Five for Friday: Robots on the move, digital ghosts, and AI-driven sketching

Your weekend countdown checklist:

• Leave work at the office (even if “the office” is your kitchen table)? Check.

• Add Enola Holmes to your Netflix list? Check.

• Catch up on five quick reads to dazzle your friends when the topic of “What’s new in AI, IoT, automation, and Silicon Valley?” comes up during your Zoom chat? Here you go:

1. Amazon just announced a whole bunch of new attention-getting home IoT devices, including a home security drone, along with some new consumer services. But as Stacey on IoT explains, what they didn’t announce quite so loudly was all the new data streams they’ll be managing.
2. With the pandemic driving more businesses to emphasize online transactions – even in fields like healthcare that had previously often resisted the trend – companies are turning to AI to enhance customer experience. CIO explores how AI is driving everything from greater reliance on chatbots to identifying the best time of day to send texts.
3. For most of us, Halloween will be a virtual experience this year. Maybe now would be a good time to explore digital ghosts, an application from GE Digital for analyzing and automatically responding to spooky behavior on the control networks for electrical grids and manufacturing systems.
4. Can’t stop the robots: Gartner sees continued double-digit growth for robotic process automation despite (or perhaps because of) COVID-19 economic pressures.
5. Who had “courtroom sketch artist” on their bingo card for “careers that could soon be assisted by AI”?

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