Professional sports teams pour millions of dollars into data analytics, using advanced tracking systems to study every sprint, pass, and decision on the field. The results of that analysis, however, are industry secrets, making many sports difficult for researchers to study. Now, two University of Waterloo researchers, Dr. David Radke and Kyle Tilbury, are using AI to level the playing field. By tapping into Google Research Football's reinforcement learning environment, the researchers developed a system that can simulate and record unlimited soccer matches. To get things started, they generated and saved data from 3,000 simulated soccer games, resulting in a rich and complex dataset of passes, goals, and player movements for researchers to study.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to significantly increase the productivity, quality, and profitability in future manufacturing systems. Traditional mass-production will give way to personalized production, with each item made to order, at the low cost and high-quality consumers have come to expect. Manufacturing systems will have the intelligence to be resilient to multiple disruptions, from small-scale machine breakdowns, to large-scale natural disasters. Products will be made with higher precision and lower variability. While gains have been made towards the development of these factories of the future, many challenges remain to fully realize this vision. To consider the challenges and opportunities associated with this topic, a panel of experts from Industry, Academia, and Government was invited to participate in an active discussion at the 2022 Modeling, Estimation and Control Conference (MECC) held in Jersey City, New Jersey from October 3- 5, 2022. The panel discussion focused on the challenges and opportunities to more fully integrate AI into manufacturing systems. Three overarching themes emerged from the panel discussion. First, to be successful, AI will need to work seamlessly, and in an integrated manner with humans (and vice versa). Second, significant gaps in the infrastructure needed to enable the full potential of AI into the manufacturing ecosystem, including sufficient data availability, storage, and analysis, must be addressed. And finally, improved coordination between universities, industry, and government agencies can facilitate greater opportunities to push the field forward. This article briefly summarizes these three themes, and concludes with a discussion of promising directions.

Automated vehicles (AVs) are social robots that can potentially benefit our society. According to the existing literature, AV explanations can promote passengers' trust by reducing the uncertainty associated with the AV's reasoning and actions. However, the literature on AV explanations and trust has failed to consider how the type of trust - cognitive versus affective - might alter this relationship. Yet, the existing literature has shown that the implications associated with trust vary widely depending on whether it is cognitive or affective. To address this shortcoming and better understand the impacts of explanations on trust in AVs, we designed a study to investigate the effectiveness of explanations on both cognitive and affective trust. We expect these results to be of great significance in designing AV explanations to promote AV trust.

Some of Amazon's warehouse workers don't have to choose between work and play with the introduction of company-created video games that turn tedious tasks into productive fun. A detailed report from The Washington Post describes how the company has installed screens at many of its warehouse workers' stations that allow employees to turn tasks like assembling orders and moving items into competitive games. Game titles include options like MissionRacer, Dragon Duel, and CastleCrafter and typically involve a productivity-based point system. The more tasks a worker completes, the more points or progress they make in the game. Amazon is using video games to help increase productivity and make working in its warehouses less tedious.

Amazon said that by the end of the next decade packages in the company's warehouses could be readied for delivery without touching a single human hand. In a report from Reuters, Director of Amazon Robotics Fulfillment, Scott Anderson, told reporters that there is still plenty of progress to be made before robots take over its warehouses. 'In the current form, the technology is very limited. The technology is very far from the fully automated workstation that we would need,' Anderson told Reuters in a walk through of one of its facilities in Baltimore. Robots still have a long way to go before the replace human hands in Amazon's factories said one of the company's executives in a recent walk through of a facility in Baltimore.

With sterile strip lighting, an endless whir of machines, and 15 miles of conveyor belts, the Amazon warehouse in Essex doesn't feel like a place an average Briton would want to do their shopping. But the giant'Fulfilment Centre' in Tilbury, which is the size of 28 football pitches, is one of the distribution hubs rapidly replacing High Street shops around the UK. A total of 1,772 stores disappeared from the UK's busiest town centres last year, the equivalent of almost five closing every day. Retailers blame the rise of web giants like Amazon, with around 20% of all money forked out by shoppers now spent online. This is Amazon'Fulfillment Centre' in Tilbury, Essex, which high street retailers have blamed for falling trade The giant centre has an army of 1,000 un-sleeping specially developed robots to move the millions of items inside the facility.

Amazon now has more than 100,000 robots inside its warehouses worldwide. But despite the sheer volume of robotic employees working in its fulfilment centres, Amazon insists robots will not replace human labour entirely - at least, not yet. The firm claims the robots do not have the'common sense' or'dexterity' needed for the job. Amazon uses its robots to carry stock around the expansive warehouse floors and group together all the individual items needed for a specific order. This is done to reduce the amount of interaction humans have with the products.

Amazon UK is to open a distribution centre at Tilbury which will be equipped with the retailer's most advanced robotics technology. When it opens in Spring 2017, the Essex-based site will be equipped with robots that slide under a tower of shelves where products are stowed, lifted and moved through the facility. The retail giant has said that the robots help speed order processing time and reduce walking time by moving the shelves to employees, as well as save space with '50 per cent more items to be stowed per square foot'. The technology was launched earlier this year at its Dunstable and Doncaster facilities. John Tagawa, Amazon's vice president of UK operations, said: "The Amazon teams are dedicated to innovating in our fulfilment centres to increase speed of delivery while enabling greater selection at lower costs for our customers. The introduction of Amazon Robotics is the newest example of our commitment to invention in logistics on behalf of our employees and our customers."