Developments including artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotic process automation bring the promise of transforming work as we know it. Those transformed work processes will operate in a completely different way: fully automated and autonomous, with smart machines doing the work. The vision is to free humans from performing mundane and repetitive business tasks and assist them with better access to better information to better serve customers and the business. For C-suite executives and technologists today, the challenge is to move beyond the hype of digital transformation to use data and automation in ways that make a real difference in the performance of the organization. Automating work may seem like it's just about technology, but the transformation that matters most is strategic.

In a Nintendo Direct broadcast today, the Japanese video game giant laid out the lineup for its Switch console for the rest of 2019 and early 2020. Introduced by newly installed Nintendo of America executive Doug Bowser – no, not that Bowser – it was light on surprises, but the highlights were a new Animal Crossing game, New Horizons, and a teaser for the sequel to the phenomenally accomplished The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Nintendo's E3 2019 presentation was dominated by giants of the Japanese video game world – not just Nintendo's own Pokémon, Smash Bros, Animal Crossing and Zelda series, but Square Enix's Dragon Quest and Mana roleplaying series and a range of anime-styled and mech-themed games. A definitive edition of Dragon Quest XI and stylish mech battler Daemon X Machina will both be out in September, and old-school Sega series Panzer Dragoon makes an unexpected return on Switch this winter. Tongue-in-cheek action game No More Heroes 3, from Tokyo's Grasshopper Manufacture, was also announced for 2020.

Spending on video games and related equipment reached an all-time high last year, with Americans shelling out $42 billion to immerse themselves in virtual worlds where they can steal cars, shoot cowboys, and fight Nazis with abandon. But as tens of thousands of video game fans and creators gather in Los Angeles this week for the Electronic Entertainment Expo, more commonly known as E3, a difficult truth about the gaming industry is beginning to emerge: what's seen by outsiders as a fun, creative business is becoming psychologically and financially unbearable for those working in it. "Every game you like is built on the backs of workers," says Nathan Allen Ortega, 34, who thought he found his dream job when Telltale Games offered him a position as a community and video manager in 2015. Ortega was such a Telltale enthusiast that he used to participate in cosplay--the practice of dressing up as a particular character for events--as Rhys Strongfork, one of the main heroes in the company's Tales from the Borderlands. So it was an easy decision to pack up his stuff in Texas and relocate near the company's headquarters in San Rafael, California.

Ah, the Electronics Entertainment Expo, or E3 for short -- that time of the year when the video game industry gathers to tell us all about the incredible games and projects it's working on. From a Breath of the Wild sequel to Keanu Reeves taking the stage and calling us all "breathtaking," this year's E3 has been a whirlwind of stellar moments and exciting announcements. The biggest moment and the coolest game of E3 came courtesy of Polish developer CD Projekt Red's first-person shooter RPG, Cyberpunk 2077. Set in Night City, California, Cyberpunk 2077 is an open world sandbox where players fight against evil mega-corporations using body augmentation. That's cool, but CD Projekt Red delivered the best moment of E3 when it revealed Keanu Reeves is in the game.

LOS ANGELES – Google's Stadia video game streaming service just got a hefty collection of games to attract newcomers to its forthcoming cloud-based subscription offering. But Ubisoft's announcement Monday that its new Uplay service with more than 100 games will be available on Stadia, may have clarified – or confused – players about what's to come. Ubisoft will be making its new Uplay all-you-can-eat PC video game service ($14.99 monthly), which launches Sept. 3 with 100-plus games including "Assassin's Creed" and "Rainbow Six" titles, available to Stadia users next year. This will make it easier for players to play Ubisoft's games, said Brenda Panagrossi, the publisher's vice president of platform and product management. "Stadia is a new generation platform where you can play our games on any device," she said.

The Avengers assembled again, only it wasn't on a movie screen. On Monday night, video game publisher Square Enix revealed the first details of "Marvel's Avengers," which will launch on May 15, 2020. The video game will be available for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Google's new Stadia streaming service. Among the game studios working on the Avengers game are Crystal Dynamics, who previously worked on the Tomb Raider franchise; and Eidos Montreal, best known for their work on the popular Deus Ex series. What should video game players expect when they don the role of an Avenger next year?

The Atari VCS, a new video game system that plays 100-plus games originally played on the '70s console, is due in spring 2019. Pre-orders starting at $199 begin May 30. As video game fans get excited about PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch games during this week's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), a classic name is poised for a comeback. Atari announced Tuesday its VCS video game system will open up for preorders this week, with retailers GameStop and Walmart serving as exclusive partners. Pricing for the console starts at $249.99, with a top price of $389.99 for system bundles, reads a press release from Atari.

While supervised learning has tremendously improved AI performance in image classification, a major drawback is its reliance on large-scale labeled datasets. This has prompted researchers to explore the potential of unsupervised learning and semi-supervised learning -- techniques that forego data annotation but have their own drawback: diminished accuracy. A new paper from Google's UK-based research company DeepMind addresses this with a model based on Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC) that outperforms the fully-supervised AlexNet model in Top-1 and Top-5 accuracy on ImageNet. CPC was introduced by DeepMind in 2018. The unsupervised learning approach uses a powerful autoregressive model to extract representations of high-dimensional data to predict future samples.

Collaborative robots, or cobots, have been working with humans on the factory floor for years, but when it comes to the large-scale industrial robots that can lift and move massive pieces of manufacturing, the danger to human workers is so great that the robots are bolted down to the factory floor behind fences so a human never comes near them. That is starting to change as robotics becomes more widespread across industries. Today there are, on average, 84 robots for every 10,000 workers in the U.S., according to the International Federation of Robotics. This places the U.S. second to Europe, at 99 units, and ahead of Asia, which to date averages 63 units (though the most roboticized country in the world is South Korea). While these next-generation robots are revolutionizing companies and expanding their bottom line, there is one very real caveat: Their increasing interactivity and mobility opens up the possibility of injury to human co-workers.

Noelia Jiménez Martínez is Head of Data Science and Astrophysics at Unbound. She holds a PhD in Numerical Astrophysics from the UNLP (La Plata, Argentina) applied to Galaxy Formation and Chemical Evolution. Before transitioning from Academia, she was an Astrophysics Researcher at the University of St Andrews (Scotland), and previously had several postdocs positions in different universities across Europe that gave her the chance to collaborate with a huge diversity of people from several fields and backgrounds. Prior to joining Unbound she worked as a Data Science Consultant (Pivigo) in London, where she managed several data science teams working with big-to-small companies (Barclays, Criteo, Royal Mail, startups, etc) and lectured academics transitioning to Industry in the S2DS (science to data science school) in fields as Machine Learning, Statistics and Deep Learning. She is also the author of a book exploring/building empathy and social skills among academics from'hard' sciences: 'Data: A Guide to Humans'.