This article is part of our reviews of AI research papers, a series of posts that explore the latest findings in artificial intelligence. The human hand is one of the fascinating creations of nature, and one of the highly sought goals of artificial intelligence and robotics researchers. A robotic hand that could manipulate objects as we do would be enormously useful in factories, warehouses, offices, and homes. Yet despite tremendous progress in the field, research on robotics hands remains extremely expensive and limited to a few very wealthy companies and research labs. Now, new research promises to make robotics research available to resource-constrained organizations.

Sign up for the New Economy Daily newsletter, follow us @economics and subscribe to our podcast. The French government will use algorithms and artificial intelligence to identify small firms at risk of collapse in the wake of the Covid pandemic, and provide as much as 3 billion euros ($3.7 billion) to protect them. Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire presented the new measures on Tuesday as part of a plan that also includes an extension of crisis lending facilities to the end of 2021 and simplified procedures for restructuring debts of small firms. The new tools come amid warnings that a jump in insolvencies as governments pare back crisis aid could hamstring the economic recovery. The OECD said Monday that shoring up balance sheets of small firms is a crucial part of targeted fiscal support in the transition out of the crisis.

The ranks of fintechs using Banking-as-a-Service to attract small business users to their sophisticated apps just got a jolt. An elephant by the name of Intuit just entered the room. But it's not just fintechs that are looking over their shoulder. Thousands of community financial institutions that consider small business relationships their bread and butter are -- or should -- be taking notice. Intuit, with its popular QuickBooks accounting software, is arguably the best-known brand among the small business community.

Earlier this year, San Francisco-based venture capital firm Riverwood Capital invested US$ 20 million in Omie, a Brazilian start-up that provides small and medium businesses (SMBs) with an AI-powered business management software. Omie's genius idea was to focus on small firms, not served by larger management software services. By automating business functions, the company essentially eliminates the massive amount of paper work required in Brazil, a country notorious for red tape. "Cloud management platforms are revolutionising small and medium businesses in Brazil," says Marcelo Lombardo, Omie's CEO and founder. He spoke with LSE Business Review managing editor Helena Vieira on 5 November during the Web Summit conference in Lisbon. Starting from the beginning, what does Omie do? Omie is a cloud management software for small and midsize businesses. We put together pretty much everything a small business owner needs for his daily life (financials, invoicing, inventory, manufacturing, etc).

As attorneys, we are all acutely aware that we must adapt to the ever-changing technology landscape to stay relevant. Although embracing automation is important for all lawyers, it is particularly critical for solo attorneys and those in Small Law, simply because technology enables small firm attorneys to do more with less. For example, e-discovery, contract drafting, legal research and other such tasks could easily consume an attorney's entire workload if not automated. For small and solo attorneys with limited capacity, dedicating this kind of time to this work is simply not an option. And with few staff, artificial intelligence, or AI, can be the pseudo staff member that helps small firms run smoothly.

The government's latest attempt to tackle Britain's poor productivity record focused on extra funding for artificial intelligence, skills and technology, as the chancellor introduced measures to boost economic growth. Philip Hammond said there would be an expansion in the national productivity investment fund which he launched last year. The fund would rise from £23bn to £31bn to help kickstart improvements in efficiency levels across the UK. Productivity is an economic measure of the efficiency of a workforce. It typically measures the level of output per hour of work, or per worker.

Artificial Lawyer caught up with Noah Waisberg, Co-Founder & CEO of Kira Systems. We discussed how Kira Systems got started, how it is different to other AI systems and where it's going. Co-founder of Kira Systems, Noah Waisberg, used to be an associate at Weil Gotshal & Manges, starting there as a junior associate in 2006. A lot of his work focused on M&A and he says he found himself spending a lot of time reviewing contracts during due diligence (DD). According to Waisberg, DD often amounts to between 30% and 60% of the legal bill law firms gave to their clients.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) -- the technology that tries to mimic human behaviour and thought processes -- has decisively broken the size barrier. No more is it the preserve of big tech firms, as small and medium outfits and start-ups are increasingly using it to great effect. For instance, last month travel-search marketplace ixigo launched an AI-powered chatbot -- ixibaba -- for its users. The chatbot (an automated response system that gives users the feeling of chatting with another human) helps travellers find the cheapest travel deals, hotels, vacation destinations and things to do in a city. "Now AI is better positioned for an uptake, especially in domain-specific contexts, as a lot of Big Data is available. AI, one part of which is machine learning, is the next big thing," said Aloke Bajpai, co-founder and CEO at ixigo.