More and more enterprises are turning to a promising technology called RPA (robotic process automation) to become more productive and efficient. Successful implementation also helps to cut costs and reduce error rates. RPA can automate mundane and predictable tasks and processes leaving employees to focus more on high-value work. Other companies, see RPA as the next step before fully adopting intelligent automation technology such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. RPA is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the field of enterprise technology. In 2018 RPA software soared in value to $864 million, a growth of over 63%. In the course of this article, we clearly explain exactly what RPA really is and how it works. To help our understanding we will also explore the potential benefits and disadvantages of this technology. Finally, we will highlight some of the most powerful and exciting ways in which it is already transforming enterprises in a range of industries. Robotic Process Automation, or RPA for short, is a way of automating structured, repetitive, or rules-based tasks and processes. It has a number of different applications. Its tools can capture data, retrieve information, communicate with other digital systems and process transactions. Implementation can help to prevent human error, particularly when charged with completing long, repetitive tasks. It can also reduce labor costs. A report by Deloitte revealed that one large, commercial bank implemented RPA into 85 software bots. These were used to tackle 13 processes interacting with 1.5 million requests in a year.

Welcome back to Mixtape, the TechCrunch podcast that examines diversity, inclusion and the human labor that drives tech. This week, Megan moderated a panel at Sight Tech Global, a conference dedicated to fostering discussion among technology pioneers on how advances in AI and related technologies will alter the landscape of assistive technology. The panel featured three heavy hitters in the accessibility space: Haben Girma (pictured above), the first deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School and who is a human rights lawyer advancing disability justice; Lainey Feingold, a disability rights lawyer who was on the team that negotiated the first web accessibility agreement in the U.S. in 2000; and George Kerscher, the chief innovations officer for the DAISY Consortium. Among the topics they discussed were communicating via Zoom and other video platforms in the days of COVID, how tech companies have adhered to the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the need for a culture shift if we're going to realize any significant change. "It's all about a culture change to really make sure technology is accessible for everyone," Feingold told Megan. "And you can't get a culture change, I don't believe, by hammering people.

A number of major Chinese cities are to stop the use of facial recognition and other forms of unauthorized collection of people's personal identity as a new Civil Code comes into effect on Jan. 1. Companies, government-sponsored institutions, industrial associations and chambers of commerce will not be allowed to collect biometric data from people such as an image of their face, a recording of their voice or fingerprints from next year, the city of Tianjin said on Dec. 1. Property sales offices cannot collect scans of visitors' faces without their permission, the Bureau of Housing Security and Property Administration in Nanjing, eastern Jiangsu province said a few days ago. China will be adopting a new Civil Code next year that deems people's names and biometric data to be private information. The act of collecting this data can only be done in legal and proper ways without the use of force, it says.

Artificial intelligence has been the buzzword in 2020 and with the benefits of this technology evident around us; AI has had its own share of controversies. From algorithms¹ unfairly discriminating women in hiring and students complaining about unrealistic grades, there is no doubt that AI has evolved in 2020 and as 2021 beckons, it is time to take stock of what the year has been. With GPT3, deepfakes, and facial recognition making headlines in 2020, there are many arguments surrounding privacy and regulations. Clearview AI provides organizations, predominantly law enforcement agencies, with a database that is able to match images of faces with over three billion other facial pictures scraped from social media sites. The company has recently been hit with a series of reprisals from social media platforms, who have taken a hostile stance in response to Clearview AI's operations.

In contract analysis and contract automation, a knowledge base (KB) of legal entities is fundamental for performing tasks such as contract verification, contract generation and contract analytic. However, such a KB does not always exist nor can be produced in a short time. In this paper, we propose a clustering-based approach to automatically generate a reliable knowledge base of legal entities from given contracts without any supplemental references. The proposed method is robust to different types of errors brought by pre-processing such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Named Entity Recognition (NER), as well as editing errors such as typos. We evaluate our method on a dataset that consists of 800 real contracts with various qualities from 15 clients. Compared to the collected ground-truth data, our method is able to recall 84\% of the knowledge.

