Despite being a poor and unequal country, Costa Rica has managed to close the gap in access to technology for its citizens, and it is now leading the way in the region. The country started the process of admission for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) several years ago with reforms on laws, the creation of policies and the use of Computer Technologies to improve education, information access, financial markets, competitiveness, and a more open government. In May 2020, Costa Rica became the first Central American or Caribbean country invited to become an OECD member. The OECD has almost 60 years of existence, and its members are many of the world's more developed countries that work together to shape policies that foster prosperity, equality, opportunity, and well-being for their citizens. Costa Rica will become the 38th member, the fourth of Latin America.

In today's world, it is nearly impossible to avoid voice-controlled digital assistants. From the interactive intelligent agents used by corporations, government agencies, and even personal devices, automated speech recognition (ASR) systems, combined with machine learning (ML) technology, increasingly are being used as an input modality that allows humans to interact with machines, ostensibly via the most common and simplest way possible: by speaking in a natural, conversational voice. Yet as a study published in May 2020 by researchers from Stanford University indicated, the accuracy level of ASR systems from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others vary widely depending on the speaker's race. While this study only focused on the differing accuracy levels for a small sample of African American and white speakers, it points to a larger concern about ASR accuracy and phonological awareness, including the ability to discern and understand accents, tonalities, rhythmic variations, and speech patterns that may differ from the voices used to initially train voice-activated chatbots, virtual assistants, and other voice-enabled systems. The Stanford study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, measured the error rates of ASR technology from Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, and Microsoft, by comparing the system's performance in understanding identical phrases (taken from pre-recorded interviews across two datasets) spoken by 73 black and 42 white speakers, then comparing the average word error rate (WER) for black and white speakers.

Industry 4.0 signifies a seismic shift in the way the modern factories and industrial systems operate. They consist of large-scale integration across an entire ecosystem where data inside and outside the organization converges to create new products, predict market demands and reinvent the value chain. In Industry 4.0, we see the convergence of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) at scale. The convergence of IT/OT is pushing the boundaries of conventional corporate security strategies where the focus has always been placed on protecting networks, systems, applications and processed data involving people and information. In the context of manufacturing industries with smart factories and industrial systems, robotics, sensor technology, 3D printing, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data platforms work in tandem to deliver breakthrough efficiencies.

Cape Canaveral, Florida – A NASA spacecraft is stuffed with so much asteroid rubble from this week's grab that it's jammed open and precious particles are drifting away in space, scientists said Friday. Scientists announced the news three days after the spacecraft named Osiris-Rex briefly touched asteroid Bennu, NASA's first attempt at such a mission. The mission's lead scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, said Tuesday's operation 200 million miles away collected far more material than expected for return to Earth – in the hundreds of grams. The sample container on the end of the robot arm penetrated so deeply into the asteroid and with such force, however, that rocks got sucked in and became wedged around the rim of the lid. Scientists estimate the sampler pressed as much as 19 inches (48 centimeters) into the rough, crumbly, black terrain.

Chris' note: Last night, 25,997 of your fellow readers tuned in to watch Silicon Valley insider Jeff Brown's Beyond Exponential summit. It's easy to see why it was so popular… Jeff has handed readers the chance to close out gains of 221%, 239%, and even 332% from stocks that harness the power of exponential growth. And after crisscrossing the U.S. during the pandemic, he revealed for the first time his No. 1 way to profit from exponential tech over the next decade. Then read on below to hear from Jeff on why one of the best hunting grounds for exponential growth plays is artificial intelligence (AI). In the summer of 1956, John McCarthy was a young assistant professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College. He met with other scientists to discuss a topic that most people considered science fiction… thinking machines.

The software should be able to speed up the time in takes to separate truth from fiction.

That's key, since inconvenience is the enemy of sales. The pandemic wreaked havoc on supply chains, which, coupled with consumer reluctance to buy nondiscretionary items, reduced data earlier this year. Retailers that could afford AI could adjust, often by tapping nontraditional data. "Mobile is the new mall," says Cowen analyst Oliver Chen, who notes that machine learning allows brands to build one-on-one relationships with consumers at scale. That's part of the rationale behind Walmart's bid for TikTok, which provides data on how younger shoppers engage with brands via social media.

A NASA spacecraft is stuffed with so much asteroid rubble from this week's grab that it's jammed open and precious particles are drifting away in space, scientists said Friday. Scientists announced the news three days after the spacecraft named Osiris-Rex briefly touched asteroid Bennu 200 million miles away. The mission's lead scientist, Dante Lauretta, said Tuesday's operation collected far more material than expected for return to Earth -- in the hundreds of grams. The sample container on the end of the robot arm penetrated so deeply into the asteroid and with such force, however, that rocks got sucked in and became wedged around the rim of the lid. The team was scrambling to put the sample container into the return capsule as early as Tuesday -- much sooner than originally planned -- for the long trip home.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer the stuff of science fiction. The technology is already disrupting multiple industries, many of which impact you on a daily basis. Own an iPhone X? Its facial recognition system is powered by AI. Ever been redirected by Google Maps because of an accident or construction ahead? And those are just a couple of small examples.

COVID-19 pandemic has an unprecedented impact all over the world since early 2020. During this public health crisis, reliable forecasting of the disease becomes critical for resource allocation and administrative planning. The results from compartmental models such as SIR and SEIR are popularly referred by CDC and news media. With more and more COVID-19 data becoming available, we examine the following question: Can a direct data-driven approach without modeling the disease spreading dynamics outperform the well referred compartmental models and their variants? In this paper, we show the possibility. It is observed that as COVID-19 spreads at different speed and scale in different geographic regions, it is highly likely that similar progression patterns are shared among these regions within different time periods. This intuition lead us to develop a new neural forecasting model, called Attention Crossing Time Series (\textbf{ACTS}), that makes forecasts via comparing patterns across time series obtained from multiple regions. The attention mechanism originally developed for natural language processing can be leveraged and generalized to materialize this idea. Among 13 out of 18 testings including forecasting newly confirmed cases, hospitalizations and deaths, \textbf{ACTS} outperforms all the leading COVID-19 forecasters highlighted by CDC.