United Kingdom

The pandemic has seen the country pulling together, with organisations across the space sector stepping forward to help. Apian, part of the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme, aims to establish a network of secure air corridors for electric drones to navigate via satellite-enabled GPS. Each drone will be able to carry COVID-19 samples, test-kits and PPE. This will avoid courier call-out waiting times, free-up NHS staff, reduce unnecessary physical contact and minimise the risk of secondary transmission of the virus.

The past years in the Fall San Francisco was the scene of Dreamforce, with 170,000 attendees the largest IT event in the world. Artificial Intelligence, under the name Einstein, is becoming increasingly important within the Salesforce portfolio. An important development of Einstein at Dreamforce was the offering of deep voice interaction with artificial intelligence. Carola Verschoor of Royal HaskoningDHV called this in a report by professional title Executive People at the time “ talking to data. The video above is a conversation Marco van der Hoeven had with Allison Witherspoon about the development of Einstein last year.

Sarcos Defense, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sarcos Robotics, today announced that the company has been awarded a contract by the Air Force Technology Acceleratory Program (AFWERX) to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) platform.for the Center for Rapid Innovation (CRI) at Air Force Research Labs (AFRL), that will enable human-scale dexterous robotic systems.

Neil Sahota recently released the book Own the AI Revolution. In this book – which is specifically aimed at non-technically skilled business leaders – he helps his readers to recognize and seize the opportunities of AI.

How can criminals use AI? And how can the police use AI to track down criminals? The United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) is conducting research into this under the direction of Irakli Beridze.

The ZeroAbuse.AI AI tool is being developed to detect child abuse. Joelle Casteix, who works for the non-profit organization Zero Abuse Project, explains how it works.

Respect and responsibility, that’s what developing AI is all about, says Kathy Baxter, Architect, Ethical AI Practice at Salesforce.  “In fact, developing AI is like raising a child. As a developer of AI, you are actually a parent.” According to Baxter, we must therefore always show sufficient respect and responsibility.

UiPath today announced that Renzo Taal has joined the Company as Senior Vice President and Managing Director of EMEA, effective October 1. Taal joins UiPath from Salesforce, where he held several international roles and most recently served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Asia.

A Gartner poll of roughly 200 business and IT professionals on September 24, 2020 revealed that 24% of respondents’ organisations increased their artificial intelligence (AI) investments and 42% kept them unchanged since the onset of COVID-19.  Growth – namely customer experience and retention, and revenue growth – along with cost optimisation were the top focus areas for their current AI initiatives.

In the United States, more and more stores are using retail robots. For example, retail chain Schnuck Markets will expand the deployment of Simbe Robotics robot Tally with another 46 stores, using the real-time data collected by Tally at 62 locations.