Understanding and safeguarding personal freedom and civil rights is more critical than ever. So who is policing the police?
Policing is the only authority sanctioned to use force against its citizens. So democratic systems institute safeguards to ensure police impartiality and accountability, often with multiple and overlapping oversight. But who’s keeping an eye on the growing use of technology in policing? The police services board is one prevalent form of oversight responsible for ensuring…
How future changes in the structure of business and the nature of work could impact the environment
Replacing humans with robots clearly has a dystopian flavour. But could the successive waves of artificial intelligence (AI) and other exponentially developing technologies displacing jobs, ranging from banker to construction worker, have potential positives for the environment? According to a 2016 McKinsey automation study, about a third of most job activities, affecting 49 per cent…
Review: The iRobot Roomba s9+ vacuum and the Braava jet m6 mop work in tandem so you can relax
Like most people, we're not crazy about household chores. So last year around this time we were ecstatic to discover the robot vacuum we were looking for. And now iRobot has stepped up two notches by delivering a more powerful and smarter dynamic duo: the iRobot Roomba s9+ vacuum and the Braava jet m6 mop.…
A Sobeys pilot project shows that we’ll soon enough be able to shop without talking to anyone and completely bypass lineups and cashiers
Grocery giant Sobeys has unveiled what it calls Canada's first smart shopping cart at a store in Ontario. It’s a great idea for people looking for assistance in shopping and to be on their way as soon as possible. The project is a partnership with New York-based retail technology company Capers. Essentially, the cart you…
John Shillington of Amii taks about connecting research and expertise to industry and helping Alberta businesses build their capacity for machine learning
John Shillington is president and CEO of Amii. What is Amii Innovates and what do you do? Shillington: Amii Innovates is a program run by the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). It enables and supports Alberta-based businesses as they grow their in-house business and technical capabilities around artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. At Amii,…
While robots replace human workers on the factory floor, better-paid jobs are created to design, build and maintain the robots
The robots are coming, the robots are coming! They may not be an unstoppable evil army ready to take over the world as in a bad sci-fi movie, but they’re definitely making headway on factory assembly lines and increasingly in other industries. A United Kingdom research firm, Oxford Economics, did a study that covered seven…
The end of carding won’t cease the gathering of information. Instead, it will be entered into police data bases without the public’s knowledge
We’re in the era of predictive policing, geo-profiling and crime prevention – carding 2.0 – and need to ask the tough questions about what that means. Understanding and safeguarding personal freedom and civil rights is more critical than ever. The pace at which artificial intelligence is being developed and incorporated is far outpacing the regulatory…
The march of technology is inevitable, but the way its proceeds are distributed is a matter of choice. Here are some options
The RSA (Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has been exploring the future of work. Like many organizations, it begins with the assumption that some 35 to 40 per cent of jobs will be directly impacted by artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, 3D printing, blockchain, stem cells and other technologies.…
Visual intelligence allows for face identification, incident recognition, behaviour monitoring, object identification and even face or activity prediction
Business owners and managers increasingly deal with information overload, including from camera feeds. The cost outlay for a good camera system with extensive storage is dropping daily and new technologies that promise to process all this information continue to emerge. But although it’s valuable information, it’s also exceedingly time consuming to sift through all the…
Automation increases labour productivity and so raises the income levels of workers, who in turn acquire new skills to use and advance automation
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the automation of tasks once done by humans has raised fears about machines putting humans out of work and creating mass poverty. Happily, history has repeatedly proven the doomsayers wrong. While automation has certainly led to declines in entire industries (and employment in those industries), the relationship between automation and…
Policing is the only authority sanctioned to use force against its citizens. So democratic systems institute safeguards to ensure police impartiality and accountability, often with multiple and overlapping oversight. But who’s keeping an eye on the growing use of technology in policing? The police services board is one prevalent form of oversight responsible for ensuring…
