In this short paper, we present work evaluating an AI agent's understanding of spoken conversations about data visualizations in an online meeting scenario. There is growing interest in the development of AI-assistants that support meetings, such as by providing assistance with tasks or summarizing a discussion. The quality of this support depends on a model that understands the conversational dialogue. To evaluate this understanding, we introduce a dual-axis testing framework for diagnosing the AI agent's comprehension of spoken conversations about data. Using this framework, we designed a series of tests to evaluate understanding of a novel corpus of 72 spoken conversational dialogues about data visualizations. We examine diverse pipelines and model architectures, LLM vs VLM, and diverse input formats for visualizations (the chart image, its underlying source code, or a hybrid of both) to see how this affects model performance on our tests. Using our evaluation methods, we found that text-only input modalities achieved the best performance (96%) in understanding discussions of visualizations in online meetings.

The metaverse has gained significant attention from various industries due to its potential to create a fully immersive and interactive virtual world. However, the integration of deepfakes in the metaverse brings serious security implications, particularly with regard to impersonation. This paper examines the security implications of deepfakes in the metaverse, specifically in the context of gaming, online meetings, and virtual offices. The paper discusses how deepfakes can be used to impersonate in gaming scenarios, how online meetings in the metaverse open the door for impersonation, and how virtual offices in the metaverse lack physical authentication, making it easier for attackers to impersonate someone. The implications of these security concerns are discussed in relation to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) triad. The paper further explores related issues such as the darkverse, and digital cloning, as well as regulatory and privacy concerns associated with addressing security threats in the virtual world.

The words we use and the tone we inflect paint a picture of the ideas we're expressing. Whether in an online meeting, conducting a remote sales presentation, or hosting a live webinar, the emotions that come through can offer key insights. Video conferencing with Sentiment Analysis provides businesses with the unparalleled opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of what's being said amongst prospects, clients, and employees during online meetings and syncs. Intelligent emotion-reading algorithms pull out the meaning behind the text as a way to explore participant satisfaction and so much more. Here's how using video conferencing and Sentiment Analysis can work together to identify and quantify key emotional indicators and help you get a more detailed understanding of what your audience needs.

Female tech pioneers from the UAE have described their desire to get more girls to learn about artificial intelligence and coding. They spoke in an online meeting of thought leaders, organised by the British Embassy UAE on Tuesday. Gamification and using the power of social media were two suggestions on how to encourage more young people to consider a career in tech. Emirati student, Fatima Ali Aldhuhoori, who was part of her school's prize-winning robotics team and Radhika Iyer, who studied in the UAE before moving to the UK and winning the Amazon Longitude Explorer Prize for tech design, discussed how much they enjoyed using computer science to solve problems. Globally, these two women are outliers for their generation.

Before March 2020, in-person events vastly outnumbered virtual meetings, and the sudden reversal of those fortunes has yielded new information about best practices. In "the before times," skilled trainers, speakers and facilitators could look directly at participants, read their body language and see if the messages were resonating. In-person meetings encouraged participants to stay focused and engaged. Now presenters talk to their own face on a screen, and participants mute themselves and turn their cameras off. Two-way communication is critical in professional development experiences.

Even before working from home became the new norm, video conferencing solutions had been used to reduce travel expenses and save time. Now, virtual meetings have become the go-to solution for driving collaboration and improving operational efficiency across industries. As video conferencing becomes an indispensable part of any business, companies are looking for ways to enhance their solutions with advanced capabilities and improve communication even further. That's where artificial intelligence comes into play. As AI becomes more mature, it has the potential to take online video conferencing to the next level.

International negotiations to regulate artificial intelligence-based weapons are encountering difficulties, with Japan, Germany and others backing international rules on regulation but maintaining a cautious stance on a treaty to prohibit killer robots. Behind their muted approach is a fear that countries that develop autonomous weapons would shun such a treaty anyway, diminishing the significance of international efforts toward any regulation. Therefore, countries differ over how to attain this objective while agreeing on the need to prevent lethal autonomous weapons from running out of control. Germany hosted an online meeting in early April amid the COVID-19 pandemic to facilitate talks on the control of killer robots, as promoted by the U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). Representatives of more than 60 countries and regions, including the United States and Israel, both developers of AI weapons, the European Union and the United Nations, as well as nongovernmental organizations, logged in to participate in the forum.

The debate over artificial intelligence's role in HR--from recruiting to workforce planning to performance--has become moot: There's no doubt that AI has arrived and is expanding rapidly in the HR space. But, not so fast, some experts say. While AI represents a fantastic opportunity to drive HR success (and by extension, bottom-line growth), ethical issues tied to AI represent a potential dark side of these technologies. The good news is, chief HR and people officers can successfully navigate this rapidly changing, growing trend by steering clear of those ethical speed bumps in the first place. They must take a smart, steady, planned approach to circumvent negative outcomes.

NEW DELHI: A Netherlands-based start-up has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) powered smartphone app for deaf and mute people, which it says offers a low-cost and superior approach to translating sign language into text and speech in real time. The easy-to-use innovative digital interpreter dubbed as "Google translator for the deaf and mute" works by placing a smartphone in front of the user while the app translates gestures or sign language into text and speech. The app, called GnoSys, uses neural networks and computer vision to recognise the video of sign language speaker, and then smart algorithms translate it into speech. Affordable and always available interpreter services are in huge demand in the deaf community. Every day thousands of local businesses around the globe face problems with providing their services to deaf, said Konstantin Bondar, Co-Founder & CTO of Evalk, the company which developed the app. According to the National Deaf Association (NAD), 18 million people are estimated to be deaf in India.