This week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) celebrates America Recycles Week by hosting two days of free, virtual events that focus on creating a more robust and sustainable recycling system in the U.S. and abroad. Today, the America Recycles: Innovation Fair will feature more than 40 innovators from across the recycling system via virtual exhibit halls demonstrating their state-of-the-art products, services, outreach, and technologies. They are advancing the recycling system through strategies such as: deploying artificial intelligence robots to enhance operations at recycling facilities; using hard-to-recycle plastics in 3D printing materials; installing small system sorting units in stadiums and small communities; creating new construction materials from hard-to-recycle plastics; and using automated technology and recycled glass bottles to create new glassware. "EPA is proud to showcase top recycling innovators at the virtual Innovation Fair today," said EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler. "Tomorrow's America Recycles Summit will include EPA's announcement of the first National Recycling Goal, which will prompt a whole new level of dialogue among stakeholders on how to improve our domestic recycling infrastructure."

For the last year, Anna (not her real name) has been working as an Amazon "associate", in the kind of vast warehouse the company calls a fulfilment centre. For £10.50 an hour, she works four days a week, though, during busy periods, this sometimes goes up to five. Her shift begins at 7.15am and ends at 5.45pm. "When I get home," she says, "it's about 6.30. And I just go in, take a shower and go to bed. Anna is a picker in one of the company's most technologically advanced workplaces, in the south of England. This means she works in a metal enclosure in front of a screen that flashes up images of the products she has to put in the "totes" destined for the part of the warehouse where customer orders are made ready for posting out. Everything from DVDs to gardening equipment is brought to her by robot "drives": squat, droid-like devices that endlessly lift "pods" – tall fabric towers full of pockets that contain everything from DVDs to toys – and then speed them to the pickers. Everything has to happen quickly. According to the all-important metric by which a picker's performance is measured, Anna says she has to average 360 items an hour, or around 3,800 a day. In March, the Covid-19 lockdown meant that customer orders suddenly rocketed. Anna says that lots of her colleagues started putting in overtime, and new recruits arrived en masse. "They hired a lot of people," she says. "I thought there should have been fewer people in the warehouse, to have distancing." "They took out some of the tables because of 2-metre distancing, but it was impossible to find a free table or chair.

Addressing climate change is everyone's responsibility and AI has the potential to make a significant impact, yet only a fraction of organizations are actively using this technology to its full potential,

Acquisition Expands Medtronic's Artificial Intelligence and Data Capabilities, Becoming the First Company to Offer an Integrated Spine Solution Including AI-Driven Surgical Planning, Personalized Spinal Implants and Robotic Assisted Surgery DUBLIN, Nov. 16, 2020 /CNW/ -- Medtronic plc (NYSE:MDT), the global leader in medical technology, today announced that it has completed its friendly tender offer for France-based Medicrea International (Euronext Growth Paris: FR0004178572 – ALMED Medicrea; OTCQX Best Market – MRNTF), a pioneer in the transformation of spinal surgery through artificial intelligence (AI), predictive modeling and patient specific implants. On July 15, 2020, the parties announced a friendly voluntary all-cash tender offer at the price of €7.00 per Medicrea share. As a result of completion of the tender offer, Medtronic currently owns in excess of 90% of Medicrea's share capital and voting rights and will shortly request the implementation of a squeeze-out procedure under French law, which will result in Medicrea becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of Medtronic. This is Medtronic's seventh acquisition completed in 2020 and furthers Medtronic's strategic expansion into AI, machine learning and predictive analytics. Medicrea's product portfolio consists of 30 510(k) cleared or CE Marked implant technologies, utilized in spinal surgeries for adult deformity, pediatric deformity and degenerative disease.

