Over the past month, a tricked-out Honda Fit has been driving on every road in Spokane Valley, equipped with 3D imaging technology and a 360-degree panoramic camera. That's 450 miles of pavement – a lot of roadway that will be known more intimately than ever before, thanks to this high-tech hatchback. No, this car belongs to StreetScan, a Massachusetts company that aims to automate pavement management and drive data into the hands of city decision makers. In short, the technology will collect a large, detailed photo of the entire Valley road network, map it out and inventory the condition of the pavement with an algorithm. Every bump, crack and pothole will be counted and cataloged, and each block will be given a score between zero and 100.

Charleston, S.C. – October 1, 2019 – Benefitfocus, Inc. (NASDAQ: BNFT), a leading cloud-based benefits management platform and services provider, today announced several product and catalog enhancements designed to boost consumers' education around benefits and make it easier for employers to streamline the benefits selection process. The upgrades demonstrate Benefitfocus' commitment to creating and expanding on its hyperconnected ecosystem for employers, suppliers, consumers and brokers, leveraging data and artificial intelligence (AI) designed to enable more meaningful interactions and new sources of value to customers. Workflows utilizing the BenefitSAIGE artificial intelligence (AI) platform offer data-driven, tailored insights and an easily-managed communication system around their employer's benefit options. For the first time, in addition to the industry-leading pre-configured health, wealth, property and lifestyle products available as part of Benefitfocus' BenefitsPlace, consumers will have the opportunity to access personal auto insurance underwritten by national insurers. Employers will also be able to offer employees an alternate payment method via their personal credit card, thus reducing the administrative payroll burden for HR Administrators.

Ironically, people are more likely to trust AI when they don't know it's being used. AI is proving itself superior to human intelligence in an expanding number of fields. That is, except when people know AI is being used. Yes, because in certain human-centric sectors, the performance of artificial intelligence starts to drop off if people are apprised of the involvement of an intelligent machine. In fact, human resistance would seem to be the achilles heel of artificial intelligence, since for all the recent advances of AI technology this resistance is preventing AI from doing its job in areas where human contact and interaction would normally play a central role. This message was brought home most recently by a study published in Marketing Science on September 20, titled "The Impact of Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Disclosure on Customer Purchases."

Kumba covers emerging technology research breakthroughs and news at Emerj. She has performed research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is an honors graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Master's candidate in Biotechnology at Johns Hopkins University. The U.S. commercial airline system is an economic engine which generated an estimated $168.2 billion in operating revenue in 2016. Ticket fares represented 74.5 percent of operating revenue or $125.2 billion. In 2016, the overall category of transportation represented approximately 2.7 percent of the national GDP.

If you've ever attended an AI conference, I bet you passed under the placid gaze of a chrome-plated humanoid, lovingly selected from an ocean of creepy robot stock images that marketing teams can't resist pasting on every billboard these days. Clearly, I'm personally guilty of using octarine-blue sci-fi art to lure weary travelers to my blog. It certainly works, which is why it's a pity that those images have next to nothing to do with AI. Robots are very exciting but mostly useless. Today's AI is mostly boring but very useful.

The adoption of AI and automation tech in the UK is still being stunted by a lack of digital skills in businesses. That is the according to new research by Rainbird, an AI-powered automated decision-making platform. The research surveyed senior decision-makers in enterprise organisations, and that the main reason behind businesses not implementing AI is a shortage of talent in their workforce for handling automation processes. The data suggests a number of different concerns across business functions, including a lack of regulation at 87.5 per cent. In financial services it reports that the technology's "lack of transparency" inhibits its adoption, whereas within the IT industry shortage of talent has become a major hurdle.

Estonia is a pioneer in digital initiatives. The Estonian government-initiated AI strategy counts with over 20 machine learning-based solutions live in the Estonian public sector. In Estonia, citizens are always the owners of their own data. None of this comes as a surprise, though, in a country which has been named the most advanced digital society in the world by many. Below, the opening to the third annual Tallinn Digital Summit that took place on September 16 - 17.

The growing cost of artificial intelligence research means that fewer people can easily access computing power to advance the technology, which scientists warn could shortchange university laboratories and make behemoths like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook dominant. The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence estimated that the calculations required to perform AI tasks have ballooned approximately 300,000 times in the last six years. University of Massachusetts, Amherst researchers also found AI software can consume an enormous amount of power. Allen Institute scientists suggest changing the AI success quantification model could help resolve both cost and power issues -- with efficiency as well as accuracy factored in. Large tech firms are focusing on efficiency upgrades, and they argue this will make computing power more available to outside developers and academics.

Identifying geological features in a densely vegetated, steep, and rough terrain can be almost impossible. Imagery like LiDAR can help researchers see through the tree cover, but subtle landforms can often be missed by the human eye. Now, a team of scientists has tapped into the power of machine learning to identify hidden geologic features. Specifically, the scientists are identifying previously unidentified cave entrances that are difficult to see in imagery, and hard to access on the ground. Leila Donn, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin and lead author of the new research, is presenting the results of her research on Sunday at The Geological Society of America's Annual Meeting in Phoenix.

These are only a small handful of the most well-known uses of artificial intelligence, yet there is one that, despite being on the margins for much of AI's recent history, is now threatening to grow significantly in prominence. This is AI's ability to classify and rank people, to separate them according to whether they're'good' or'bad' in relation to certain purposes. At the moment, Western civilization hasn't reached the point where AI-based systems are used en masse to categorize us according to whether we're likely to be'good' employees, 'good' customers, 'good' dates and'good' citizens. Nonetheless, all available indicators suggest that we're moving in this direction, and that this is regardless of whether Western nations consciously decide to construct the kinds of social credit system currently being developed by China. This risk was highlighted at the end of September, when it emerged that an AI-powered system was being used to screen job candidates in the UK for the first time.