The robot showed up at Kenneth Williams' doorstep when he needed it most. Williams had just been laid off from his job when he plugged in Jibo, a social home robot, on November 1st, 2017. "For that year [that I didn't have a job], it was a presence in my life every single day that I talked to," he says. Jibo sat in Williams' bedroom, on his desk, where every day, it greeted him in the morning and ran through the weather and his calendar. Williams, 44, asked Jibo questions, requested music, and played its games. Jibo couldn't do much, really, but its most redeeming feature, the one that cemented it as a robot darling in its owner's heart, was its facial recognition.

Tuesday's announcement that Stephen Schwarzman, a US private equity billionaire, donated £150 million ($189 million) to Oxford University is the latest in a growing philanthropic movement to keep artificial intelligence (AI) in check. The Stephen A Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities will incorporate a library, a concert hall, an auditorium and, most importantly, an Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence. "Technology can't be allowed to just do whatever it wants because it can," the CEO of Blackstone said in response to his donation. But he is not the only one concerned. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, set up Luminate last year to advocate for civic empowerment, data and digital rights, financial transparency, and independent media.

Treatment plans for troubled teens are highly specialized. Designed to restore young people struggling with issues such as: anger, oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), attention deficit disorder (ADD), substance abuse, depression, grief and loss, adoption, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), eating disorders, self-harm, or rebellion, just to name a few. Located in Idaho, near the Sawtooth Mountains, we serve families from all over the U.S. Most of our parents and clients can come from California, Texas, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, Idaho, Colorado, Nevada, Georgia, Florida, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, and Tennessee just to list a few. Several families also come to us from overseas.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, failed to pass several proposals to address sexual harassment, antitrust issues and diversity policies at its annual shareholder meeting, despite hundreds of employees protesting outside the event. The annual meeting comes as Alphabet faces growing pressure from shareholders and employees, including over its handling of sexual harassment allegations, ethical concerns surrounding its artificial intelligence systems, its widespread reliance on and treatment of contract workers and its operations in China. But the company's board voted down all 13 proposals shareholders had put forward, which encompassed a wide range of social concerns surrounding the company. They included efforts to change employment practicesand end forced arbitration. Google removed its policy of forced arbitration regarding sexual assault claims for full-time employees in November 2018, following a walkout of roughly 20,000 employees over the company's responses to sexual misconduct.

At Accelirate, an automation startup, few newcomers to the IT staff claim to be experts in critical areas like robotic process automation (RPA) or machine learning, but everyone has the chance to become one. The Edison, N.J.-based company, which was launched last year to assist companies on the automation track, is now up to 120 employees, 90% residing in IT, and it has debuted on Computerworld's annual Best Places to Work in IT list as the No. 11 small organization. Since RPA and related technologies are treading new ground, Accelirate found itself facing a dearth of expert talent, which could put a damper on its plan for fast-paced growth. The solution: building an in-house, three-month training program that gets all new IT hires, both first-time job holders and seasoned veterans, quickly up to speed. "Not too many people have prior experience with the platforms or technologies we were working with -- finding someone who'd done RPA before was few and far between," says Ahmed Zaidi, Accelirate's chief automation officer.

Big data, analytics, and machine learning are starting to feel like anonymous business words, but they're not just overused abstract concepts--those buzzwords represent huge changes in much of the technology we deal with in our daily lives. Some of those changes have been for the better, making our interaction with machines and information more natural and more powerful. Others have helped companies tap into consumers' relationships, behaviors, locations and innermost thoughts in powerful and often disturbing ways. And the technologies have left a mark on everything from our highways to our homes. It's no surprise that the concept of "information about everything" is being aggressively applied to manufacturing contexts.

Jurisdictions might be on-the-hook for their self-driving car laws that allow autonomous cars and for which might get into mishaps or crashes. Florida just passed a law that widens the door for self-driving driverless cars to roam their public roadways and do so without any human back-up driver involved. Some see dangers afoot, others see progress and excitement. Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, declared that by approving the new bill it showed that "Florida officially has an open-door policy to autonomous vehicle companies." There are now 29 states that have various driverless laws on their books, per the National Conference of State Legislatures: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, New York, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin, plus Washington, D.C. Here's a question that some politicians and regulators are silently grappling with, albeit some think that they have the unarguably "right" answer and thusly have no need to lose sleep over the matter: Should states, counties, cities and townships be eagerly courting self-driving autonomous cars onto their public roadways, or should those jurisdictions be neutral about inviting them into their locales, or should they be highly questioning and require "proof until proven safe" before letting even one such autonomous car onto their turf?

With increasing mouths to feed and environmental changes, there is a need for a revolution in the farming industry. AI offers data-driven solutions to boost productivity and efficiency. In farming, AI is usually short for "artificial insemination." But a different kind of AI, artificial intelligence, is showing great promise in solving some of agriculture's most significant challenges, from the need to increase productivity and profits to overcoming labor shortages to protecting the environment. Of all the industries AI is transforming, it's safe to say none have a greater human impact than farming.

Businesses are witnessing a tipping point that can dramatically change the trajectory of their growth. Shifting attention from Big Data collection to real-time data consumption is setting the stage for a level of intelligence that requires a new way of thinking about processes and the applications that enable them. Fortunately, technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain are helping companies find a path forward. For many organizations, pulling together large volumes of data – which comprise diverse formats and originate from numerous sources – is creating a wave of pressure-tested innovations, data security and privacy, and a seismic shift in business value. And this outcome is changing not only the definition of industry leadership but also people's lives for the better.