The COVID-19 crisis has emphasized the need for scientific methods such as machine learning to speed up the discovery of solutions to the pandemic. Harnessing machine learning techniques requires quality data, skilled personnel and advanced compute infrastructure. In Africa, however, machine learning competencies and compute infrastructures are limited. This paper demonstrates a cross-border collaborative capacity building approach to the application of machine learning techniques in discovering answers to COVID-19 questions.

Artificial-intelligence developers are helping hospitals and medical providers manage jammed phone lines, as Americans race to secure a place in line for Covid-19 vaccinations--or get a test or screening as they wait. Hyro Inc., a company that makes plug-and-play conversational artificial-intelligence software, has developed an AI-powered virtual assistant designed to lessen the load of incoming calls for vaccination information and scheduling queries handled by call-center staff.

Artificial Intelligence is the defining technology that has the power to boost a nation to new heights. This holds true even for the Australia-Pacific region too. In New Zealand, companies are now better positioned to roll out AI applications to boost the economy and bring higher revenues. Various research reports have pointed out that Kiwi organizations view AI to challenge the competitive landscape over the coming years. Compared to Australia, New Zealand displays a more favorable market for AI in the future.

We are living through the largest real-world experiment of our time. As the COVID-19 crisis goes on, our homes have become a distributed platform from which we continue to perform our jobs while maintaining the necessary social distancing. This experiment threatens to explode in our collective faces. During the COVID-19 emergency, business continuity and productivity have deteriorated significantly. Many people are working from home for the first time in their lives, employed by organizations that have not adapted their roles, processes, or tools to support that mode of operation.

Many Australian enterprises have spent years trying to justify their investments in data analytics models. On average, only half of the analytic models built by organisations will ever make it to production. Clearly, organisations that operationalise and monetise their artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics capabilities are more likely to succeed with their customer engagements. Tech execs gathered at a virtual roundtable recently to discuss the challenges they face when moving their AI and data analytics programs from an experiment inside their business to one that is a key part of their core operations. The conversation was sponsored by SAS.

Join us for a live online forum where leaders from the Federal Government, Booz Allen, and select industry and academic partners will provide a candid look at how AI is already being applied and explore opportunities to leverage it further.

Nuro, one of the nation's best-funded self-driving vehicle startups, has begun using its robots to ferry food and medical supplies around a California stadium that has been converted into a coronavirus treatment facility, CEO Dave Ferguson announced on Wednesday. "We realized that we could potentially use our R2 unmanned vehicles to provide truly contactless delivery of goods, where we remove any possible interaction between a driver dropping off goods and a person picking them up," Ferguson wrote. Contactless delivery could reduce the spread of COVID-19. In a Tuesday phone interview, Nuro policy chief David Estrada told Ars that the robots are ferrying food, supplies, and medical equipment from the parking lot of Sleep Train Arena, home of the Sacramento Kings, into the stadium itself. Human workers at designated locations load the vehicles at one end of a trip and unload them at the other.

All of the major social media companies and their parent corporations have issued a joint statement on their COVID-19 response efforts. They have also invited other companies to join them as they work to keep their communities healthy and safe. In the statement, the companies stressed their joint effort to combat fraud and misinformation about the virus, elevate authoritative content on their platforms, and share critical updates in coordination with the governments. The Finnish text analytics company Utopia Analytics is aware of the struggle that social media giants now face with content moderation. This is why Utopia Analytics is offering its Utopia AI Moderator service to one of these giants at cost for as long as the crisis lasts.