AI-based electrocardiogram (ECG) technology developer AliveCor announced today that it has closed a $65 million Series E financing round. Mountain View, Calif.-based AliveCor plans to use proceeds from the financing round to accelerate the growth of its remote cardiology platform, both domestically and globally, according to a news release. AliveCor is augmenting its artificial intelligence-powered ECG with telehealth services and detection and condition management services. Omron, Khosla Ventures, WP Global Partners, Qualcomm Ventures and Bold Capital Partners, all existing investors, led the financing. AliveCor noted that its enhanced partnership with Omron in particular will position the company to include hypertension management within its service portfolio.

C3.ai intends to list its Class A common stock under the ticker symbol "AI" on the New York Stock Exchange. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. The offering is subject to market conditions, and there can be no assurance as to whether, or when, the offering may be completed or as to the actual size or terms of the offering. Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and BofA Securities are acting as lead book-running managers for the proposed offering. Deutsche Bank Securities is acting as a book-running manager for the proposed offering.

AI took center stage in recently-announced updates to the Alexa virtual voice assistant, and in the charges this week from the European Commission that Amazon is breaking EU competition rules. During Amazon's Alexa Live event held in July, the company announced a major update to Alexa's developer toolkit that brings AI improvements. Since launching in 2014, Amazon's voice assistant has shipped hundreds of millions of units, which are targeted by a sizable developer community offering voice apps, called Skills, that extend the Alexa default feature set. Just as the Android and iOS large selections of third party applications differentiate those operating systems, so Skill plays an important role in Amazon's growth strategy for Alexa, according to a recent account in siliconAngle. Amazon added deep learning models for natural language understanding that the company said will enable Skills to recognize users' voice commands with 15% higher accuracy on average.

Conversational AI agency VERSA is to partner Mogaé in a joint venture. Announcing a Diwali India launch, VERSA said its expansion into this country is to capitalise on demand for specialised conversational strategy and design in a market with a population of more than 1.3 billion people, and an installed base of nearly a billion mobile phones. VERSA India will be a 50/50 joint venture between VERSA (Headquartered in Melbourne, Australia; with US operations out of Seattle) and Mogaé Consultants, owned by Sandeep & Tanya Goyal. Dr. Sandeep Goyal, is a well-known advertising & media veteran who has been a past President of Rediffusion, ex-Group CEO of Zee Telefilms and former Founder Chairman of Dentsu India. Tanya Goyal has been a six-term member of the Governing Council of the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) and was Executive Director of Dentsu India.

The Japanese bank will help customers understand key social and economic activities using Orbital Insight's combination of satellite imagery, location data and artificial intelligence Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) announced today that it is partnering with Orbital Insight, the geospatial analytics company, to offer customers access to new data sources for better business decisions. SMBC will use Orbital Insight's GO platform to launch an analytics service that visualizes social and economic activities in near real-time by combining satellite imagery, anonymized location data and artificial intelligence. The service will initially focus on understanding macro trends like how people are shifting daily activities amidst current remote work requirements. SMBC has already piloted Orbital Insight's data for its proof of concept projects and confirmed its effectiveness. "When it comes to business risk, geospatial analytics and AI can make the invisible visible," said Katsunori Tanizaki, Senior Managing Executive Officer at SMBC. "The uncertainty of the pandemic makes that an even more important need for our customers, who are often managing global assets. Working with Orbital Insight on this new service combines SMBC's business insights as a financial institution with Silicon Valley's cutting-edge technology to help customers navigate the right decisions. Access to daily trends on thousands of global locations will be extremely valuable, especially across the construction, finance, retail and maritime sectors."

On Wednesday, London-based Synthesized launched a platform to help organizations identify and rectify biases in their data. Synthesized touts the platform as the "first publicly available solution to accurately detect and remove biases in data." A "freemium" Community Edition of the platform designed to mitigate bias in data is now available. "The reputational risk of all organisations is under threat due to biased data, and we've seen this will no longer be tolerated at any level. It's a burning priority now and must be dealt with as a matter of urgency, both from a legal and ethical standpoint," said Nicolai Baldin, CEO and founder of Synthesized in a press release.