Google is making it easier for YouTube creators to engage with their audience and quickly reply to comments under their videos. The company is rolling out Smart Reply -- an AI-powered feature designed to help users generate appropriate replies without actually typing -- to YouTube Studio. Here's what the implementation looks like: Unlike Smart Reply for Gmail, YouTube's integration supports multiple languages. For the time being, Smart Reply for creators only works in English and Spanish, but it seems Google plans to add more options in the future. In a blog post, Google researchers explained they had to come up with a whole new language-processing model to accommodate for the common usage of emoji on YouTube.

Northern Light CEO C. David Seuss presented a virtual session at The Market Research Event (TMRE) Digital Week on June 24, about the value of new, AI-driven tools for "decision-oriented analysis" of social media posts to help set and refine an organization's product marketing strategy. Seuss' talk, entitled "Using Machine Learning to Make Social Media Marketing Decisions," focused on analyzing Twitter – the most text content-rich social media platform – for the specific purpose of gleaning business insights valuable to marketing professionals. "Assessing simple co-occurrence of Twitter hashtags is insufficient, and often downright misleading, for marketers of complex products," Seuss asserted in his presentation. "Understanding the context of the social media conversation is vital to derive a truly meaningful analysis of hashtag and keyword overlaps." Seuss explained that using AI and machine learning techniques to measure the semantic similarity of hashtags leads to far more accurate analysis that gets at the importance, from a business perspective, of seemingly related terms.

When I reflected on the past decade of dating at the end of 2019, none of us had any idea what was in store for us at the start of this year. Take your mind on a journey back to the far-off time of last year. Dating was still considered to be a bad time by many. Online dating and apps -- now the most popular way couples meet -- had long been blamed for hookup culture and fostering an environment where ghosting ran amok. If people (by and large men) weren't ghosting, then they were probably sending messages horrible enough to warrant public shaming.

This is an updated version. Turing Award Winner and Facebook Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun has announced his exit from popular social networking platform Twitter after getting involved in a long and often acrimonious dispute regarding racial biases in AI. Unlike most other artificial intelligence researchers, LeCun has often aired his political views on social media platforms, and has previously engaged in public feuds with colleagues such as Gary Marcus. This time however LeCun's penchant for debate saw him run afoul of what he termed "the linguistic codes of modern social justice." It all started on June 20 with a tweet regarding the new Duke University PULSE AI photo recreation model that had depixelated a low-resolution input image of Barack Obama into a photo of a white male.

The country-wide lockdown to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic in India resulted in an unprecedented drop in air pollution levels across cities. As people practise social distancing and marvel at the positive impact of the lack of human mobility on the environment, this is an opportune time to curate and run an effective air pollution campaign so that the new normal might be brighter. As many as 21 out of the 30 most polluted cities in the world are in India. Yet, public outrage and civic action towards air pollution are sporadic and scattered, peaking during Diwali but remaining low-key for the rest of the year. In light of this trend, Clean Air Fund and Quilt.AI studied the history and impact of 30 major environmental and public health campaigns in India since 2015.

The last decade saw a massive shift in the marketing industry. 

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has called on the UK government to create "a new pro-competition regulatory regime" that can control Facebook, Google and other technology companies that are primarily funded by digital advertising. The non-ministerial department has completed a study announced last July and concluded that "existing laws are not suitable for effective regulation." To combat the problem, it's recommending that a new Digital Markets Unit be set up with major oversight and powers. The Unit was first proposed in a report published by the Digital Competition Expert Panel (DCEP) -- a group chaired by Professor Jason Furman, a former chief economist when Barack Obama was president -- in March 2019. The CMA believes it should have a code of conduct that ensures Facebook and Google don't veer into "exploitative or exclusionary practices," or do anything that is likely to reduce public trust and transparency.

PA Consulting's Lee Howells, an automation and AI expert, is quoted in a special AI & Robotics report on how AI-driven technology is accelerating the shift towards home working. The piece discusses how the COVID-19 lockdown has forced millions of employees to adapt to working remotely, and says this trend is expected to continue well after the pandemic subsides. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter are moving towards making working from home the norm -- a shift enabled by artificial intelligence-driven telecommuting. However, the article goes on to recognise the potential of homeworking to cause mental stress, with many employees noting "video call fatigue" and craving real human interaction. Lee predicts that the lockdown will accelerate the development and use of AI tools to monitor and manage the mental wellbeing of remote workers.

Content production helps connect brands with customers, governments with citizens and organizations with their supporters. But, while important, content production can also be a labor- and time-intensive task. Producing articles, infographics, videos and a variety of other content requires a significant amount of work from writers and editors. With organizations producing and managing content daily, many have begun to turn to various technologies to help. One of the more capable of these technologies is AI.

New developments and opportunities are opening up in artificial intelligence, says Paul Budde. I RECENTLY followed a "lunch box lecture", organised by the University of Sydney. The world is infatuated with artificial intelligence (AI), and understandably so, given its super-human ability to find patterns in big data as we all notice when using Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay and so on. But the so-called "general intelligence" that humans possess remains elusive for AI. Interestingly, Professor Kuncic approached this topic from a physics perspective.