After hovering at around $10 consistently, the price of a five-pound bag of Nishiki medium grain rice shot up to $30 on Amazon.com in March and hit a peak of $59.99 at 9 p.m. on Saturday, March 21, according to the Amazon price tracker Keepa. As of Friday, April 24, the bag of rice was priced at around $20. Prices on Amazon have been volatile since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States. By the end of March, Keepa's data revealed, an eight-pack of Barilla spaghetti, whose price normally hovers around $10, shot up to $49.25. The cost of an eight-pack of Skippy Superchunk Peanut Butter nearly quadrupled, from $12.52 to $45. COVID-19 has made the public more aware of price fluctuations on basics like toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and dried goods, as demand for those products surged beyond expectations.

Organizations are turning to technology to help stay connected and engaged with customers. As social distancing has put a hamper on in-person experiences, stores and brands are looking for additional ways to still provide their products and services to customers. Companies all over the world are fighting for customer attention, and they are using technology to discover new ways to get it. As such they are turning to technologies such as AI to help. Industries are using artificial intelligence to help organize, improve and streamline tasks such as creating custom experiences, personalized emails, offers, chatbots, and various other hyperpersonalized experiences.

More than three-quarters (78%) of consumers worldwide say companies must address bias in artificial intelligence (AI) and new research from Genpact (NYSE: G), a global professional services firm focused on delivering digital transformation, finds that they will reward businesses that take action. The study, now in its third year, underscores how AI continues to present opportunities for growth, but businesses still have work to do to address customers' concerns about bias and workers' concerns about equity in re-skilling opportunities. Empathising deeply with customer concerns is what will separate the winners from losers. Genpact's study, AI 360: Hold, fold, or double down?, shows that while 69% of UK consumers worry about AI discriminating against them, and 64% fear that AI will make decisions that affect them without their knowledge, companies that understand these issues and act accordingly can succeed. The study analyses perceptions of three distinct audiences that are critical to AI's widespread adoption in business: senior executives, workers, and consumers.

It is difficult to decide upon the efficacy of an online sale simply from the discount offered on commodities. Different features have different influence on the price of a product which must be taken into consideration when determining the significance of a discount. In this paper we have proposed a machine learning based heuristic to quantify the \textit{"significance"} of the discount offered on any commodity. Our proposed technique can quantify the significance of the discount based on features and the original price, and hence can guide a buyer during a sale season by predicting the efficacy of the sale. We have applied this technique on the Flipkart Summer Sale dataset using Support Vector Machine, which predicts the efficacy of the sale with an accuracy of 91.11\%. Our result shows that very few mobile phones have a significant discount during the Flipkart Summer Sale.

AWS is excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Augmented AI (Amazon A2I), a new service that makes it easy to implement human reviews of machine learning (ML) predictions at scale. Amazon A2I removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting associated with building and managing expensive and complex human review systems, so you can ensure your ML models produce accurate predictions. Amazon A2I enables humans and machines to do what they do best by easily inserting human judgment into the ML pipeline. Amazon A2I provides built-in human review workflows for common ML tasks such as content moderation and text extraction from documents, in combination with Amazon Rekognition and Amazon Textract. You can also create your own human review workflows for ML models built with Amazon SageMaker or with any on-premises or cloud tools via its API.

As we gather with family and friends in video spaces, with our virtual backgrounds and touched-up faces, our actual bodies are safely secreted away in our modern bunkers, waiting for the day we might return to the living. In this context, there is something uneasy in streaming the new Amazon Prime series Upload. Like other shows that have explored the intersections between technology and society, Upload questions what it means to be truly human--and, in particular, about the potential of some part of our selves living on in digital form. The plot follows some standard tropes, including a whodunit, a romance, and a character who does a lot of growing up after he has died. But beneath this, we are presented with set pieces that make strange the possibilities of our digital selves living rich lives after death, and that question what it means to live full lives in the meantime.

The demand for convenient retail is the main force shaping the industry today and both online shops and brick-and-mortar stores strive to offer the best experience to their customers. And while there are many strategies devised to increase customer satisfaction in digital retail, physical stores still struggle with meeting shoppers' expectations. At Abto Software, we have already developed an easily deployable Cashierless Checkout for retail outlets that eliminates queues and ensures the growth of the store attendance. Today we offer yet another retail automation technique: camera-based product recognition technology for smart fridges and intelligent vending machines. Abto Computer Vision engineers have developed an AI-driven grocery product recognition model for vending machines and smart fridges.

Artificial Intelligence is anticipated to disrupt every business and enterprises across the world. One of the major factors that drive the growth of artificial intelligence market in retail is the advancement in big data, and adoption of artificial intelligence enabled devices and services across various different domains. Additionally, the expansion of human-aware artificial intelligence systems and the wide scope of AI technologies are the opportunities in retail market that exist at present. Further, artificial intelligence technologies are the future for many industries that are determined for effective, low-cost operations and high productivity in their respective business segments and markets. The factors that drive the market growth comprise of growing need for surveillance and monitoring at a brick and mortar store, rising responsiveness and application of artificial intelligence in the retail industry for effective logistics and product delivery, improved user-experience, amended productivity, and higher return on investment (RoI).

Artificial Intelligence is anticipated to disrupt every business and enterprises across the world. One of the major factors that drive the growth of artificial intelligence market in retail is the advancement in big data, and adoption of artificial intelligence enabled devices and services across various different domains. Additionally, the expansion of human-aware artificial intelligence systems and the wide scope of AI technologies are the opportunities in retail market that exist at present. Further, artificial intelligence technologies are the future for many industries that are determined for effective, low-cost operations and high productivity in their respective business segments and markets. The factors that drive the market growth comprise of growing need for surveillance and monitoring at a brick and mortar store, rising responsiveness and application of artificial intelligence in the retail industry for effective logistics and product delivery, improved user-experience, amended productivity, and higher return on investment (RoI).

About Malong Technologies Malong Technologies is a global leader in artificial intelligence for product recognition. Since its founding in 2014, the company has focused on advanced deep learning research and development in product recognition for retail applications, with numerous scientific achievements along the way. Malong invented the CurriculumNet weakly-supervised learning algorithm, which won the inaugural WebVision Challenge of CVPR by a large margin. Malong Technologies is on a mission to help the retail industry transform with AI to significantly improve operational efficiency, security and customer experience. Its deep learning breakthroughs are in use by its customers via Malong's RetailAI suite – RetailAI Protect, RetailAI Fresh and RetailAI Cabinet.