Artificial intelligence (AI) applications -- as an example, virtual personal assistants and chatbots -- are being adopted rapidly within the global workplace. By 2024, Gartner predicts that these technologies will replace almost 69 percent of the typical manager's workload.

If you ask Siri to show you the weirdest people in the world, what images might you see? Siri showed me different links to the same scientific paper, published a decade ago, with the questioning title, "The weirdest people in the world?" By some stroke of luck, or a divine favor from the science-communication gods, "weird" turns out to be an acronym for capturing the weirdness of people raised in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. WEIRD people, like myself and many of you reading this, are, unfortunately, part of a problem that still faces psychology, a discipline largely dedicated to parsing what all humans share in common: The field's research subjects are too damn weird. For too long, psychologists have focused their research on "one particular culture," Michael Muthukrishna, an assistant professor of economic psychology at the London School of Economics, told me. "To be honest, it's worse than that, because scientists were actually looking at a subset of that population, undergraduates, who aren't representative of less educated populations within the country."

Seed Round Co-Led by Glasswing Ventures and Google's AI-focused Fund, Gradient Ventures, Will Be Used To Supercharge R&D and Support Customer Success Plannuh, a startup transforming the way marketers plan and budget, announced a $4 million seed round co-led by Glasswing Ventures and Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-focused venture fund. The new funding will be used to accelerate Plannuh's R&D initiatives and support teams as the company continues to expand its customer base. Peter Mahoney, founder and CEO of Plannuh, was troubled by the consistent mismanagement of budgets and poor execution of plans resulting in wasted spend. Leveraging over 30 years of marketing experience, Mahoney identified that the primary causes of budgetary waste stemmed from too many marketing plans, budgets and metrics spread across various slide presentations, spreadsheets, documents, and disparate systems. This resulted in a lack of visibility into plan execution, time and marketing spend, as well as budget forecast accuracy.

MELVILLE, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Verint Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: VRNT), The Customer Engagement Company, today announced it has been named a leader by industry analyst firm Ovum in Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) solutions in a comparison report, Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting an Intelligent Virtual Assistant Solution, 2020-21*. Reviewing IVAs that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to provide natural, human-like interactions with consumers, the report concludes the new tools "make a massive difference to customer engagements" compared with legacy, non-intelligent IVAs. Verint Intelligent Virtual AssistantTM--part of Verint Customer Engagement Cloud portfolio--is among the best, according to the report. "The strides that leading vendors have made in IVAs in recent years are impressive," says Ovum Distinguished Analyst, Michael Azoff, author of the report. "In the vendors' customer use cases we studied, for example, it was typical to hear of million-dollar range cost savings by introducing IVAs (calculated as cost per call), bringing ROI within the first year."

The Gartner report, 'Predicts 2020: AI and the Future of Work', predicted that 69% of routine work by managers will be replaced by AI and emerging automation technologies by 2024. That proportion of managerial admin is expected to be offloaded to technologies such as chatbots and virtual personal assistants. This shift in reliance on technology is expected to empower employees more, giving them more responsibility and scope for influence without needing to take on management tasks. Matt Weston, Managing Director of Robert Half UK, examines the future of the workplace as automation and artificial intelligence shift the landscape. "The role of manager will see a complete overhaul in the next four years," said Helen Poitevin, research vice president at Gartner.

Do you want to start a career in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, but don't know where to begin? If so, this meetup can help by providing an ideal foundational mapping of the career paths and certifications that IT professionals should consider if they're interested in transitioning to AI and ML. Artificial intelligence is now being used in an ever-expanding array of products: cars that drive themselves; robots that identify and eradicate weeds; computers able to distinguish dangerous skin cancers from benign moles; and smart locks, thermostats, speakers and digital assistants that are bringing the technology into homes. Machine learning engineers develop devices and software that use predictive technology, such as Apple's Siri or weather-forecasting apps. They ensure machine learning algorithms have the data that needs to be processed and analyze huge amounts of real-time data to make machine learning models more accurate.

A lot of news hit the industry last month at CES 2020. Amid new product and service announcements were some partnership announcements too. One that's worth picking back up and discussing is the new working group formed by Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance called Project Connected Home over IP, which aims to develop a new, open standard for smart-home device connectivity. According to MarketsandMarkets, the smart-home sector will be worth 151.4 billion by 2024. Growth will be driven in part by factors like increased awareness and adoption of smart devices, a growing desire for saving energy and reducing carbon footprints, the ubiquitous adoption of smartphones, and increasingly accessible solutions in terms of pricepoint and ease of use.

I love LDA but I'm a firm believer that it doesn't have many practical/successful applications in the real world I am actually published on a couple of papers regarding applying LDA at large scale, while working at a large company. It doesn't seem to be a super common approach, and it appears to be really easy to get it wrong. Coupled with the fact that there are other approaches that are about as good, numerically, well, yeah, not a lot of people bother. Doesn't mean it can't work. Anyhow- after we applied a few tricks, the coherence of the topics produced was much (qualitatively) better than clusters being produced by other standard clustering/co-clustering approaches, albeit quantitatively worse.

These days, just about every smart home gadget works with Google Assistant or Amazon's Alexa. And, for the most part, Google Assistant and Alexa can do many of the same things--like give you the weather forecast, play music, read the news, and so much more. But, when you compare Alexa and Google Assistant head to head, which intelligent personal assistant is smarter? We took a deep dive into the nitty-gritty of both Alexa and Google Assistant to find out which smart assistant knows--and can do--more. The Hub Max comes with Google Assistant, so you can check the weather, watch recipe videos, control your smart home, and more.

Campus Queries is a series in which Daily Bruin readers and staff present science-related questions for UCLA professors and experts to answer. Q: What is artificial intelligence? A: Artificial intelligence is emulating a task on a computer that's easy for a human, said Judea Pearl, a researcher and UCLA computer science professor. Home assistants like Amazon's Alexa talk to their users the way people talk to each other, and many media portrayals of AI, like Skynet from the "Terminator" franchise, depict them as out to dominate humanity. Despite the range of intelligence displayed by AI in the real world and fiction, the larger question of what makes a computer truly intelligent remains.