Covid-19 is the "kryptonite" of AI, breaking its brittle models with outlier data that becomes the new normal, suggests a scientist writing in the Nature Public Health Emergency Collection effort of the National Library of Medicine, NIH. The pre-publication paper is an evaluation of how AI has performed against Covid-19, the main areas where AI has contributed to the right and areas where AI has had little impact. "Its use is hampered by a lack of data, and by too much data. Overcoming these constraints will require a careful balance between data privacy and public health and rigorous human-AI interaction," states the paper, written by Wim Naude, a visiting professor at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. "It is unlikely that these will be addressed in time to be of much help during the present pandemic. In the meantime, extensive gathering of diagnostic data on who is infectious will be essential to save lives, train AI, and limit economic damages," he states.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is gaining traction among enterprises, as RPA tools have proven they can streamline repetitive processes and save lots of time. But as more companies implement RPA, they're also finding they maximize ROI when they pair it with Intelligent Process Automation (IPA). RPA software revenue grew 63.1% in 2018 to $846 million, according to Gartner, making it the fastest-growing segment of the global enterprise software market. RPA tools are used in all industries, although Gartner says the biggest adopters are banks, insurance companies, telcos and utility companies. Such firms typically have many legacy systems and use RPA to help integrate data among them.

"Don't read the comments" is a cardinal rule of the internet. They're often hotbeds of toxicity and abuse, and rarely does a person come away from them feeling enlightened. Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Alphabet, is working to combat this problem through a project called Perspective, an API that uses machine learning to spot harassment online. But, researchers have discovered that it's easy to game the system. Perspective assigns a "toxicity score" to comments based on the perceived impact they might have on a conversation.