"It's pervasive in all aspects of how we think about people, getting the right people on the right projects and building careers," said Jeff Wong, chief innovation officer for Ernst & Young, which brands itself as EY. EY in 2017 launched an AI-powered chatbot named "Goldie" that has answered more than 2.2 million questions for employees across 138 countries to date. Now, the company, which hires about 65,000 people annually, is considering ways to use artificial intelligence to help human resources staff select qualified candidates. "We're trying to be particularly thoughtful about how we apply AI in this particular circumstance," Mr. Wong said. Emphasis on diversity, inclusion and fairness are requirements for such an AI system, he said.

Tokyo's Olympics may become known as the "Robot Games." Organizers on Friday showed off robots that will be used at the new National Stadium to provide assistance for fans using wheelchairs. Tokyo Olympic official Masaaki Komiya pointed out that Japan is known for its robot technology, and the 2020 Summer Games are a good place to show off. "Robots should not overwhelm people," Komiya, the vice director general to the Tokyo Olympics, told a news conference. "Robots are something that have an amicable relationship with human beings and can work together. That's the kind of robots we envision."

University of Toronto Engineering researchers have built a set of magnetic'tweezers' that can position a nano-scale bead inside a human cell in three dimensions with unprecedented precision. The nano-bot has already been used to study the properties of cancer cells, and could point the way toward enhanced diagnosis and treatment. Professor Yu Sun and his team have been building robots that can manipulate individual cells for two decades. Their creations have the ability to manipulate and measure single cells--useful in procedures such as in vitro fertilization and personalized medicine. Their latest study, published today in Science Robotics, takes the technology one step further.

The U.S. Army recently awarded QinetiQ North America a contract worth up to $152 million for special robots that are light enough to be carried in a backpack into combat. The Common Robotic System Individual, or CRS (I), is the Army's first "small-sized" robotic program of record, according to a recent press release from the service's Maneuver Capability Development Integration Directorate at Fort Benning, Georgia. "CRS (I) is a remotely operated, highly mobile, unmanned ground vehicle that is light enough for a dismounted soldier to carry in a backpack," the release states. These new robots, which the Army plans to begin fielding in fiscal 2020, "will provide the dismounted soldier with enhanced situational awareness, force protection and increased standoff capability from enemy threats," the release adds. The potential value of the total program could be $429 million over seven years for the delivery of more than 3,000 ground robots, according to a May 22, 2018, QinetiQ North America press release announcing that the company had been chosen as one of two finalists in the program.

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has released a draft version of its 20-year roadmap for AI research in the United States. Made after consultation with researchers and tech companies, the roadmap calls for sustained support from the federal government and prescribes a number of steps to ensure the U.S. retains its position as a nation with some of the most advanced AI resources on the planet. The roadmap also supports the development of lifelong personal assistants to augment human ability in education, health care, and industry. According to the roadmap: "… lifelong personal assistants will enable an elderly population to live longer independently, AI health coaches will provide advice for lifestyle choices, customized AI tutors will broaden education opportunities, and AI scientific assistants will dramatically accelerate the pace of discovery." Organizers believe such efforts could promote universal personalized education, accelerate scientific discovery, and drive business innovation.

A former judge and family law educator has teamed up with tech entrepreneurs to launch an app they hope will help divorced parents better manage their co-parenting disputes, communications, shared calendar and other decisions within a single platform. The app, called coParenter, aims to be more comprehensive than its competitors, while also leveraging a combination of AI technology and on-demand human interaction to help co-parents navigate high-conflict situations. The idea for coParenter emerged from co-founder Hon. Sherrill A. Ellsworth's personal experience and entrepreneur Jonathan Verk, who had been through a divorce himself. Ellsworth had been a presiding judge of the Superior Court in Riverside County, California for 20 years and a family law educator for 10. During this time, she saw firsthand how families were destroyed by today's legal system.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning architectures such as deep learning have become integral parts of our daily lives--they enable digital speech assistants or translation services, improve medical diagnostics and are an indispensable part of future technologies such as autonomous driving. Based on an ever increasing amount of data and powerful novel computer architectures, learning algorithms seemingly approach human capabilities, sometimes even surpassing them. So far, however, it often remains unknown to users how exactly AI systems reach their conclusions. Therefore, it may often remain unclear whether the AI's decision-making behavior is truly intelligent or whether the procedures are just averagely successful. Researchers from TU Berlin, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute HHI and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) have tackled this question and have provided a glimpse into the diverse "intelligence" spectrum observed in current AI systems, specifically analyzing these AI systems with a novel technology that allows automatized analysis and quantification.

The swarm robots are coming and they could change the way wars are fought. In February, the defence secretary said "swarm squadrons" will be deployed by the British armed forces in the coming years. The US has also been testing interconnected, co-operative drones that are capable of working together to overwhelm adversaries. Low-cost, intelligent and inspired by swarms of insects, these new machines could revolutionise future conflicts. From swarming enemy sensors with a deluge of targets, to spreading out over large areas for search-and-rescue missions, they could have a range of uses on and off the battlefield.

Digital marketing is experiencing a transformative shift to automated, personalized marketing and prescriptive, machine learning recommendation engines. Wire Stone is a leading provider of integrating marketing solutions and experiences, maintaining client relationships that span many years and, in some cases, decades. Wire Stone is uniquely qualified to assist marketing leaders and decision makers at every level of the various industries we work with: technology, telecommunications, automotive, aeronautics, sports retail, financial, and others. We're a unique mix of strategists, creatives, programmers, data analysts, engineers and architects--obsessed with the art and science of crafting integrated approaches and optimizing meaningful connections that few agencies can match. Wire Stone's Data Science team provides intelligence products and services to some of the world's largest and most innovative companies.

In his role as principal data scientist at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., Kirk Borne sees the world in terms of data connections. "Life is about who is connected to whom and what is connected to what," Borne said, and he pointed to graph databases and graph analytics applications as new ways to capitalize on such connections. That's because graph databases, a form of NoSQL software, document the connections between data points quite different compared to mainstream relational databases. Graph systems represent data not as elements in tables, but as nodes linked to one another by edges with a set of properties that delineate the relationship between nodes. Therefore, one of the advantages of graph databases is they allow data analysts to navigate through data sets without the need to create and run complex queries to join combinations of tables together, as in the relational model.