With the arrival of artificial intelligence in primary and secondary education classrooms, researchers are advising caution before welcoming AI without rigorous preparation. The conference will examine the current state of AI learning and the teaching of AI skills for students. It also will separate the myths from realities of AI and envision an inclusive future for AI in education and beyond the traditional classroom: in early childhood education, higher education, lifelong learning.

In 2002, a couple of Japanese visitors to Australia swapped passports with each other before walking through an automatic biometric border control gate being tested at Sydney airport. The facial recognition algorithm falsely matched each of them to the others' passport photo. These gentlemen were in fact part of an international aviation industry study group and were in the habit of trying to fool biometric systems then being trialed round the world. When I heard about this successful prank, I quipped that the algorithms were probably written by white people - because we think all Asians look the same. Colleagues thought I was making a typical sick joke, but actually I was half-serious.

While technology was involved in less than 50% of customer experience (CX) projects in the past, now it is involved in almost two-thirds of these types of initiatives. This is according to Don Scheibenreif, distinguished VP analyst within the customer experience research group at Gartner, commenting on the evolution of customer experience over the last 10 years. With technology, many organisations are realising it's not enough to have a good customer service department or marketing department, they are thinking about the whole experience a client goes through, stated Scheibenreif. He pointed to the fact that an airline can now offer customers 10 different ways to interact with it via technology, something that was not around five years ago. "Technology is providing companies more choices to interact with the customer. Software vendors are also responding to those needs by creating things like data warehouses for customer data. There are more intelligent case management systems that figure out the next customer actions, as well as interactive and predictive e-commerce platforms. "A lot of the technology has evolved to provide companies many more options to engage with customers and even potentially predict what they will do next." The distinguished VP analyst added Gartner believes companies like Starbucks, Domino's Pizza, Ritz-Carlton Hotel and BMW have found value in using technology. "These are organisations that actively study customer behaviour, they understand customer journeys and they are very strategic in their use of technology to create an overall experience," he said. This week, Gartner hosted its annual Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Cape Town, where CIOs and senior IT executives heard about the technology and trends shaping the future of IT and business, including how firms cannot grow their business if they don't give customers great experiences. For Gartner, Scheibenreif said, CX is the sum of either the one-off or cumulative interactions that a person would have with a company, whether it's through employees, physical location or the company Web site. When you put all of those interactions together, that is the customer experience. Mapping out the customer journey, the Gartner analyst said it started from customer service. "It was basically improving interactions on the phone, first-call resolution and being able to provide a personalised experience.

Intelligent bots use artificial intelligence to accomplish specific tasks by identifying user intent from text or voice conversations. They use a process called entity extraction, leveraging natural language understanding to extract key pieces of information. Most of the intelligent chatbots today are powered by natural language processing and machine learning. This enables them to get smarter and identify the key elements of a conversation to provide smart replies. Some of the most common places these chatbots are used are answering questions, playing music or making reservations.

AI could strip emerging markets of their competitive edge, keep inflation low despite QE, cause huge labour market disruption and drive populism according to a new report. The report – Future proofing your asset allocation in an age of megatrends published by BNY Mellon – shows a huge range of complex challenges facing economies, markets and thus investors from two megatrends – AI and climate change. To compile the report, Create Research conducted detailed interviews with 45 chief investment officers, investment strategists and portfolio managers among asset owners, asset managers and pension consultants in 16 countries. AI is seen as a risk and opportunity by 52%, a risk alone by 33% and a pure opportunity by 7%. The report says that investment-specific challenges related to climate change centre on areas that are unknowable, requiring judgemental calls about the future.

Yolanda Gil, a research director at the USC Viterbi Information Sciences Institute (ISI), co-authored a new 20-year Artificial Intelligence Roadmap. An outbreak of a highly contagious mosquito-borne virus in the U.S. has spread quickly to major cities around the world. It's all hands on deck to stop the disease from spreading–and that includes the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which scour online news and social media for relevant data and patterns. In consultation with human scientists, AI systems could help contain infectious diseases and identify effective vaccines. Working with these results, and data gathered from numerous hospitals around the world, scientists discover an interesting link to a rare neurological condition and a treatment is developed.

WASHINGTON – Robot shipments are expected to jump 39 percent from 2018 to 2022 from a record annual sales level of $16.5 billion last year, according to the World Robotics report. More than a third of global installations are in China and the top five countries -- also including Japan, Korea, the U.S and Germany -- hold 74 percent of the market. China's investment in robots reached $5.4 billion last year. "We saw a dynamic performance in 2018 with a new sales record, even as the main customers for robots -- the automotive and electrical-electronics industry -- had a difficult year," said Junji Tsuda, President of the International Federation of Robotics. "The U.S.-China trade conflict poses uncertainty to the global economy -- customers tend to postpone investments."

Karaoke complexes might be relatively common now, but back in 2004 singing into a PlayStation was the closest most of us could get. SingStar's discs of party classics formed the caterwauling soundtrack to millions of student gatherings, hen parties and five-pint Fridays all over Europe for more than a decade. Like Just Dance, it harnesses the infectious joy of pop music in a way that anyone can play. A gleeful absurdist masterpiece in which you start by rolling up pencils and apple peel and end up absorbing buildings, trees and, eventually, most of the planet in your big sticky ball, because why not? Journey is a short and moving shared experience whose music, evocative colour palette and simple play come together as they only can in games, for a powerful emotional effect. It's often picked as an ur-example of games as art – including by curators at the V&A, where it was front and centre at a recent exhibition. Resident Evil meets Alien seems like such an obvious game pitch that it is incredible it wasn't realised until 2008. In Dead Space, the player becomes lowly engineer Isaac Clarke, who finds himself investigating the "planet-cracking" ship Ishimura after radio contact with the vessel is lost.

Laura Nolan is a modern hero. A former Google software engineer, Nolan resigned from her job last year after being asked to dramatically enhance the artificial intelligence used in US military drones. She is now calling for a ban on all forms of autonomous weapons on the basis that they might accidentally initiate a catastrophic global war. She said this as part of her role as a member of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. Now, listen, sometimes I'm able to kid myself about the goodness of people.