BOGOTA – About 100 million people living in cities worldwide will likely fall into poverty due to the coronavirus pandemic, urban experts said on Wednesday, calling for mapping tools to identify vulnerable communities and investment focusing on slums. Densely populated cities are at the front line of the contagious outbreak. People living in poverty with little or no running water, sewage systems or health care access have been hit especially hard, said experts at the World Bank, the World Resources Institute (WRI) and other groups studying urban issues. "Within cities we need to focus on those who need help the most, the poor and the vulnerable have been very seriously affected," said Sameh Wahba, global director for the World Bank's urban, disaster risk management, resilience and land global practice. "Our estimate is that there will be possibly upward of a 100 million so-called new poor on account of loses of jobs and livelihoods and income," Wahba told a webinar with members of the media.

On November 19, APICS (American Production and Inventory Control Society, now known as ASCM, Association for Supply Chain Management) hosted a representative from Anheuser-Busch InBev who specializes in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning innovation. The representative, Adam Spunberg, works out of the Newark office and is the global director of tech exploration. In his position Spunberg monitors and oversees innovation in the supply chain area of the company. Additionally, he focuses on bringing the company together through new technology and using AI to do something spectacular that couldn't be done before. Through his experience, he has learned that innovation is a mixture of having great ideas and then generating support for those great ideas. Anheuser-Busch InBev has four main checkpoints for filtering these innovative ideas: idea prioritization, quality check, zone demand and direct sponsorship.

The exponential growth in data has proven to be a gamechanger in marketing, especially with the introduction of cognitive computing and AI. IBM Watson is breaking new ground in this area and speaking more on this is Marta McMichael, global director of performance marketing at IBM Watson IoT. With an extensive background in the high-tech industry, Marta has worked in varied roles, including working as a programmer, a consultant and managing large account sales at IBM. It is here at IBM that she discovered her passion for marketing and transitioned into it. In the interview, Marta shares her big career epiphany that helped her refocus on creating value for her clients.

Amy O'Connor, chief information officer at Cloudera and Patrick Sullivan, global director of Security Strategy at Akamai, discuss the growing use of artificial intelligence in both public and private sector cyber security, The latest agency to consider using artificial intelligence to augment their cybersecurity systems is the Internal Revenue Service. A request for proposals went out in June for an analytics platform to identify risks at the agency, and AI cloud providers are jumping at the opportunity. "I think it's encouraging that the IRS is going down this path. We see both in the private sector and public sector that people are turning to machine learning. One of the challenges that we face is not only are the threats growing… but just the challenge of finding qualified security professionals is daunting. There's estimates from ISACA that we will be about two million security personnel short next year and that grows to three and a half million based on estimates a couple of years from there," said Patrick Sullivan, global director of Security Strategy at Akamai "So what you end up with is a lot of great security tools that there's no human there that is trained to consume those, to inspect those. That's one opportunity with machine learning is to have better inspection of that enormous security perimeter that you have there."

They all have to be tested before they roll out into the world, not only to meet government regulations but to verify adherence to a host of voluntary standards, like WiFi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, Thread and others. That is a lot of testing. And that's why TUV Rheinland recently opened a huge Silicon Valley test facility in Fremont, Calif. It's important for testing to be near the design teams, says TUV Rheinland's Sarb Shelopal, the company's global director of wireless and IoT testing. Distance, he says--and Silicon Valley's traffic--is a big deal when companies are trying to move fast.

They all have to be tested before they roll out into the world, not only to meet government regulations but to verify adherence to a host of voluntary standards, like WiFi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, Thread and others. That is a lot of testing. And that's why TUV Rheinland recently opened a huge Silicon Valley test facility in Fremont, Calif. It's important for testing to be near the design teams, says TUV Rheinland's Sarb Shelopal, the company's global director of wireless and IoT testing. Distance, he says--and Silicon Valley's traffic--is a big deal when companies are trying to move fast.

"The holy grail of a chatbot or virtual assistant is to help you adjust your behavior, telling you when to save more or spend in order to reach certain goals," said Lex Sokolin, global director of fintech research for Autonomous Research. Could UBS clients soon be serviced by voice-controlled AI? Maybe not yet, but a new pilot program between the bank and Amazon's Alexa service is testing the frontiers of both science fiction and wealth management. UBS' partnership with Amazon will enable clients and non-clients of the bank to get answers to financial and economic questions, ranging from what is inflation to how the U.S. economy is faring. It's the latest example of how wealth management firms are experimenting with new technologies such as data analytics and artificial intelligence to expand or reinvent the business.