Global supply chains are the order for the day in the automobile industry, pharmaceuticals and consumer electronics to give some examples. A single product could have a huge number of suppliers. Delays can result in shortages, overstocking, and poor customer experiences. To procure raw materials, manage trading partners, plan sequences and perform tasks while processing huge volumes of data, is a huge task, fit for data analytics using AI. Artificial intelligence has been leveraged since the mid-2000s to forecast demand using historical shipping data, as indicated by a record in DisCo.

Computer programs have shown superiority over humans in two-player games such as chess, Go, and heads-up, no-limit Texas hold'em poker. However, poker games usually include six players--a much trickier challenge for artificial intelligence than the two-player variant. Brown and Sandholm developed a program, dubbed Pluribus, that learned how to play six-player no-limit Texas hold'em by playing against five copies of itself (see the Perspective by Blair and Saffidine). When pitted against five elite professional poker players, or with five copies of Pluribus playing against one professional, the computer performed significantly better than humans over the course of 10,000 hands of poker. Science, this issue p. 885; see also p. 864

Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba, has vigorously endorsed China's grueling "996" culture, or working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. But now he has an even bolder vision for the future of work thanks to artificial intelligence: the 12-hour workweek. In the future, people may end up working only three days a week, with only four hours of work per day, Ma said at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Thursday, according to Bloomberg News. In Ma's view, the development of AI could free humanity to partake in activities other than work, with the entrepreneur comparing AI with the advent of electricity. "The power of electricity is that we make people more time so that you can go to karaoke or dancing party in the evening. I think because of artificial intelligence, people will have more time enjoying being human beings," he said, Bloomberg reported.

An especially hot area of enterprise software in recent years has been the front office, functions such as sales and support. There is a rush to transform the entire "go-to-market" process, and more recently, that raging market has collided with another very hot industry, the Internet voice services that replace phones with cloud-based communications. Throw in a little artificial intelligence, and what do you have? A San Francisco startup called Dialpad, founded in 2011, is trying to transformer customer support, sales, and marketing with a bit of machine learning and a lot of data. The company has received $120 million in financing in four rounds from Google, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.

The Fort Worth-based company said the program will be offered on select international flights out of Terminal D. According to the company, customers can now have their face scanned during boarding instead of scanning passes. The customer's identity will then be verified by U.S. Customs and Border Protection within seconds. The company said the new program will not store facial information and that using facial recognition is optional. "As its largest hub, implementing new technology like biometric boarding gives us the opportunity to enhance the airport experience in partnership with CBP. This new technology allows us to provide a more seamless and modern experience for both our customers and team members," Vice President of DFW Hub Operations at American Cedric Rockamore said.

By Jayadipta Chatterji Mehta In a joint initiative with industry, the government has set up four centres for promoting industry 4.0, across the country. However, there is a need for at least 20 such institutions to create best practices and spread the awareness of artificial intelligence (AI) products and its adoption by industry. An initiative of the Engineering Export Promotion Council (EEPC) together with the department of heavy industries, these are four demonstration centres that will escalate manufacturing to a smart and intelligent hub. Their task is to enhance competitiveness in every industry cluster across the country. They include the Centre for Industry 4.0 (C4i4) Lab in Pune; IITD-AIA Foundation for Smart Manufacturing; I4.0 India at IISc Factory R&D Platform; and Smart Manufacturing Demo & Development Cell at CMTI.

Anaya Bussey didn't know much about "artificial intelligence" when she arrived at a camp at Princeton University earlier this summer other than that "it was definitely blowing up." But after just three weeks here she and other students--all incoming high school juniors--teamed up to use the technology to help diagnose melanoma by looking at skin lesions. Bussey, 15, who is from the Bronx borough in New York City, has been interested in computer science since she was in elementary school. But there have been times when she's been one of only a handful of girls--or black students--in a computer class or program. That wasn't the case at the Princeton summer camp, run by AI4ALL, a two-year-old nonprofit that seeks to increase diversity and inclusion in AI education, research, and policy.

TECHNOLOGIES such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), the internet of things (IoT), 5G, and robotics have plenty of potential in the healthcare space. However, most healthcare organizations are unable to leverage those technologies because they neither have the digital infrastructure nor the technology talent to turn their vision into real projects. "Health services have a lot to do before they can make the most of these opportunities," Waitematā District Health Board (DHB) Clinical Director Innovation Robyn Whittaker told Tech Wire Asia underscoring the fact that industry professionals aren't oblivious to the power that technology holds. Whittaker and her team at Waitematā DHB have just made it to the list of finalists in the talent accelerator category at the IDC Digital Transformation Awards. To prepare for the digital age, Whittaker's team is working on the foundational layers, digitizing data, and making it available for clinicians and researchers looking to make sense of that data.

It may not yet be clear how societies will guard against the potential downside of artificial intelligence -- including algorithmic bias, invasions of privacy and unjustified profiling -- but it's already abundantly clear that safeguards are needed. That's the bottom line from Wednesday night's panel discussion on AI bias, presented in Seattle by EqualAI and LivePerson. Both of the panel's presenters have a stake in figuring out how to address AI's downsides: LivePerson is interested in how chatbots and other AI-enabled tools can smooth interactions between companies and the customers they serve, while EqualAI is an initiative supported by the likes of Arianna Huffington, Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales and LivePerson CEO Robert Locascio to reduce AI bias. "Companies are creating AI to change the world," said EqualAI executive director Miriam Vogel, who focused on equal-pay issues and bias training for law enforcement during her time at the Obama White House and the Justice Department. "They're trying to do good, they're trying to reach people who have not been reached, start conversations that haven't happened otherwise -- knowing that [implicit bias] is not necessarily coming from a malicious act. It's coming from human actions," she said.

An AI trawled 3.5M books and found fundamental differences in the written language we use to describe men and women. An unsupervised machine learning study presented at the 2019 meeting of Association for Computational Linguistics--which examined 3.5M books published between 1900 and 2008--indicates that men are described based on their behavior, where women are described based on appearance. In specific, words like "beautiful" and "sexy" are two of the adjectives most frequently used to describe women, while common descriptors for men were "brave," "rational," and "righteous." The books, which amounted to approximately 11B words in sum, included a mix of fiction and non-fiction. "We are clearly able to see that the words used for women refer much more to their appearances than the words used to describe men," said University of Copenhagen computer scientist and assistant professor Isabelle Augenstein in a statement.