Contractors and major construction companies are each trying to achieve broadly the same business objectives, like streamlining projects, mitigating risks (financial and human), saving time and costs, and ensuring that planning and project engineering are accurate. The tools many use can be very different, irrespective of role in the process. It's a surprising fact that even some globe-straddling multinational construction conglomerates run most of their daily operations on Microsoft Excel, given the well-publicized inherent inaccuracy of that particular platform. Is it also surprising to find a tiny contracting company in a niche area of construction running a cutting-edge SaaS to ensure its operations are run smoothly? Project management, engineering, and construction in general involve huge numbers of variables that make ensuring efficient levels of productivity and progress extraordinarily tricky.

Facebook wants to create a device that can read your mind -- literally. It's funding research on brain-machine interfaces that can pick up thoughts directly from your neurons and translate them into words, the company announced in a blog post last week. The short-term goal is to help patients with paralysis, by decoding their brain signals and allowing them to "speak" their thoughts without ever having to move a muscle. That could be a real public good, significantly improving quality of life for millions of people. In the US alone, 5.4 million people currently live with paralysis.

Earlier in the summer, it was announced that some casinos in Macau had begun using facial recognition software.

Healthcare is one of the most valuable and demanding industries that offers value-based care to millions of people while at the same time becoming top revenue earners for many countries. As per the report, in the current time, the healthcare industry in the US alone earns revenue of $1.668 trillion. The healthcare industry has generated plenty of data and is among the top. The new method of data collection, such as sensor-generated data, has helped this industry to find the spot in the top. What if this data can be used to provide better healthcare services at lower costs and increase patient satisfaction?

Harry Butler Institute, Murdoch University, are helping to protect Australia's biosecurity. In a first of its kind application in Western Australia, AI technology in the field - using IBM Power-9 based hardware and PowerAI Vision technology - is providing scientists with real-time profile of biosecurity threats within seconds, helping them to identify invasive species, even when distinguishing features may not be visible to the human eye.

A year after coming out of stealth mode with $40 million, self-driving truck startup Kodiak Robotics will begin making its first commercial deliveries in Texas. Kodiak will open a new facility in North Texas to support its freight operations along with increased testing in the state. There are some caveats to the milestone. Kodiak's self-driving trucks will have a human safety driver behind the wheel. And it's unclear how significant this initial launch is; the company didn't provide details on who its customers are or what it will be hauling.

Matt Beane, assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, finds that robots, machine learning, and AI are changing how we train for our jobs -- not just how we do them. His study shows that robot-assisted surgery is disrupting the traditional learning pathway of younger physicians. He says this trend is emerging in many industries, from finance to law enforcement to education. And he shares lessons from trainees who are successfully working around these new barriers. Beane is the author of the HBR article "Learning to Work with Intelligent Machines." CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. Like it or not, people increasingly do their jobs with robots, machine learning, or artificial intelligence. These developing technologies are already destroying some jobs and changing how many others are performed. But it's not just work that's changing.

Complex contracts usually contain clauses which specify who will own the Intellectual Property (IP) which arises from, or goes into, a project. But what happens when a non-human entity creates original work under the contract? While the fully automated Artificial Intelligence (AI) envisioned in the science-fictional world of killer robots is yet to be realised, smaller-scale AI is commonplace in day-to-day life. AI can be simply defined as technology which performs tasks that would normally require the brain of a human to complete, such as autonomous decision-making. AI programs can have the capacity to learn independently and improve their own processes.

Amazon's self-driving robots will be roaming the streets of another neighborhood. The online shopping giant said Tuesday that the six-wheeled robots, about the size of a smaller cooler, will begin delivering packages to customers in Irvine, California. It comes after Amazon began testing them in a suburb of Seattle at the beginning of the year. Amazon AMZN, 1.29% said the robots, which are light blue and have the Amazon smile logo stamped on its sides, are able to avoid crashing into trash cans or pedestrians. Still, a worker will accompany the robots at first. Other companies have been testing similar delivery robots on college campuses, delivering burgers or soda to students.

I usually cover the developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence as part of my regular feature titled Tech Diaries, but this week was so jam-packed with AI news that I had to do write a separate piece. One story that stood out from the rest was of the AI-enabled photo-editing App called FaceApp. It is owned by Russia-based Wireless Lab and has been around since 2017, but with the recent addition of a feature which lets you see your future self made it go viral last week. My Facebook newsfeed was full of people showing off their'Now & Then' pictures -- Looked enticing but I held off the temptation to generate an older version of myself. For starters, some reports suggest that the App has collected more than 150 million photos of people's faces since its launch & according to its terms of service it can use the huge database in whatever way it wants.