Amazon announced last week that it will spend $700 million to train about 100,000 workers in the US by 2025, helping them move into more highly skilled jobs. The New York Times observed that with this program Amazon is acknowledging that "advances in automation technology will handle many tasks now done by people." The number of jobs which AI and machines will displace in the future has been the subject of numerous studies and surveys and op-eds and policy papers since 2013, when a pair of Oxford academics, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, estimated that 47% of American jobs are at high risk of automation by the mid-2030s. McKinsey Global Institute: between 40 million and 160 million women worldwide may need to transition between occupations by 2030, often into higher-skilled roles. Clerical work, done by secretaries, schedulers and bookkeepers, is an area especially susceptible to automation, and 72% of those jobs in advanced economies are held by women.

Amperity, a Seattle, WA-based AI-powered Customer Data Management platform, raised a $50M Series C financing. Backers included Tiger Global Management, Goldman Sachs, Declaration Partners, Madera Technology Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and Lee Fixel. The company, which has now raised total funding to-date to $87m, intends to use the funds to accelerate new capabilities, as well as expand into new verticals including financial services, automotive, insurance, and healthcare, while continuing to grow within the retail, travel, and hospitality industries. Led by Kabir Shahani, CEO and co-founder, Amperity leverages artificial intelligence to provide a Customer Data Management platform for companies to connect, identify, and understand their customers, improve marketing performance, accelerate accurate customer insights, and enable customer experiences. The company serves brands such as Alaska Airlines, Starbucks, The Gap Inc, Moët Hennessy USA, Wynn Resorts, Kendra Scott, Lucky Brand, Planet Fitness, Seattle Sounders, Stanley, and many more.

For some, a rose is a symbol of beauty or love. For Shaza Mehdi, it is a connection to her mother, but also a gateway to innovation. Mehdi's mother, Afshin, grows rose bushes at their Lawrenceville home. But a few years ago, the plants kept getting diseases, ruining the blooms. Mehdi tried diagnosing the flowers by Googling images of plant diseases and comparing those images with the sick roses.

Amazon Alexa, which sits in your house and accepts voice commands enabling it to play music, activate lights, read news headlines and many other functions, is one of several intelligent personal assistants currently vying for dominance alongside Google Home and the Apple HomePod. Now however, Amazon is aiming to take this technology one step further by implementing it in to an actual robot that can not only answer questions, but also move autonomously around your home. Codenamed'Vesta', the new device is currently being worked on by Amazon's Lab126 research and development arm in Sunnyvale, California. According to reports, the web giant had intended to reveal the robot earlier this year but it wasn't quite ready for mass-production and more engineers have since been assigned to help speed things along. Rumor has it that the robot will be about waist-high and can navigate using an array of cameras.

Imagine showing a photo taken through a storefront window to someone who has never opened her eyes before, and asking her to point to what's in the reflection and what's in the store. To her, everything in the photo would just be a big jumble. Computers can perform image separations, but to do it well, they typically require handcrafted rules or many, many explicit demonstrations: here's an image, and here are its component parts. New research finds that a machine-learning algorithm given just one image can discover patterns that allow it to separate the parts you want from the parts you don't. The multi-purpose method might someday benefit any area where computer vision is used, including forensics, wildlife observation, and artistic photo enhancement.

Sitting in a hotel lobby in Tangier, Morocco, Charity Wayua laughs as she recounts her journey to the city for a conference on technology and innovation. After starting her trip in Nairobi, Kenya, where she leads one of IBM's two research centers in Africa, she had to fly past her destination for a layover in Dubai, double back to Casablanca, and then take a three-and-a-half-hour drive to Tangier. What would have been a seven- to eight-hour direct flight was instead a nearly 24-hour odyssey. This is not unusual, she says. The hassle of traveling within the region isn't the only thing making things difficult for Africa's research community: the difficulty of traveling out of the region has often left its researchers out of the international conversation.

With images aggregated from social media platforms, dating sites, or even CCTV footage of a trip to the local coffee shop, companies could be using your face to train a sophisticated facial recognition software. As reported by the New York Times, among the sometimes massive data sets that researchers use to teach artificially intelligent software to recognize faces is a database collected by Stanford researchers called Brainwash. More than 10,000 images of customers at a cafe in San Francisco were collected in 2014 without their knowledge. OKCupid and photo-sharing platforms like Flickr are among for researchers looking to load their databases up with images that help train facial recognition software. That same database was then made available to other academics, including some in China at the National University of Defense Technology.

MANCHESTER, ENGLAND - Mathematician Alan Turing, whose cracking of a Nazi code helped the Allies to win World War II but who committed suicide after being convicted for homosexuality, will appear on the Bank of England's new £50 banknote, the central bank said Monday. "As the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, as well as war hero, Alan Turing's contributions were far-ranging and path-breaking," BoE Gov. Mark Carney, who took the final decision on the character selection, said. "Turing is a giant on whose shoulders so many now stand." Turing's electro-mechanical machine, a forerunner of modern computers, unraveled the Enigma code used by Nazi Germany and helped give the Allies an advantage in the naval struggle for control of the Atlantic. His work at Bletchley Park, Britain's wartime code-breaking center, was credited with shortening the war and saving many thousands of lives.

Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, speaks in front of the concept design for the new Bank of England fifty pound banknote, featuring mathematician and scientist Alan Turing, during the presentation at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, north-west England on July 15, 2019. Alan Turing, a mathematician and codebreaker who deciphered German World War II messages, will appear on Britain's new 50 pound note. The Bank of England made the announcement Monday that Turing, who died in 1954, would appear on the currency and some of his work would also adorn the note. The action continues the posthumous accolades for the scientist, who after the war was charged with gross indecency after admitting to having a homosexual relationship, which was illegal at the time in Britain. To avoid imprisonment, he chose chemical castration with female hormones.

Alexa-enabled devices like the Echo or Echo Dot can be used to control smart home products such as the Ring Alarm Kit. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. Our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. Prime Day is a great opportunity to find money-saving deals on smart home products that can be controlled using Amazon Alexa on your Echo device. From smart doorbells to pressure cookers, here are the best Alexa-compatible Prime Day deals of 2019.