I've been asked many times recently to comment on how the rise of AI will impact jobs and the economy, particularly in customer service and contact centers. I've seen wildly differing forecasts, from the dire predictions of Elon Musk to the optimistic predictions of Accenture. According to Forrester's'The Future of Jobs' report, robots will take 24.7 million jobs by 2027, but create 14.9 million new jobs in the same period. There is no doubt that AI will impact jobs globally more than any other technology in our lifetime. The key question is - what should we do about it?

Q: For those who haven't heard of it, what is the best way to describe Parascript? A: We are basically an AI company that focuses various machine learning techniques on document-based information (whether the documents are scanned images or born-digital) in order to automate as many manual document processing tasks as possible from document sortation to data entry. Q: How important is document automation for digital transformation? A: A digitally transformed organization is typically an organization that is efficient, adaptive and automated. The importance depends entirely on whether your business processes involve document-based information.

Tech Intelligence Bulletin (HG Insights) – Brown University is exploring concepts with Intel technology for an Intelligent Spine Interface project that aims to use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to restore movement and bladder control for patients paralyzed by severe spinal cord injuries. During the two-year program, researchers will record motor and sensory signals from the spinal cord and use artificial neural networks to learn how to stimulate the post-injury site to communicate motor commands. Surgeons at Rhode Island Hospital near Brown University will implant electrode arrays on both ends of a patient's injury site, creating an intelligent bypass to eventually allow the severed nerves to communicate in real time. Researchers are considering Intel AI open source software such as nGraph and Intel AI accelerator hardware to meet the real-time requirements of this application. "As a Ph.D. student at Brown, I investigated how to interface the brain with machines as an application. Now at Intel, we're combining our AI expertise with Brown University's cutting-edge medical research to help solve a critical medical problem: how to reconnect the brain and spine after a major spinal injury," said Naveen Rao, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of the AI Products Group.

In March, Yoshua Bengio received a share of the Turing Award, the highest accolade in computer science, for contributions to the development of deep learning--the technique that triggered a renaissance in artificial intelligence, leading to advances in self-driving cars, real-time speech translation, and facial recognition. Now, Bengio says deep learning needs to be fixed. He believes it won't realize its full potential, and won't deliver a true AI revolution, until it can go beyond pattern recognition and learn more about cause and effect. In other words, he says, deep learning needs to start asking why things happen. The 55-year-old professor at the University of Montreal, who sports bushy gray hair and eyebrows, says deep learning works well in idealized situations but won't come close to replicating human intelligence without being able to reason about causal relationships.

The United States is blacklisting a group of Chinese tech companies that develop facial recognition and other artificial intelligence technology that the U.S. says is being used to repress China's Muslim minority groups. A move Monday by the U.S. Commerce Department puts the companies on a so-called Entity List for acting contrary to American foreign policy interests. The blacklist effectively bars U.S. firms from selling technology to the Chinese companies without government approval. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a written statement Monday that the U.S. government "will not tolerate the brutal suppression of ethnic minorities within China." The blacklisted companies include Hikvision and Dahua, both of which are global providers of video surveillance technology.

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The amount of data available to organizations every day continues to proliferate at a staggering volume. But technologies such as analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to help businesses make better use of these massive volumes of data. In an age of collaboration between humans and machines--what we call the "Age of With"1--organizations can gain advantage by designing systems in which humans and machines work together to improve the speed and quality of decision-making. But not every organization is optimizing the opportunities available in the Age of With. Some do little or nothing with data to aid their decision-making. Others carry out analytics projects in pockets of the business.

Scott Sanchez used to have a hard time deciding what to eat, especially when he was traveling. The 42-year-old wanted to lose weight and found he needed to dissect a menu with the waiter before he could order. It was a challenge, he says, but one that gave birth to The Fit, a menu personalization platform that uses artificial intelligence to give restaurant brands and their customers the option to customize their menu and food choices. At least 32 million Americans -- including 5 million children -- have food allergies, according to nonprofit Food Allergy Research & Education. Whenever they eat out, they need to make sure there are no ingredients in the food that could trigger an allergic reaction. Those with dietary preferences, from vegans to people wanting to lose weight -- there are 93 million obese people in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- also need to carefully examine menus.

A NASA Frontier Development Lab (FDL) team has shown that by using deep learning, it is possible to virtually monitor the Sun's extreme ultraviolet (EUV) irradiance, which is a key driver of space weather. The Sun is vital for survival, but solar flares, which typically occur a few times a year, have the potential to cause severe disruptions in space and on Earth. These disruptions can impact spacecraft, satellites and even systems here on Earth, including GPS navigation, radio communications and the power grid. Deep learning can help get more value out of our current ability to monitor the Sun by providing virtual instruments to supplement physical devices. This research will be published in Science Advances on October 2, 2019 ("A deep learning virtual instrument for monitoring solar extreme ultraviolet spectral irradiance").

Farmers around the world are facing the urgent question of how to sustainably feed a global population expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 -- and the answer, in part, might be found nestled among the cornstalks and soybeans on a farm a short distance from Washington, D.C. The fields are outfitted with a network of high-tech sensors that could revolutionize how food is grown across the globe by putting data in the hands of farmers and scientists in ways unimaginable a few years ago. The sensors are part of a groundbreaking new partnership between Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The 7,000-acre farm at the USDA's Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland is using FarmBeats, a project that aims to harness data and artificial intelligence to help farmers cut costs, increase yields and sustainably grow crops that are more resilient to climate change. "We can't simply double our acreage to produce this food," says Dan Roberts, research leader at the Sustainable Agricultural Systems Research Laboratory, located at the Beltsville center.