI summit, which explored a human-centric approach to AI with leaders from across the industry, 43 percent of which were women. Diversity in AI teams was an overarching theme throughout the day, and Rudina Seseri, Founder and Managing Partner of Glasswing Ventures, poignantly highlighted the need to mind gender disparity in technology.