ServiceTitan, which makes operating software for electricians, plumbers and the like, is stepping up its game by developing artificial intelligence of the type normally used by more sophisticated companies to streamline repetitive tasks and bring data to decision-making. ServiceTitan, the software developer for tradespeople such as electricians and plumbers, has moved into artificial intelligence. The Glendale company unveiled Titan Intelligence, or TI, at its Pantheon 2022 conference for its customers, including business owners, managers, IT and finance team members. The event was held at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on April 20-22. Anmol Bhasin, chief technology officer for ServiceTitan, said he previously worked with AI at Salesforce.com Inc. and Groupon Inc., and his goal is to bring the same types of services that those companies offer to the trades.

"In hiring, the bank wants to use AI to help source the right candidates. "There's a chance AI models will be biased," said Caroline Arnold, BofA's head of enterprise technology (which includes HR tech). "You might say, who's going to be successful at this company? An AI engine could find that people who golf are going to be successful at the company. On the other hand, using those same techniques can remove bias if you have the model ignore some of these things that are indicators of different groups but go on to the meat of the profile of the person and understand it in a deeper way." Arnold believes an AI engine can never be the final say in who gets hired. Mehul Patel, CEO of Hired, a technology company whose software uses AI to match people to jobs, agreed that AI and humans have biases. "The good news about AI is, you can fix the bias," he said. "We will boost underrepresented groups.

Bank of America spends $3 billion developing and buying technology every year, and about three times that on keeping its existing IT infrastructure going, says David Reilly, global banking and markets technology chief information officer. As you might expect, some of that goes to artificial intelligence technology. The bank does not disclose how much. Speaking on Thursday at the bank's NYC Technology Summit, Reilly and other executives shared some of their experiences with AI and some of their concerns about it. Bank of America's chatbot, erica, which is currently available in 10 states, uses two forms of AI: natural language processing to understand speech, text and intent, as well as machine learning to glean insights from customer data that can be turned into advice and recommendations.

Data from your smartphone sensors can reveal PINs and passwords to hackers and allow them to unlock your mobile devices, according to a study led by an Indian-origin scientist. Instruments in smartphones such as the gyroscope and proximity sensors represent a potential security vulnerability, researchers from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore said. Using machine learning algorithms and a combination of information gathered from six different sensors found in smartphones, researchers succeeded in unlocking Android smartphones with a 99.5 per cent accuracy within only three tries, when tackling a phone that had one of the 50 most common PIN numbers. The previous best phone-cracking success rate was 74 per cent for the 50 most common PIN numbers, but NTU's technique can be used to guess all 10,000 possible combinations of four-digit PINs. Led by Shivam Bhasin, NTU Senior Research Scientist, researchers used sensors in a smartphone to model which number had been pressed by its users, based on how the phone was tilted and how much light is blocked by the thumb or fingers.

If there are things you can trust to not change, that hackers will always be looking for new exploits in security systems is sure to be on that list. Thankfully, there are also those in the security company working toward keeping a step ahead of the would-be hackers. A new study by researchers from Singapore's Nanyang Technological University found hackers could use data collected by various sensors in the device to guess the smartphone's PIN. Instruments like the "accelerometer, gyroscope and proximity sensors represent a potential security vulnerability," according to an NTU statement Tuesday. To prove their point, the researchers took the data gathered by six sensors on Android smartphones and ran it through machine-learning and deep learning algorithms.