NHS Digital wanted to make it easier for users to research and access published NHS health data. To achieve that, the agency partnered with IPsoft to provide users with their own data concierge whom they call ViDA (or Virtual Digital Assistant). ViDA is an always-on conversational agent based on our industry-leading digital colleague, Amelia. Users simply tell ViDA what information they are attempting to locate using everyday language, and ViDA can take it from there. You can read more about the project in detail here from our Cognitive Project Lead for UK Healthcare, David King.

Investors and wealth managers are always looking to capitalize on their investments--and the latest innovations are arming them with more efficient tools to get there. Fintech solutions are increasingly being adopted among the digitally active population, as 64% of surveyed wealth managers consider digitization essential in 2019. Today's graphic from Raconteur highlights the benefits of investment technology, and touches on shifting sentiments in human vs. digital interactions. Where do investors and wealth managers see the next epoch of investment fintech heading? According to a TD Ameritrade survey of 1,000 investors, a whopping 90% consider getting tailored investing advice to be the most important feature of any tech tool.

Domino's Pizza stores in Australia and New Zealand have finally begun using an elaborate new employee monitoring tool to track employee performance. First announced in 2017, the DOM Pizza Checker was finally implemented at a number of Domino's stores in Oceania beginning this August, according to an investor presentation. The device is a high-powered overhead camera connected to machine-learning software that monitors employee performance as they make a pizza. The DOM Pizza Checker (pictured above) is a high powered camera and computer system that observes and evaluates employees as they make pizza. The camera matches a live image of the pizza being made to an image of the pizza that's been ordered.

We are co-organising the 2nd annual Deep Learning Indaba which will be held at Stellenbosch University from 9-14 September 2018. The Deep Learning Indaba exists to celebrate and strengthen machine learning in Africa through state-of-the-art teaching, networking, policy debate, and through our support programmes, such as the IndabaX and the Kambule and Maathai awards. The Indaba works towards the vision of Africans becoming critical contributors, owners, and shapers of the coming advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The report on the outcomes of the first Indaba 2017 can be read here.

In our oceans the scale of disasters is measured in millions, billions, and trillions, while solutions amount to single digits: individuals or institutions working to impact a chosen issue with approaches often both brilliant and quixotic. Putting such individuals in close contact with both whales and billionaires is the strange alchemy being attempted by the Sustainable Ocean Alliance's Accelerator at Sea. I and a few other reporters were invited to observe said program, a five-day excursion in Alaska that put recent college graduates, aspiring entrepreneurs, legends of the sea, and soft-spoken financial titans on the same footing: spotting whales from Zodiacs in the morning, learning from one another in the afternoon, and drinking whiskey good and bad under the Northern lights in the pre-dawn dark. In that time I got to know the dozen or so companies in the accelerator, the second batch from the SOA but the first to experience this oddly effective enterprise. And I also gathered from conversations among the group the many challenges facing conservation-focused startups. The picture painted by just about everyone was one of impending doom from a multiplicity of interlinked trends, and as many different approaches to averting or mitigating that doom as people discussing it.

Among other things, O'Reilly suggests raising the minimum wage and taxing robots, carbon emissions, and financial transactions. Rather than pursuing IPOs and playing Wall Street's game, he believes, technology entrepreneurs should spread wealth with other models, like member cooperatives and investment structures that reward long-term thinking. As for a universal basic income, an old idea coming around again because of the fear that computers will render human labor all but worthless, O'Reilly seems open to the possibility that it will be necessary someday. Indeed, it seems like a failure of imagination to assume that the next step from where we are now is just to give up on the prospect of most people having jobs.

"For most real problems, there aren't perfect answers," writes Thomas W. Malone. "But when they are connected in the right ways, groups of people and computers together can often get closer to perfect intelligence than either could alone." Malone, who is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, explores the potential of such connections in his new book, Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together, from which this excerpt is taken. Will general AI be a form of collective intelligence? We know that the human brain is itself a form of collective intelligence.

LAS VEGAS, NV / ACCESSWIRE / October 16, 2019 / ASA Staffing World 2019 (Booth 253) - October 16, 2019 - CEIPAL, a SaaS platform for the front- and back-office business operations of staffing companies, today announced ground-breaking new capabilities to simplify, automate and enhance workflows for recruiting professionals. CEIPAL's integrated applicant tracking system (ATS) is the first-of-its-kind to harness artificial intelligence (AI) and deliver a powerful engine that offers searching, ranking, harvesting and chatbot capabilities to turn any recruiter into a high performer. "CEIPAL's AI functionality has transformed the way we recruit by drastically reducing search time, while greatly improving the quality of our shortlisted candidates," said Mani Kandan, Development and Technology Implementation Head of KRG Systems. "This has greatly improved the consistency of searches, and supercharged our recruiters, while saving our company up to 50 percent of what we would spend on any other ATS. In addition to substantial cost savings, CEIPAL's new AI engine empowers recruiters by speeding searches and improving quality with the following features: "CEIPAL is showing the recruitment world what artificial intelligence actually looks like in practice and our recruiters couldn't be more excited," said Derrick Alex, Head - Delivery Excellence of VDart, Inc. "We've worked with some of CEIPAL's leading competitors before and heard plenty of talk about AI, but never got to see it successfully deployed until we made the switch."

Artificial Intelligence was once the stuff of science fiction. Now it's here, and every publication from the Washington Post to Wired to the Wall Street Journal is full of articles and videos exploring it. Depending on whom you listen to, AI will be a job killer or a job creator; a tool to boost productivity or Skynet from the Terminator movies; a technology that will dramatically transform society or an overhyped nothingburger. To help prepare for this uncertain and potentially disturbing future, Gov. Phil Scott impaneled an Artificial Intelligence Task Force in 2018. Its mandate: to "investigate the field of artificial intelligence" in the state and make recommendations for how the technology can be responsibly applied in Vermont's economy and government.

Invisibility cloak technology has been developed that bends light in order to make objects disappear. The material, which was created by Canada-based camouflage company Hyperstealth, could be used to hide large items such as army tanks or even to shield troops on the ground from enemies. Amazing video footage shows the screen in all its glory – in one clip a white sheet on the screen is visible, before a small miniature tank is revealed behind the screen. This is while another clip shows the screen in front of what looks like a tree, but it comes down, revealing a large housing complex. The company has been developing the technology for a number of years but has now applied for patents to begin the process of manufacturing it.