Plexiglass and human "traffic monitors" will go only so far to ease concerns of both consumers and employees about in-person banking while the COVID pandemic continues. Financial institutions are realizing that long-term adjustments will be required in how retail banking is conducted. This dramatic shift has sharply increased interest in various types of conversational banking, especially as a means to ease the pressure on call centers. Most often, conversational banking takes the form of chatbots powered by artificial intelligence. But it also includes voice-activated digital assistants such as Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, used with a variety of devices including mobile phones and smart speakers.

Machine learning capabilities are a significant asset in IIoT platforms, assisting in the collection and organization of data between multiple edge devices within the network. FogHorn Systems announced yesterday the availability of Lightning ML, an edge intelligence software platform for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), which the company states is the industry's first IIoT software platform with integrated machine learning capabilities and universal combability across all major IIoT edge systems, i.e. operational technology (OT) systems and IoT sensors. "To date, machine learning is typically done in the cloud," said David C. King, CEO of FogHorn Systems. "FogHorn Lightning ML is designed to deliver the same powerful machine learning (ML) insights on a very tiny footprint, less than 256MB." Lightning ML users can execute proprietary, domain-specific ML models or choose from ML algorithms which plug into streaming data from assets and machines.

The graduating computer science students at UC Berkeley had just finished chuckling at a joke about fleets of "Google buses, Facebook shuttles and Uber-copters" lining up to whisk them them to elite jobs in Silicon Valley. The commencement ceremony for a cohort of students who, one professor confided, were worth around $25bn, was a feel-good affair. Until, that is, Gavin Newsom took to the lectern and burst the bubble. The smooth-talking Democrat, and frontrunner to win California's gubernatorial race next year, warned the students that the "plumbing of the world is radically changing". The tech industry that would make them rich, Newsom declared, was also rendering millions of other people's jobs obsolete and fueling enormous disparities in wealth.