Hijackings, missile strikes and drone assaults on ships by Yemen's Houthi rebels have forced AP Moller-Maersk, a Danish shipping and logistics giant, and Hapag-Lloyd, a German shipping and container transportation company, to pause shipments through the Red Sea. Their decisions, announced on Friday, are a sign that major corporations are taking the security situation in the Red Sea increasingly seriously. But the consequences might also be felt by the world's oil markets and the cost of energy that consumers need to bear – though the extent of any disruption might depend on how major global players respond to the looming crisis, said experts. Maersk said in a statement that its decision stemmed from the company's concerns about the "highly escalated security situation in the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden" over the past few weeks. Recent missile and drone attacks on commercial vessels represent a "significant threat to the safety and security of seafarers," it said.

An analytics revolution comes for every sport sooner or later. MLB had Moneyball in the early 2000s and has moved well beyond it in the years since. The NBA has used efficiency to all but kill the mid-range jump shot. Soccer has seen an influx of countless new ways to measure passes and scoring chances down to the finest detail. The NFL's change became most evident in 2018. Computer models that looked at thousands of games found an inefficiency: Coaches were being too conservative on fourth down, when teams can either punt the ball away or go for an all-or-nothing conversion.

Using artificial intelligence and automation to digitize and upgrade banking processes is the new imperative for banks and credit unions. They have come to realize that becoming truly digital institutions requires much more than offering a mobile banking app, or turning paper files into digital files. Digital transformation requires a much more comprehensive approach. One of the most challenging areas is in lending, the bread and butter of banking. Where loan originations used to take place in a face-to-face meeting between a banker and client -- taking upwards of two to three hours (depending on the type of loan) -- they are now taking place online and on mobile phones.

Norvig's (1992) Paradigms of AI Programming is an important book for learning about AI programming. However, the book uses Common Lisp as the programming language, which is less popular now than in 1992. Thus, we have translated many classical AI programs described in the book into Python, a more commonly used language. We have also documented the programs and offered them as a resource in a course on knowledge-based AI.

As stragglers settle into their seats for general biology class, real-time captions of the professor's banter about general and special senses – "Which receptor picks up pain? An interpreter stands a few feet away and interprets the professor's spoken words into American Sign Language, the primary language used by the deaf in the US. Except for the real-time captions on the screens in front of the room, this is a typical class at the Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York. About 1,500 students who are deaf and hard of hearing are an integral part of campus life at the sprawling university, which has 15,000 undergraduates. Nearly 700 of the students who are deaf and hard of hearing take courses with students who are hearing, including several dozen in Sandra Connelly's general biology class of 250 students. The captions on the screens behind Connelly, who wears a headset, are generated by Microsoft Translator, an AI-powered communication technology. The system uses an ...