Copilot, a tool built on top of OpenAI's large language models and launched by Microsoft-backed GitHub in 2022, is now used by millions of developers around the world. "Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers," Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai claimed on an earnings call in October: "This helps our engineers do more and move faster." Expect other tech companies to catch up, if they haven't already. A bunch of new startups have entered this buzzy market too. Newcomers such as Zencoder, Merly, Cosine, Tessl (valued at 750 million within months of being set up), and Poolside (valued at 3 billion before it even released a product) are all jostling for their slice of the pie.

Almost 8 million UK jobs could be lost to artificial intelligence in a "jobs apocalypse", according to a report warning that women, younger workers and those on lower wages are at most risk from automation. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said that entry level, part-time and administrative jobs were most exposed to being replaced by AI under a "worst-case scenario" for the rollout of new technologies in the next three to five years. The thinktank warned that the UK was facing a "sliding doors" moment as growing numbers of companies adopt generative AI technologies – which can read and create text, data and software code – to automate everyday workplace tasks. The report said this first wave of AI adoption was already putting jobs at risk as growing numbers of companies introduce the technology. However, a second wave could lead to the automation of more jobs amid rapid advances in AI.

Topic modelling with innovative deep learning methods has gained interest for a wide range of applications that includes COVID-19. Topic modelling can provide, psychological, social and cultural insights for understanding human behaviour in extreme events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we use prominent deep learning-based language models for COVID-19 topic modelling taking into account data from emergence (Alpha) to the Omicron variant. We apply topic modeling to review the public behaviour across the first, second and third waves based on Twitter dataset from India. Our results show that the topics extracted for the subsequent waves had certain overlapping themes such as covers governance, vaccination, and pandemic management while novel issues aroused in political, social and economic situation during COVID-19 pandemic. We also found a strong correlation of the major topics qualitatively to news media prevalent at the respective time period. Hence, our framework has the potential to capture major issues arising during different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic which can be extended to other countries and regions.

Henry Alty argues that while robotic process automation players like Blue Prism and UiPath started companies on the automation journey, businesses need to think more strategically to capture value from broader digital transformation. The rise of robotic process automation (RPA) saw companies automate individual tasks previously undertaken by humans, utilising software provided by companies including Blue Prism and UiPath. At one point valued at more than £1bn and $35bn respectively, these venture capital darlings flew high on the promise of turning an entire workforce into'citizen developers', who could effortlessly develop applications to solve individual problems. This software was sold to Chief Financial Officers as a tool to drive enormous productivity gains and cost savings by automating repetitive'swivel chair' work. But that promise has been largely disproven.

The European Commission has pushed back the deadline for the second wave of Digital Europe Programme proposals that includes the European Digital Identity Wallet under the European Digital Identity framework. The second wave of proposals covers €58 million (approximately US$61 million) in funding to support the implementation of the European Digital Identity Framework and the implementation of the Once Only System under the Single Digital Gateway Regulation, along with the deployment of services for European blockchain services infrastructure, blockchain standardization, and artificial intelligence (AI)-based pilots to aid law enforcement. Originally scheduled to end on May 17, 2022, the new deadline is August 17, 2022. The European Digital Identity Framework portion looks to attain the European Digital Identity's objective of improving citizen access to secure electronic identity and trust services with digital signatures and sharing personal identity data. The Commission looks to develop and test out tools supporting the development, implementation, and support of the EU-eID ecosystem with decentralized technologies and a self-sovereign identity framework under the one-only principle and the sharing of data between public administrations in the EU under the control of the user.

Drones are remarkable things, nonetheless. The other day, a representative of the U.S. National Forest Service was reporting on their use for re-seeding incinerated forests in California, speeding the process at a vastly reduced cost. It occurred to me, though, that the same dark cloud/silver lining thinking applied. Imagine all the out-of-work foresters heading for the unemployment line in the shade of a flock of drones. It occurred to me, as well, that this replacement of "repetitive task" workers with artificial intelligence (AI) technology was fully expected. The first wave of AI pushed millions of such laborers out of the labor force.

The SEIR model is a widely used epidemiological model used to predict the rise in infections. This model has been widely used in different countries to predict the number of Covid-19 cases. But the original SEIR model does not take into account the effect of factors such as lockdowns, vaccines, and re-infections. In India the first wave of Covid started in March 2020 and the second wave in April 2021. In this paper, we modify the SEIR model equations to model the effect of lockdowns and other influencers, and fit the model on data of the daily Covid-19 infections in India using lmfit, a python library for least squares minimization for curve fitting. We modify R0 parameter in the standard SEIR model as a rectangle in order to account for the effect of lockdowns. Our modified SEIR model accurately fits the available data of infections.

Motivated by suggested question generation in conversational news recommendation systems, we propose a model for generating question-answer pairs (QA pairs) with self-contained, summary-centric questions and length-constrained, article-summarizing answers. We begin by collecting a new dataset of news articles with questions as titles and pairing them with summaries of varying length. This dataset is used to learn a QA pair generation model producing summaries as answers that balance brevity with sufficiency jointly with their corresponding questions. We then reinforce the QA pair generation process with a differentiable reward function to mitigate exposure bias, a common problem in natural language generation. Both automatic metrics and human evaluation demonstrate these QA pairs successfully capture the central gists of the articles and achieve high answer accuracy.

Bongs Lainjo Cybermatic International, Montréal, QC, Canada Correspondence: Bongs Lainjo Email [email protected] Abstract: The objective of the study is to conduct an exploratory review of the Covid-19 pandemic by focusing on the theme of Covid-19 pandemic morbidity and mortality, considering the dynamics of artificial intelligence and quality of life (QOL). The methods used in this research paper include a review of literature, anecdotal evidence, and reports on the morbidity of COVID-19, including the scope of its devastating effects in different countries such as the US, Africa, UK, China, and Brazil, among others. The findings of this study suggested that the devastating effects of the coronavirus are felt across different vulnerable populations. These include the elderly, front-line workers, marginalized communities, visible minorities, and more. The challenge in Africa is especially daunting because of inadequate infrastructure, and financial and human resources, among others. Besides, AI technology is being successfully used by scientists to enhance the development process of vaccines and drugs. However, its usage in other stages of the pandemic has not been adequately explored. Ultimately, it has been concluded that the effects of the Covid-19 are producing unprecedented and catastrophic outcomes in many countries. With a few exceptions, the common and current intervention approach is driven by many factors, including the compilation of relevant reliable and compelling data sets. On a positive note, the compelling trailblazing and catalytic contributions of AI towards the rapid discovery of COVID-19 vaccines are a good indication of future technological innovations and their effectiveness. History has a way of reminding us that while the good times are great, a business as usual comes with many unforeseen risks and challenges. On a positive note, stress, anxiety, and other mental health issues have turned around many mindsets in certain groups. There are now significant and unprecedented levels of compassion, empathy, and more, originating from many populations. One such instance, wherein significant challenges were posed to the community is at the time of the First World War. Besides, there was the Spanish plague, there was the second world war and for the last 60 plus years, we have had to live in a world of misgivings; ranging from populism to political unrests and instability in several parts of the world, primarily the Middle East and some parts of Asia.

Beyond a doubt, the COVID-19 pandemic has tarnished economies and lives across the world. Businesses and organizations in India had started to pick up the fallen markets, that's when the'second wave' of COVID came gushing, pushing all the efforts in vain. The'second wave' of the pandemic is delaying business normalization in the country, as coronavirus infections are again on a rise. The second wave has surely taught us that this pandemic and its impact are here for a long stay. Maybe it will go down for some time but it will surely re-appear.