Imtiaz Adam, Twitter @Deeplearn007 Updated a few sections in Sep 2020 Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly affecting the world around us. It is increasingly making an impact in retail, financial services, along with other sectors of the economy.

Despite the global impact of COVID-19, 47% of artificial intelligence (AI) investments were unchanged since the start of the pandemic and 30% of organizations actually planned to increase such investments, according to a Gartner poll. Only 16% had temporarily suspended AI investments, and just 7% had decreased them. During the pandemic, for example, AI came to the rescue. Chatbots helped answer the flood of pandemic-related questions, computer vision helped maintain social distancing and machine learning (ML) models were indispensable for modeling the effects of reopening economies. "If AI as a general concept was positioned on this year's Gartner Hype Cycle, it would be rolling off the Peak of Inflated Expectations. By that we mean that AI is starting to deliver on its potential and its benefits for businesses are becoming a reality," says Svetlana Sicular, VP Analyst, Gartner.

Starfleet's star android, Lt. Commander Data, has been enlisted by his renegade android "brother" Lore to join a rebellion against humankind -- much to the consternation of Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the USS Enterprise. "The reign of biological life-forms is coming to an end," Lore tells Picard. "You, Picard, and those like you, are obsolete." In real life, the era of smart machines has already arrived. They haven't completely taken over the world yet, but they're off to a good start.

Healthcare is an important industry which offers value-based care to millions of people, while at the same time becoming top revenue earners for many countries. Today, the Healthcare industry in the US alone earns a revenue of $1.668 trillion. The US also spends more on healthcare per capita as compared to most other developed or developing nations. Quality, Value, and Outcome are three buzzwords that always accompany healthcare and promise a lot, and today, healthcare specialists and stakeholders around the globe are looking for innovative ways to deliver on this promise. Technology-enabled smart healthcare is no longer a flight of fancy, as Internet-connected medical devices are holding the health system as we know it together from falling apart under the population burden.

When Shamir Rahim, founder and CEO of VersaFleet, transformed his bio-medical startup into an AI-powered transportation management system, he never imagined being at the epicenter (in a good way) of a supply chain revolution during a worldwide pandemic. As anyone desperately searching for toilet paper discovered earlier this year, the last mile is the crucial link in every supply chain. VersaFleet's SaaS-based cloud platform relies on AI to meet one of the toughest supply chain challenges: last mile delivery. "We wanted to provide our customers with a command center view of last mile product delivery with cost and time savings," said Shamir Rahim, founder and CEO of VersaFleet. "As our customers slowly open up again, VersaFleet is providing greater agility so they can quickly adjust logistics for maximum efficiency, whether people are out sick or returning to work, quarantines are lifted or imposed again, and operational hours shift at any time."

In a restaurant landscape where lean profit margins are getting even slimmer due to the necessary COVID-19 safety measures of distancing, staying afloat is an increasingly difficult challenge. Small wonder, then, that some operators are using whatever means they can to stand out from their competition. Robot waiters, although not a new phenomenon, are making headlines around the world again, but this time with a socially distanced twist. At Claypot Rice, a Chinese restaurant in Calgary, robot greeters and servers chat with guests, take orders and run food from the kitchen. These are typically three distinct roles performed by humans, a fact not lost on owner Alex Guo.

Academics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Massachusetts General Hospital have demonstrated how neural networks can be trained to administer anesthetic during surgery. Over the past decade, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and deep learning algorithms have been developed and applied to a range of sectors and applications, including in the medical field. In healthcare, the potential of neural networks and deep learning has been demonstrated in the automatic analysis of large medical datasets to detect patterns and trends; improved diagnosis procedures, tumor detection based on radiology images, and more recently, an exploration into robotic surgery. Now, neural networking may have new, previously-unexplored applications in the surgical and drug administration areas. A team made up of MIT and Mass General scientists, as reported by Tech Xplore, have developed and trained a neural network to administrator Propofol, a drug commonly used as general anesthesia when patients are undergoing medical procedures.

Here at Visory we believe that the millions of cameras sitting idly around us, providing at most some emergency'after the fact' analysis or simple statistics capabilities at best, could be harnessed in a secure and safe way to create value from the images the cameras are seeing. There is so much unused yet valuable data out there that is simply not being harnessed to create value. What we are talking about are things like whether a car crash is going to happen or a crime might be committed for example. Visory is here to turn cameras into predictive sensors and turn these'dumb' devices into smart and helpful ones. During the beginning of 2020 Visory was selected by the Dubai Future Foundation as one of the companies to participate in a governmental project to provide smart monitoring systems for the Dubai Road and Transport Authority.

Let's go back to a simpler time. It is the early or late 90s. You are eight years old, waking up early to catch the latest action-filled episodes of your Saturday morning cartoons; TV shows that portray what technology may look like in the future. In Japan, popular anime shows like Outlaw Star, Mobile Suit Gundam, and Cowboy Bebop. These shows would pull viewers in, giving us a taste of the future for breakfast. They would show us worlds where humans and cyborgs were almost unidentifiable from each other, where trips to space were as simple as catching a bus, or where artificial intelligence and robotics were used to better humanity (and used for epic battles in space).

There has been a loneliness pandemic in the last 20 years, marked by growing rates of opioid use and suicides, increased health care costs, lost productivity, and rising mortality. According to the experts, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, with its associated lockdowns and social distancing, has only made things worse. Precisely evaluating the depth and breadth of societal loneliness is a tedious task, restricted by available tools, like self-reports. Now in a new proof-of-concept article, recently published online in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry on September 24th, 2020, a team of researcher headed by scientists from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, has utilized artificial intelligence technologies to study the natural language patterns (NLP) to determine the levels of loneliness in older adults. Most studies use either a direct question of'how often do you feel lonely,' which can lead to biased responses due to stigma associated with loneliness or the UCLA Loneliness Scale which does not explicitly use the word'lonely.