Every year, it gets harder to keep up with technology updates in convenience services. For many industry players, the pandemic put some projects on hold, but the surging interest in contactless transactions accelerated expansion of technology innovation. An early morning session, "Trending Technologies in Convenience Services," gave attendees a chance to unpack the key tech innovations at the National Automatic Merchandising Association show at Chicago's McCormick Place. "The pandemic has given us a lot of new terms, and it's also accelerated the digital transformation of the industry," session moderator Michael Kasavana, Ph.D., the NAMA endowed professor emeritus, observed at the outset. The well attended session provided updates on artificial intelligence services for convenience services, contactless payments and ways to prevent the growing cybercrime threat.

Two days after its great presentation (and a bit failed), the Cybertruck is already generating a lot of interest. Tesla has received 146,000 pre-orders for the electric van, Elon Musk tweeted on Saturday. Tesla is offering three versions of the truck: a rear-wheel-drive engine with a range of 250 miles for $ 39,900; double all-wheel-drive engine with 300 miles of reach for $ 49,900; and all-wheel drive on all three wheels with 500 miles of reach for $ 69,900. Musk said 42 percent of pre-orders are dual-engine, 41 percent of three engines and 17 percent of single-engine. "No ads and no paid support," Musk said in a follow-up tweet.

Google is launching a new service for the Google Assistant called "Your news update" Take the idea of an algorithmically determined news source, the kind you get from Facebook or Google news, and convert it into an audio stream. To play it, simply ask a Google speaker or smart assistant on your phone to "listen to the news" Google uses the information it has learned about you over the years along with your location to create a personalized series of short news updates from the partners you have an audio license for. He hopes to foster an ecosystem that he calls "the audio web" according to Liz Gannes, Google audio news product manager. These are not podcasts, but news, similar to the hourly news updates that can be heard on the radio. Your News Update replaces the current way to get news updates from the Assistant, which consists of a direct list of news sources. With that system, you must choose which sources you want and in what order they are reproduced.

GitHub today launched GitHub Security Lab, an ongoing effort to protect open source projects. The GitHub Security Lab aims to bring together security researchers from partner organizations such as Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Oracle, Uber and HackerOne. To boost the GitHub Security Lab, GitHub is CodeQL, an open source variant analysis software from Semmle, a company that it acquired in September to help GitHub better detect vulnerabilities in the code. Semmle security software is used by companies such as Google, Microsoft and NASA. GitHub says it has used the CodeQL semantic code analysis engine to find more than 100 vulnerabilities in popular open source projects with custom queries.

Google Cloud is making Contact Center AI generally available for use today. The cloud service is built with Dialogflow of the conversational AI engine to automate interactions with customers in call centers. Contact Center AI contains Virtual Agent to automatically respond to customer inquiries with voice or text or transfer the conversation to a person when a bot cannot help a client. Agent Assist uses natural language processing to increase customer service agent interactions with customers when a bot cannot help a client. The news comes today when Google launched its rich communication services (RCS) to Android message users in the United States, and days after Google's experimental unit, the Area 120 CallJoy service to answer phone calls and questions Small business customers get an update.

Have you ever wondered how to pronounce a particularly challenging word? Google announced that it will launch a tool in mobile search that allows you to practice pronunciations without leaving the results page. Coinciding with its debut, the tech giant this morning added images to its search dictionary and translation features aimed at helping to better communicate the meaning of the words. The pronunciation module, which is released today in American English, and Spanish will soon follow, allows you to practice saying specific words to your phone's microphone. You will receive comments on what you can adjust in your pronunciation, in any case.

Canadian immigration officials deny travel visas to a large number of AI researchers and research students scheduled to attend the NeurIPS and Black in AI workshop, event organizers said. Among the people who have been denied entry is Tẹjúmádé Àfọ njá, co-organizer of the NeurIPS Machine Learning workshop for the developing world. NeurIP Information Processing Systems (NeurIPs) is the world's largest annual international AI conference, according to the AI Index 2018 report. The conference is scheduled to be held from December 8 to 14 in Vancouver, Canada. On Tuesday, Black in AI co-founder and Google AI researcher Timnit Gebru said that 15 of the 44 attendees who planned to join the workshop on December 9 were denied entry.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the skill of a computer program or a machine to think and learn, in other words mimic human's learning capability. Most of the older AI techniques are just boosted programming tactics nowadays. The major difference between normal'computer program' and AI is, in first case programmer is the one providing all the smartness to the system by programming it in as a World Model, and in lateral case the system learns by itself by referring past experience and training. In earlier AI techniques that were built in the beginning of AI evolvement, 'Real world modeling' approach was preferred. "Do not model the Real World; Instead, Model the Mind."