It could be argued artificial intelligence (AI) is already the indispensable tool of the 21st century. From helping doctors diagnose and treat patients to rapidly advancing new drug discoveries, it's our trusted partner in so many ways. Now it has found its way into the once exclusively-human domain of love and relationships. With AI-systems as matchmakers, in the coming decades it may become common to date a personalised avatar. This was explored in the 2014 movie "Her", in which a writer living in near-future Los Angeles develops affection for an AI system. The sci-fi film won an Academy Award for depicting what seemed like a highly unconventional love story.

Artificial intelligence seems to have transformed almost all the sectors across the world. On that note, healthcare sector has seen immense transformations over the years and the extent to which life has become convenient cannot be merely put into words. With 2020 being a year full of challenges especially on the healthcare front, not praising the healthcare sector for how it stood as a pillar is just not justified. Not surprising though, this sector has a plethora of opportunities that leverage technology to be deployed, hence paving way for Artificial Intelligence to explore a lot more areas. Having said that, AI has led to a lot of developments in the healthcare sector, making life simpler like never before.

One of the biggest lessons Australia and New Zealand business leaders can take from the past 12 months is that a climate of uncertainty is now the new normal. The shift in customer behaviour brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with rapid information technology changes, has already presented significant challenges. As a result, many organisations have had to bring forward their digital transformation plans and complete projects in weeks or months rather than years. During 2021, CIOs will have to work throughout their organisations and apply digital technologies and data to unlock new business opportunities. They must also work to promote a growth mindset that will help to unlock fresh innovation and agility. Adopting such a growth mindset will require CIOs and IT teams to embrace six key trends during the coming 12 months.

Even massive events like the 54th edition of Consumer Electronics Show (CES) have gone virtual due to the current pandemic. Since 1967, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which is the North American trade association for the consumer technology industry, has been organising the fair, and this year was not going to be any different--well, except they had to take the almost 300,000m${} 2$ from CES 2020 to the cloud. In this post, I mainly put the focus on current and future hardware/robotics trends presented at CES 2021 (because we all love to make predictions, even during uncertain times). "Innovation accelerates and bunches up during economic downturns only to be unleashed as the economy begins to recover, ushering in powerful waves of technological change"--Christopher Freeman, British Economist. With this quote, I start the first session on'my show' of CES 2021, 'Tech trends to watch' by CTA (see their slides here).

The priorities of every financial institution have been impacted by the pandemic, with some firms believing that a greater investment needs to be made in technology, others focusing on new products and services, and still others wanting to improve components of trust and security. The foundation of each of these priorities is a combination of a need to improve customer experiences while managing operating costs in an uncertain economic environment. The reassessment of corporate priorities is being done with the backdrop of consumer standards for engagement that have moved away from one-size-fits-all transactional experiences to contextualized experiences that are personalized across multiple touchpoints and channels. At the same time, as consumers widen their scope of understanding of what can be achieved with digital engagement, more of them will be willing to pay more for services that enhance their financial lifestyle through real-time insights, proactive recommendations and simplified engagement. According to Salesforce's Trends in Financial Services report, there is an urgent need for the industry to transform data and insights into actionable outcomes that are consumer-centric.

COVID-19 has infected more than 23 million Americans and killed 386,000 of them to date, since the global pandemic began last March. Complicating the public health response is the fact that we still know so little about how the virus operates -- such as why some patients remain asymptomatic while it ravages others. Effectively allocating resources like ICU beds and ventilators becomes a Sisyphean task when doctors can only guess as to who might recover and who might be intubated within the next 96 hours. However a trio of new machine learning algorithms developed by Facebook's AI division (FAIR) in cooperation with NYU Langone Health can help predict patient outcomes up to four days in advance using just a patient's chest x-rays. The models can, respectively, predict patient deterioration based on either a single X-ray or a sequence as well as determine how much supplemental oxygen the patient will likely need.

Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) is a global biopharmaceutical company making advancements in oncology, haematology, immunology and cardiovascular disease. BMS are dedicated to helping patients prevail over serious diseases through a diverse and promising pipeline and new scientific platforms. Prior to 2019, in partnership with the Oxford Medical Sciences Division, Celgene co-developed and provided support for fellowships which will continue as the Oxford-BMS Translational Research Fellowship Programme. The goals of this scheme are to stimulate new scientific discovery and translation and to facilitate skills and people transfer between researchers in academia and industry. This programme offers fellows an opportunity to gain exposure to the field of commercial drug discovery and development.

Every financial institution is looking to digital transformation to meet rising customer expectations for speed and convenience, lower its operating cost, and fend off competition, including from tech companies moving into financial services. Some are spending over 10% of yearly revenue on technology investments, according to Bloomberg. "This is a huge investment and most financial institutions cannot support this for the long term," says Michael Fei, SME banking CEO at OneConnect Financial Technology, an associate of Ping An Insurance. The covid-19 pandemic has revealed how even financial institutions that considered themselves digitally advanced are, in reality, still wedded to analog processes along the chain of processing. "For many financial institutions, this has been a wake-up call," says Fei. "In the past, many had thought that if they have an online portal and a mobile application then that's enough. But now they've realized it's not. Some banks have online portals and mobile apps where you can apply for loans, but they still need to send items to the customer and carry out on-site inspection before they can process the loans, which hasn't been possible during covid. Banks have had to reshape and redesign the whole process of their lending products."

This post contains a list of the AI-related seminars that are scheduled to take place between now and the end of February 2021. We've also listed recent past seminars that are available for you to watch. All events detailed here are free and open for anyone to attend virtually. This list includes forthcoming seminars scheduled to take place between 15 January and 28 February. Zero-shot (human-AI) coordination (in Hanabi) and ridge rider Speaker: Jakob Foerster (Facebook, University of Toronto & Vector Institute) Organised by: University College London Zoom link is here.

CES 2021 was unlike any trade show we've ever experienced. Due to Covid-19, it was "all digital," which really meant "mostly websites." To find the hot stuff this year, we didn't wander the millions of square feet of the Las Vegas Convention Center and surrounding facilities, but instead watched streamed presentations, combed through hundreds of exhibitors' "digital activations" and, of course, heard plenty of pitches from entrepreneurs and marketing folks eager to keep us in the loop--global pandemic or not. That means we weren't able to touch and feel the innovations like in years past--although we did get some stuff sent to our homes. Still, it hasn't stopped us from bringing you the craziest, coolest and kookiest gadgets we could find.