To describe the future of work, Richard Baldwin is developing a new lexicon. The professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva warns that we are unprepared for the ways in which new technology is changing the nature of globalization. Baldwin's new book, The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work, is a natural follow-up to his 2016 book, The Great Convergence. Three years ago, he explained how a third wave of globalization--a collapse in the cost of the movement of people thanks to technology--would be the most disruptive, because it hits workers in the service sector. Baldwin's new book, published earlier this year, breaks down what this disruption will entail.

The Scelbi was initially advertised in the back of an amateur radio magazine in 1974. The product would only sell about 200 units and was discontinued before the end of the decade.

WASHINGTON - Blacksburg was already well prepared when the U.S. government announced in April that the Virginia town would be home to the country's first commercial drone delivery service. Virginia Tech University, based in Blacksburg, has for years hosted a major drone development program, which has carried out experimental deliveries of ice cream, fast food and more. "I moved (to Blacksburg) last August, and when I was telling people I was moving, they said, 'I know somebody there had their Chipotle (Mexican restaurant chain) delivered by drone!' " said Megan Duncan, a communications professor at Virginia Tech. So, when Wing became the first drone company to be approved as an air carrier by the federal government, allowing the Google parent company Alphabet Inc. to start drone deliveries in and around Blacksburg, many of the locals were excited, Duncan said. "I think there's superinteresting possibilities for remote areas that are underserved, particularly with people who need prescriptions and can't make a 45-minute drive," she said by phone.

There are exciting opportunities if you're thinking about higher education, reskilling or specialising. Government has introduced a new industry funded AI Masters programme, beginning with at least 200 new AI Masters students in September 2019. As part of the Industrial Strategy, Government is committed to putting the UK at the forefront of the artificial intelligence and data revolution. A Masters degree is a relatively quick way to upskill existing employees, returners to work, or individuals interested in converting from other disciplines. It is expected that this programme will expand to include more students year-on-year.

Self-driving vehicles, dating apps which give out relationship advice, humanoid robots that crack jokes and get upset... With a global market that is expected to reach US$35,870 million by 2025 from its direct revenue sources, artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just the subject of science fiction books. According to a study carried out by IDC, in the ASEAN region, AI adoption rates are currently on the rise and growth has almost doubled in comparison to last year. When it comes to adopting this emerging technology, Indonesia is leading the way, with 24.6% of companies already embracing AI in some capacity. Thailand comes in second and the bronze medal goes to Singapore. This is somewhat surprising, considering the city state is normally something of a trailblazer in the region when it comes to embracing new technologies.

In 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin famously stated that whoever becomes the leader in artificial intelligence "will become the ruler of the world." Most experts on technology and security would agree with Putin about the importance of AI, which will ultimately reshape healthcare, transportation, industry, national security, and more. Nevertheless, Moscow's recognition of AI's importance will not produce enough breakthroughs to obtain the technological edge that it so deeply desires. Russia will ultimately fail in its quest to become a leader in AI because of its inability to foster a culture of innovation. Russia's anxieties about competing in the information age are far from new. In 1983, then-Soviet Minister of Defense Nikolai Ogarkov lamented to the New York Times that in the United States, "small children -- even before they begin school -- play with computers….here

The formalism of anchor words has enabled the development of fast topic modeling algorithms with provable guarantees. In this paper, we introduce a protocol that allows users to interact with anchor words to build customized and interpretable topic models. Experimental evidence validating the usefulness of our approach is also presented.

Imitation learning is the process by which one agent tries to learn how to perform a certain task using information generated by another, often more-expert agent performing that same task. Conventionally, the imitator has access to both state and action information generated by an expert performing the task (e.g., the expert may provide a kinesthetic demonstration of object placement using a robotic arm). However, requiring the action information prevents imitation learning from a large number of existing valuable learning resources such as online videos of humans performing tasks. To overcome this issue, the specific problem of imitation from observation (IfO) has recently garnered a great deal of attention, in which the imitator only has access to the state information (e.g., video frames) generated by the expert. In this paper, we provide a literature review of methods developed for IfO, and then point out some open research problems and potential future work.

City Logistics is characterized by multiple stakeholders that often have different views of such a complex system. From a public policy perspective, identifying stakeholders, issues and trends is a daunting challenge, only partially addressed by traditional observation systems. Nowadays, social media is one of the biggest channels of public expression and is often used to communicate opinions and content related to City Logistics. The idea of this research is that analysing social media content could help in understanding the public perception of City logistics. This paper offers a methodology for collecting content from Twitter and implementing Machine Learning techniques (Unsupervised Learning and Natural Language Processing), to perform content and sentiment analysis. The proposed methodology is applied to more than 110 000 tweets containing City Logistics key-terms. Results allowed the building of an Interest Map of concepts and a Sentiment Analysis to determine if City Logistics entries are positive, negative or neutral.

Imitation from observation is the framework of learning tasks by observing demonstrated state-only trajectories. Recently, adversarial approaches have achieved significant performance improvements over other methods for imitating complex behaviors. However, these adversarial imitation algorithms often require many demonstration examples and learning iterations to produce a policy that is successful at imitating a demonstrator's behavior. This high sample complexity often prohibits these algorithms from being deployed on physical robots. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that addresses the sample inefficiency problem by utilizing ideas from trajectory centric reinforcement learning algorithms. We test our algorithm and conduct experiments using an imitation task on a physical robot arm and its simulated version in Gazebo and will show the improvement in learning rate and efficiency.