Fake video walk-throughs, a magically expanding loft, and stair hallucinations are just some of the new AI-generated features house hunters are coming across. As you're hunting through real estate listings for a new home in Franklin, Tennessee, you come across a vertical video showing off expansive rooms featuring a four-poster bed, a fully stocked wine cellar, and a soaking tub. It looks perfect--maybe a little too perfect. Everything in the video is AI-generated . The real property is completely empty, and the luxury furniture is a product of virtual staging.

When Melissa Kono, the town clerk in Burnside, Wisconsin, began training election workers in 2015, their questions were relatively mundane. They asked about election rules, voter eligibility, and other basic procedures. The job was gratifying and enjoyable; they helped their neighbors while sipping coffee. But over the past few years, everything has changed. Kono now finds herself fielding questions about what to do when approached by suspicious voters who ask provocative questions or gripe about fraud.

It's easy to decry cancel culture, but hard to turn it back. And as I explain below, the lessons that members of the AI community have learned in this regard can be generalized to other professional subcultures. To understand the flash point at issue, it's necessary to delve briefly into how AI functions. In many cases, AI algorithms have partly replaced both formal and informal human decision-making systems that pick who gets hired or promoted within organizations. Financial institutions use AI to determine who gets a loan. And some police agencies use AI to anticipate which neighborhoods will be afflicted by crime.

By Debjani Ghosh According to the August 2020 National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom)- McKinsey report, 'Unlocking Value From Data and AI: The India Opportunity', artificial intelligence (AI) deployments, if done right, could add about ₹500 billion to India's GDP in the next five years. Nearly 45% of this value is expected to be driven by the consumer and retail, agriculture, and banking and insurance sectors. Execution will be the key imperative for success. What is needed is an India AI playbook that can help GoI not just build deployment plans but also figure out how to scale them for maximum impact. Such a playbook requires strategy, data, talent, technology, policy framework, execution and the right culture to come together. India unveiled its AI strategy in 2018.

CNN appears to be making it common practice not to report news that may portray presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in a negative light. Biden raised eyebrows Wednesday morning during an interview with a virtual panel at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists, which was posted in full on Thursday, where he was asked if he has taken a cognitive test. "No, I haven't taken a test. Why the hell would I take a test?" Biden reacted to the question from CBS reporter Errol Barnett, who is Black.

Artificial intelligence and robotic process automation are emerging as the most promising technologies for state IT offices, according to new data revealed at a government technology and leadership conference in Indianapolis this week. Doug Robinson, the executive director for the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, on Tuesday offered a preview of his organization's 2019 survey data, which shows that 65 percent of state CIOs believe AI and robotic process automation will be the "most impactful" emerging technologies for state government within the next three to five years. Robinson said it is an increase from 57 percent in 2018, with AI and robotics stealing interest away from other technologies such as the "internet of things," connected and autonomous vehicles and blockchain. State technology leaders see growing potential in the ability to automate many of their business processes, Robinson told the audience at the annual conference of the National Association of State Technology Directors. Indiana CIO Dewand Neely, who joined Robinson on stage, said he sees robotic process automation -- software tools that can automatically carry out tedious processes that could once only be done by humans, such as data entry -- as especially pertinent for the Indiana Office of Technology.

NASCAR will use the breadth and depth of AWS technologies to build cloud-based services and automate processes, including a new video series on NASCAR.com The video series will debut heading into the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race at Michigan International Speedway, sharing the greatest historical moments in NASCAR racing with viewers. NASCAR is migrating its 18-petabyte video archive to AWS, and will leverage Amazon Rekognition--an AWS service that adds intelligent image and video analysis to applications--to automatically tag specific video frames with metadata, such as driver, car, race, lap, time, and sponsors so they can easily search those tags to surface the most iconic moments from past races. By using AWS's services, NASCAR expects to save thousands of hours of manual search time each year, and will be able to easily surface flashbacks like Dale Earnhardt Sr.'s 1987 "Pass in the Grass" or Denny Hamlin's 2016 Daytona 500 photo finish, and quickly deliver these to fans via video clips on NASCAR.com and social media channels. NASCAR will leverage AWS services to enhance its full range of media assets including websites, mobile applications, and social properties for its 80 million fans worldwide.

In a future of autonomous vehicles, the industry expects ride-hailing services could eliminate the need for many to carry insurance at all. Ann Arbor -- Insurers are bracing for change as they plan for a future with self-driving cars. Although the hope is that autonomous vehicles will decrease traffic incidents and improve road safety, it could take years before the benefits of expensive-to-repair, technology-packed vehicles reduce insurance premiums. Meanwhile, autonomous vehicles promise to shift liability for accidents from drivers to the car itself, threatening insurers' traditional business model. "There's angst, anxiety, worry (because) ... we're heavily in the auto business," Neil Alldredge, senior vice president of corporate affairs for the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, told auto insurers earlier this month at an Ann Arbor conference on the topic.

NEW DELHI: Accenture today said it has developed an artificial intelligence powered solution to help visually impaired people improve the way they experience the world around them and enhance their productivity in the workplace. The solution, called Drishti, was developed as a part of Accenture's focus on Tech4Good, which aims to apply technology to improve the way the world lives and works by solving complex social challenges, a company release said. Accenture, plans to introduce Drishti to more than 100 visually impaired employees in India. The solution is currently being piloted at Accenture in South Africa, and a Spanish language version is being tested with Accenture employees in Argentina. Drishti, which means'vision' in Sanskrit, provides smart phone-based assistance using AI technologies such as image recognition, natural language processing and natural language generation capabilities to describe the environment of a visually impaired person.

Staging is serious business in presidential politics. Every detail--from the sign on the lectern to the demographics of everyone behind the candidate to (on one bizarre occasion this cycle) the raw slabs of meat dressing the set--is meant to convey who the candidate is and what the candidate stands for. So you can learn a lot juxtaposing the optics of the campaign speeches Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump gave last week on the future of the economy. While Clinton spoke from the center of a tech hub in Denver, surrounded by millennials tapping away on MacBooks, Trump addressed a crowd inside a scrap metal factory in a Pennsylvania steel town, standing before a wall of crushed aluminum cans. Before either candidate spoke, they'd cast two opposing visions.