Artificial intelligence shouldn't be an afterthought for marketers, says new martech vendor Acoustic. Formerly known as IBM Watson Marketing, Acoustic was sold off by tech giants IBM earlier this year and rebranded with a sole focus on marketers. The independent marketing cloud company has since rebuilt a cloud that it says has a "modern architecture" and brings "humanity" to AI-powered marketing. Jay Henderson, senior vice president of product management at Acoustic, says at the moment a lot of the company's competitors aren't enabling marketers to use AI easily. "I think marketers, generally at the moment, have a little bit of fatigue around the way we've all talked about AI," Henderson says.

Mining companies from around the world have begun using artificial intelligence in their operations. From safety and maintenance, to exploration and autonomous vehicles, and drills, AI is being used to navigate efficiencies and speed. With this new technology, however, comes an ever-growing need for a workforce who can navigate these new systems. Thanks to a $1.25 million grant from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an interdisciplinary team at the University of Nevada, Reno, has committed to graduating six doctoral and four master's degree students who will address several challenges related to major safety and health issues in mining operations. "Future mine engineers need to understand emerging technology like AI, drones and big data," Javad Sattarvand, University College of Science assistant professor of mining engineering and the project's principal investigator, said.

The talk is Wednesday afternoon, Jan. 30. Here is the paper: Envisioning AI for K-12: What should every child know about AI?

The cocktail party problem, alternatively known as the dinner party problem, is the difficulty automated systems encounter when tasked with isolating audio in noisy, multisource environments. It's widely studied, and a number of academic teams, startups, and corporate giants claim to have solved it with sophisticated machine learning algorithms. But Amazon believes there's room for improvement, and to this end, it's releasing a data set -- the Dinner Party Corpus, or DiPCo -- intended to spur research on the topic. According to Zaid Ahmed, a senior technical program manager in the Alexa Speech group, the corpus was created with the help of Amazon volunteers who simulated a dinner-party scenario in the lab. Over the course of multiple sessions (each involving four participants), the volunteers served themselves food from a buffet table and spoke over music piped into the room.

During NYFW last week, Rag & Bone returned to the runway after a three-year break and, true to form, brought a technology twist to its show. The brand partnered with Microsoft to bring a giant robotic arm to its runway show, which captured 360-degree angles of the models and performers, and presented it to the audience in real-time on screens in the amphitheater. It used cutting-edge technology, but its incorporation served more as a marketing tactic for Rag & Bone -- and it's a strategy the brand has come to rely on. To debut the brand's Fall 2019 collection, Rag & Bone opted out of a runway show and instead hosted a dinner experience called "A Last Supper," where it used AI to capture guests in attendance on video. Though these stunts work to grab attention, where robotics is making an impact in fashion is behind the scenes. For example, many brands are currently using robotics to cut down fulfillment times in warehouses and speed up manufacturing, using robots to cut and sew fabrics at a faster-than-ever pace.

Sign in to report inappropriate content. A growing number of classrooms in China are equipped with artificial-intelligence cameras and brain-wave trackers. While many parents and teachers see them as tools to improve grades, they've become some children's worst nightmare.

In today's connected world, factories are smart, cars are smart, buildings are smart, and homes are smart. School campuses should be smart too. The number of gun-violence incidents in the United States is much too high, and while politicians and special interest groups argue about how exactly to curb this violence, technology could help keep campuses safer. The latest IoT (Internet of Things) technologies could streamline campus and school operations to help them run as efficiently as possible. According to MarketsandMarkets, the global IoT in education market is expected to grow from $4.8 billion in 2018 to $11.3 billion by 2023.

Although many companies talk about artificial intelligence, it's likely that the majority of their employees aren't actually using machine-learning technologies in the workplace. One big reason for that is while executives may be excited about A.I., employees may feel threatened or even insulted that managers would force them to use tools that that they fear will one day replace them. As FedEx senior data scientist Clayton Clouse said during an A.I. conference in San Francisco last week, "We shouldn't expect that people will jump up and down and be excited when we say, 'Hey, we're going to be augmenting your job with A.I.'" Citing a survey about A.I. from McKinsey, Clouse said that while the majority of companies polled by the consulting firm said they were implementing A.I. either in their business or through pilot projects, "only 6% reported that their employees were actually using the system the way they should be used." The employees, it turns out, are skeptical about A.I., especially machine-learning tools intended to automate decision-making in some way, Clouse said. If workers don't trust the A.I. tools to do as good of a job as them, they simply aren't going to use them, he explained.

Missile could strike U.S. withing 30 minutes; retired Army Gen. Anthony Tata reacts. China's Communist Party marked 70 years in power Tuesday with a military parade showcasing the country's global ambitions and advancements in weapons technology. Trucks carrying nuclear missiles designed to evade U.S. defenses, a supersonic attack drone and other products of a two-decade-old weapons development effort rolled through Beijing as soldiers marched past President Xi Jinping and other leaders on Tiananmen Square. Fighter jets flew over spectators who waved Chinese flags. The display highlighted Beijing's ambition for strategic influence to match its status as the second-largest global economy, even as Xi's government suppresses dissent that illustrates the tensions between a closed, one-party dictatorship and a rapidly evolving society.

The European Robotics League (ERL) presents the SciRoc Challenge, a new robotics competition on smart cities that occurs every two years in a European city. Funded by the European Commission's Horizon 2020 framework programme, the first SciRoc challenge takes place in the city of Milton Keynes, United Kingdom. They update stock lists, take customers' orders or find out the location of a person in need. On the third day of the competition, teams continued competing in the five different episodes and the public could see the first trials in the emergency category. The aerial teams were ready to start delivering autonomously the first-aid kit to the mannequin placed inside the flying arena!