Timnit Gebru, a co-leader of Google's Ethical Artificial Intelligence team, said late Wednesday that she'd been abruptly fired from the search giant over an email she sent to colleagues. Gebru, a prominent AI researcher, has done studies on the dangers of facial recognition bias and has spoken out on the lack of diversity in the tech industry. In the wake of her departure, more than 1,400 Google workers, as well as more than 1,800 other industry professionals, signed an open letter in support of Gebru. "Instead of being embraced by Google as an exceptionally talented and prolific contributor, Dr. Gebru has faced defensiveness, racism, gaslighting, research censorship, and now a retaliatory firing," the letter read. In a series of tweets Wednesday night, Gebru said she was terminated for a message she sent to Google Brain Women and Allies, an internal email list at the company.

Many Google employees and others in the tech and academic communities are furious over the sudden exit from Google of a pioneer in the study of ethics in artificial intelligence--a departure they see as a failure by an industry titan to foster an environment supportive of diversity. Timnit Gebru is known for her research into bias and inequality in AI, and in particular for a 2018 paper she coauthored with Joy Buolamwini that highlighted how poorly commercial facial-recognition software fared when attempting to classify women and people of color. Their work sparked widespread awareness of issues common in AI today, particularly when the technology is tasked with identifying anything about human beings. At Google, Gebru was the co-leader of the company's ethical AI team, and one of very few Black employees at the company overall (3.7% of Google's employees are Black according to the company's 2020 annual diversity report)-- let alone in its AI division. The research scientist is also cofounder of the group Black in AI.

In the last years, AI safety gained international recognition in the light of heterogeneous safety-critical and ethical issues that risk overshadowing the broad beneficial impacts of AI. In this context, the implementation of AI observatory endeavors represents one key research direction. This paper motivates the need for an inherently transdisciplinary AI observatory approach integrating diverse retrospective and counterfactual views. We delineate aims and limitations while providing hands-on-advice utilizing concrete practical examples. Distinguishing between unintentionally and intentionally triggered AI risks with diverse socio-psycho-technological impacts, we exemplify a retrospective descriptive analysis followed by a retrospective counterfactual risk analysis. Building on these AI observatory tools, we present near-term transdisciplinary guidelines for AI safety. As further contribution, we discuss differentiated and tailored long-term directions through the lens of two disparate modern AI safety paradigms. For simplicity, we refer to these two different paradigms with the terms artificial stupidity (AS) and eternal creativity (EC) respectively. While both AS and EC acknowledge the need for a hybrid cognitive-affective approach to AI safety and overlap with regard to many short-term considerations, they differ fundamentally in the nature of multiple envisaged long-term solution patterns. By compiling relevant underlying contradistinctions, we aim to provide future-oriented incentives for constructive dialectics in practical and theoretical AI safety research.

"Communities should ask hard questions about these programs. As the power and scope of this technology expands, so does the need for privacy protection," said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union's Project on Speech, Privacy and Technology. "Drones can be used to investigate known crimes. But they are also sensors that can generate offenses." With the pandemic still worsening, drones are a way of policing at a distance, said Rahul Sidhu, an officer in Redondo Beach, near Los Angeles, which started a program similar to the one in Chula Vista just after the virus reached the United States.

RE2 Expands Intellectual Property with Invention of Fluid Rotary Joint for Underwater Manipulation PITTSBURGH, PA – Dec. 3, 2020 – RE2 Robotics, a leading developer of intelligent mobile manipulation systems, has announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued patent number 10,704,665 for the invention of a fluid rotary joint that is capable of precise positioning while being driven by both fluids and gasses, including water, hydraulic fluid, and air. The patent, "Fluid Rotary Joint and Method of Using the Same," further adds to the Company's mobile manipulation intellectual property and underwater robotics expertise. The invention, which was developed during the design of an inflatable underwater manipulator for explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) applications, can be used in robotic arms to provide precise rotational positioning for dexterous manipulation. It combines a strain wave gear and fluidic actuators in a compact, precise rotary joint. The strain wave gear uses materials with tunable load transmission characteristics for the flex spline, rather than expensive toothed interfaces.