Over four years ago, Sophia the humanoid robot told Khaleej Times in an interview that she wants to start a family. And yesterday, she revealed that she has a'family' now. The humanoid robot, who received Saudi citizenship, answered questions put up by audit professionals during the three-day 20th Annual Regional Audit Conference held at Dubai World Trade Centre from March 7 to 9. During the interaction, she also responded to public questions about whether robots will take over jobs of the humans and how artificial intelligence and robotics can help audit professionals. How was your Emirates flight to Dubai?

In October 2021, Cynthia Rudin was announced as the winner of the AAAI Squirrel AI award. This award recognizes positive impacts of artificial intelligence to protect, enhance, and improve human life in meaningful ways. Cynthia was formally presented with the prize during an award ceremony at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, following which she delivered an invited talk. Cynthia began her talk, and set the scene for her research in interpretable AI, with the story of a project she carried out in New York City, where the goal was to maintain the power grid using machine learning. Some parts of the grid infrastructure in the city are as old as 140 years, and this inevitably leads to failures in parts of the system.

Over the past decade, camera technology has made gradual, and significant improvements thanks to the mobile phone industry. This has accelerated multiple industries, including Robotics. Today, Davide Scaramuzza discusses a step-change in camera innovation that has the potential to dramatically accelerate vision-based robotics applications. Davide Scaramuzza deep dives on Event Cameras, which operate fundamentally different from traditional cameras. Instead of sampling every pixel on an imaging sensor at a fixed frequency, the "pixels" on an event camera all operate independently, and each responds to changes in illumination. This technology unlocks a multitude of benefits, including extremely highspeed imaging, removal of the concept of "framerate", removal of data corruption due to having the sun in the sensor, reduced data throughput, and low power consumption. Davide Scaramuzza is a Professor of Robotics and Perception at both departments of Informatics (University of Zurich) and Neuroinformatics (joint between the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich), where he directs the Robotics and Perception Group. His research lies at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning, using standard cameras and event cameras, and aims to enable autonomous, agile, navigation of micro drones in search-and-rescue applications. Davide Scaramuzza: Hi, thank you. Abate De Mey: So firstly, I'd like to give a little bit of background about why I reached out and invited you to the show today. So over the past few months, I've been working a lot with my team at fluid dev, where we've been building a platform, helping robotics companies scale. And while we were working with one of the companies on that platform, we were digging into a lot of open source VSLAM algorithms. Um, and we just kept running into your name as we were doing research and reading up on this. So I'm super excited to have you on today and I'd love to learn just a little bit more about yourself and what your team is doing.

Welcome to the third episode of New voices in AI! This episode features Tanja Kaiser sharing her journey to working with swarm robotics. Where are you from/ where do you work? I'm Tanja Katharina Kaiser and I'm currently a research assistant and final year doctoral candidate in the Service Robotics Group led by Prof. Dr.-Ing. My current research focus is on evolutionary swarm robotics, but I am interested in swarm intelligence and bio-inspired robotics in general.

Yesterday's science fiction is today's invention. Babel Fish, the "oddest thing in the universe", is a species of fish featured in Douglas Adam's magnum opus, The Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy. The fish, worn as an earpiece, translates all the languages that ever existed instantly. Babel Fish is no longer the stuff of dreams: Thanks to advances in AI, especially in the NLP domain, many tech giants are in the process of building a universal translator. To that end, Universal Speech Translator was a dominant theme in the Meta's Inside the Lab event on February 23.

And it's more important than ever for companies to evaluate the new technologies teams are implementing to ensure they are facilitating the desired outcomes, as well as to assess a particular technology's potential application to other areas and teams in the company. "In a sales organization, for example, certain teams may have access to certain tools that increase their productivity. Other teams might be able to benefit from that as well," says Hughell. "It's important when we bring in new technologies that we negotiate our contracts such that they're flexible, so we can determine who needs the technology." When evaluating new technologies to drive and support distributed workforces, Hughell suggests paring up individuals, which not only helps people learn, but drives adoption of the new technology and helps the company assess whether it's bringing the expected results. "I always tell my leaders inspect what you expect. Don't just buy a piece of technology, roll it out and expect miracles to happen," she says. "You have to drive adoption and usage, and you might find that it was the wrong technology and it's not serving your desired outcome or purpose, at which point, make that decision as a leader to fast fail and move on." The most important best practice is to do what's necessary to empower your employees to succeed. Providing libraries of bite-size instruction videos, for instance, can help team members learn specific features of new technology related to their work, without having to sit through long training sessions. Creating the atmosphere of learning and collaboration is as important to a company's success as implementing the new technology. "At the end of the day," says Hughell, "if you can show someone that you're going to help empower their success and help increase their productivity and reduce friction in their day-to-day operation, not many people would argue with that."

We remember Pic de la Mirandole Like a man who knew everything about the science of his time. But Einstein warns us: "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Knowledge alone is sterile and does not allow progress. The instrument of knowledge is intelligence or reason, and the instrument of imagination is instinct or the heart, according to Pascal's own words, and by this criterion of imagination the great thinker makes a figure of vision as evidenced by all his contributions to science also. "Intelligence has no proof, it must be erased. It is good only for menial tasks."

We all have seen these movies where AI takes over the world and realizes that humans are an unnecessary burden for the planet but is that really the future of AI? Many experts have divided opinions on whether AI will be beneficial to humanity in the future or it's the end but everyone agrees on the fact if done correctly it will have profound changes on society. It can be hard to estimate what the future of AI would contain but we can get a rough idea from the current trends that are currently happening. As AIs keep on getting smarter and more efficient means that it is inevitable that they are able to do one of the most complex jobs that humans have. As AI's don't need to be paid or given sick leave means that they will be the employers favorite choice.

From customer experience applications in banking to fraud detection in credit, financial organizations are leaning heavily on AI tools. One important aspect of AI in finance is making the technology explainable. Organizations must ensure that their models are unbiased and can be easily explained in light of increasing compliance and regulatory oversight of AI and machine learning technology. During the Ai4 2022 Finance Summit on March 1, H2O.ai CEO Sri Ambati spoke to attendees about explainable AI, AI governance and data governance. H2O.ai is an AI cloud vendor that develops an open source machine learning platform for enterprises.

Abductive reasoning, frequently misidentified as deductive reasoning, is the process of making a plausible prediction when faced with incomplete information. For example, given a photo showing a toppled truck and a police cruiser on a snowy freeway, abductive reasoning may lead someone to infer that dangerous road conditions caused an accident. Humans can quickly consider this sort of context to arrive at a hypothesis. But AI struggles, despite recent technical advances. Motivated to explore the challenge, researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the University of California, Berkeley, and the MIT-IBM Watson AI lab created a dataset called Sherlock, a collection of over 100,000 images of scenes paired with clues a viewer could use to answer questions about the scenes.