To help its service technicians more efficiently repair and maintain its models, Mercedes-Benz USA is outfitting all of its authorized American dealerships with HoloLens 2 headsets. The devices are equipped with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, a mixed reality app that that lets users collaborate during hands-free video calls from their own computers. Organizations have long known the importance of business resiliency, but becoming resilient requires time and preparation, and the pandemic has forced many organizations to evolve at a pace few could have imagined. To recover and thrive within this new context presents new challenges. That is why we are partnering with customers to support faster adoption of digital capabilities.

See list and speakers following the plenary agenda, below. The Athens Roundtable is committed to advancing legal stakeholder education in AI and the law. The Roundtable is being held with the intention that attendees qualify for continuing legal education in their areas of professional practice. Attendance is upon invitation only. If you wish to attend, please request an invitation at aiathens@thefuturesociety.org.

Onit, a workflow software company based in Houston with a legal component, announced this week that it has acquired 2018 TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield alum McCarthyFinch. Onit intends to use the startup's AI skills to beef up its legal workflow software offerings. The companies did not share the purchase price. After evaluating a number of companies in the space, Onit focused on McCarthyFinch, which gives it an artificial intelligence component the company's legal workflow software had been lacking. "We evaluated about a dozen companies in the AI space and dug in deep on six of them. McCarthyFinch stood out from the pack. They had the strongest technology and the strongest team," Eric M. Elfman, CEO and co-founder of Onit told TechCrunch.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a digital frontier that will have a profound impact on the world. It will have immense technological, economic, and social consequences and will transform the way humans work, live, and produce and distribute goods and services. Although it is too early to say, it is clear that AI will affect traditional intellectual property (IP) concepts. Commercial AI-generated music and AI-created inventions are not so far, and it is expected that it will define the concepts of the'composer', 'author', and'inventor'. But how that will happen is not clear yet.

Frequently described as the world's most important number because it underpins trillions of dollars of transactions, the London interbank offered rate (Libor) has persisted until now despite a scandal that caused lasting reputational damage to the entire financial system. Libor is the key interest rate benchmark for mortgages, loans and contracts but it has been tainted since 2012 when it emerged that banks had misstated their Libor rate submissions, often in collusion, to make better returns. The controversy led to at least five traders going to jail in the UK, and US and UK regulators extracting penalties totalling about $10bn. Regulators want Libor phased out by December 31 2021, and banks are pivoting to alternative risk-free rates such as Sonia (sterling overnight interbank average rate). Its demise is already a headache for law firms and banking clients, which must examine hundreds of thousands of legal contracts containing references to the Libor rate and then rewrite and "repaper" them to ensure they include the new reference rates.

This week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) celebrates America Recycles Week by hosting two days of free, virtual events that focus on creating a more robust and sustainable recycling system in the U.S. and abroad. Today, the America Recycles: Innovation Fair will feature more than 40 innovators from across the recycling system via virtual exhibit halls demonstrating their state-of-the-art products, services, outreach, and technologies. They are advancing the recycling system through strategies such as: deploying artificial intelligence robots to enhance operations at recycling facilities; using hard-to-recycle plastics in 3D printing materials; installing small system sorting units in stadiums and small communities; creating new construction materials from hard-to-recycle plastics; and using automated technology and recycled glass bottles to create new glassware. "EPA is proud to showcase top recycling innovators at the virtual Innovation Fair today," said EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler. "Tomorrow's America Recycles Summit will include EPA's announcement of the first National Recycling Goal, which will prompt a whole new level of dialogue among stakeholders on how to improve our domestic recycling infrastructure."

A new design of an AI assistant that has become increasingly popular is that of an "aggregated assistant" - realized as an orchestrated composition of several individual skills or agents that can each perform atomic tasks. In this paper, we will talk about the role of planning in the automated composition of such assistants and explore how concepts in automated planning can help to establish transparency of the inner workings of the assistant to the end-user. Conversational assistants such as Siri, Google Assistant, Figure 1: Simplified architecture diagram of Verdi (Rizk et and Alexa have found increased user adoption over the last al.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) governance regulates the exercise of authority and control over the management of AI. It aims at leveraging AI through effective use of data and minimization of AI-related cost and risk. While topics such as AI governance and AI ethics are thoroughly discussed on a theoretical, philosophical, societal and regulatory level, there is limited work on AI governance targeted to companies and corporations. This work views AI products as systems, where key functionality is delivered by machine learning (ML) models leveraging (training) data. We derive a conceptual framework by synthesizing literature on AI and related fields such as ML. Our framework decomposes AI governance into governance of data, (ML) models and (AI) systems along four dimensions. It relates to existing IT and data governance frameworks and practices. It can be adopted by practitioners and academics alike. For practitioners the synthesis of mainly research papers, but also practitioner publications and publications of regulatory bodies provides a valuable starting point to implement AI governance, while for academics the paper highlights a number of areas of AI governance that deserve more attention.

We present an approach to data fusion that combines the interpretability of structured probabilistic graphical models with the flexibility of neural networks. The proposed method, lightweight data fusion (LDF), emphasizes posterior analysis over latent variables using two types of information: primary data, which are well-characterized but with limited availability, and auxiliary data, readily available but lacking a well-characterized statistical relationship to the latent quantity of interest. The lack of a forward model for the auxiliary data precludes the use of standard data fusion approaches, while the inability to acquire latent variable observations severely limits direct application of most supervised learning methods. LDF addresses these issues by utilizing neural networks as conjugate mappings of the auxiliary data: nonlinear transformations into sufficient statistics with respect to the latent variables. This facilitates efficient inference by preserving the conjugacy properties of the primary data and leads to compact representations of the latent variable posterior distributions. We demonstrate the LDF methodology on two challenging inference problems: (1) learning electrification rates in Rwanda from satellite imagery, high-level grid infrastructure, and other sources; and (2) inferring county-level homicide rates in the USA by integrating socio-economic data using a mixture model of multiple conjugate mappings.

A jointly developed new report by Europol, the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) and Trend Micro looking into current and predicted criminal uses of artificial intelligence (AI) was released today. The report provides law enforcers, policymakers and other organisations with information on existing and potential attacks leveraging AI and recommendations on how to mitigate these risks. "AI promises the world greater efficiency, automation and autonomy. At a time where the public is getting increasingly concerned about the possible misuse of AI, we have to be transparent about the threats, but also look into the potential benefits from AI technology." said Edvardas Šileris, Head of Europol's European Cybercrime Centre. "This report will help us not only to anticipate possible malicious uses and abuses of AI, but also to prevent and mitigate those threats proactively. This is how we can unlock the potential AI holds and benefit from the positive use of AI systems."