Locus Robotics, the market leader in autonomous mobile robots (AMR) for fulfillment warehouses, today announced a strategic partnership with Balloon One, a London-based provider of software and supply chain applications for distribution, manufacturing and e-commerce companies. Together, Balloon One and Locus Robotics will provide customers with a more efficient, cost-effective solution to meet the dramatically increasing demand for e-commerce fulfillment, further driving the adoption of the innovative warehouse technologies offered by both companies.

“As e-commerce continues to explode across all channels, warehouse fulfillment has become a critical part of the economy,” said Rick Faulk, CEO of Locus Robotics. “Our partnership will deliver cutting-edge robotics technology to Balloon One customers and drive significant operational efficiency and productivity gains, and a faster time to value.”

Through the partnership, Balloon One will offer Locus Robotics’ award-winning, multi-bot solution for warehouse fulfillment alongside Körber/HighJump WMS, enabling customers to achieve consistent efficiency gains of 200-300% without the need for expensive or time-consuming infrastructure changes. In addition, the Locus Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) model ensures that Balloon One customers can address the challenges of the labor market at a very low start-up cost.

“Balloon One is pleased to announce an exciting new partnership with the industry’s most technologically advanced autonomous mobile robot (AMR) provider, Locus Robotics,” said Craig Powell, Managing Director, Balloon One. “The Locus system can be deployed in as little as four (4) weeks and provides two to three (2X-3X) times picker productivity gains. Based on our internal assessment, we believe this technology will become an essential part of our warehouse operations and will provide our customers with a unique and significant advantage in today’s increasingly demanding e-commerce landscape.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has quickly transformed the retail industry, making online and omnichannel purchasing the new normal across the globe. Locus Robotics’ industry-leading robotics fulfillment solution enables brands, retailers, and third-party logistics (3PL) operators to easily meet higher order volumes and increasing consumer demand for e-commerce, retail, omnichannel, and manufacturing order fulfillment. Locus’s proven, multi-bot solution for fulfillment incorporates collaborative, autonomous robots that work closely with human employees to improve fulfillment productivity and efficiency – consistently doubling or tripling fulfillment productivity, lowers labor costs, with near-100% accuracy, while also enabling users to save 30% or more in operating expenses.

Balloon One will be offering live, in-person demonstrations of the Locus Solution to prospective customers at their new demonstration suite in West London. Demos will provide a hands-on experience to showcase the value of the fully integrated Locus and Körber/HighJump solutions.

The post Locus Robotics Expands UK Presence with Strategic Partnership with Balloon One appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.

The work will include up to four projects and a new partnership that will integrate with Health Data Research UK’s (HDRUK) existing research programmes.

The Better Care Partnership was established to lead a new data science initiative, which could receive up to £1.2 million in funding.

Initially funded for three years, it will use continuous improvement methods to integrate clinical practice, large scale health data and advanced analytics to deliver insights for improving care for patients across the UK.

In addition, HDRUK will also support one year Catalyst Projects to demonstrate how patient care can be improved through data-driven health and care decision.

The organisation is teaming up with the Health Foundation to support the projects, which could each receive up to £200,000.

Professor Simon Ball, medical director at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust and national lead for Health Data Research UK’s Better Care priority, said: “As healthcare professionals we make hundreds of decisions a week with our patients. In doing so we aim to decide what will work best for each individual.

“Electronic healthcare records offer the opportunity to combine patients’ data with information on best practice, so that we can reliably deliver high quality care in complex settings and pressured environments.

“Beyond that we can use the resulting data on patients’ outcomes and experience, to continuously learn from, and improve on, everyday practice in ways that are applicable across the NHS.”

Organisations putting forward partnership or project ideas will be expected to demonstrate how they plan to listen to patients and understand their wishes about how their health data will be used.

They will also be expected to show how patients will be involved at all stages. The aim is to use health data responsibly and ethically with a clear focus on improving patient care.

The UK has vast and rich data about people’s health and care, however this is often not available quickly for clinicians or patients to access to support their decision making, according to HDRUK.

This causes delays and, in some cases, prevents the data from being analysed to deliver better care and improve people’s health.  Both the Catalyst Projects and the Better Care Partnership, which will start in May 2020, aim to help address some of these issues.

The closing date for applying for the Catalyst and Better Care Partnership is 11 March, 2020 at 4pm.

The post Health Data Research UK launches £1m data science partnership appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.

As the seat of the first Industrial Revolution, the UK has a long history of designing regulatory solutions to the challenges posed by technological change. However, regulation has often lagged behind – sometimes very far behind – new technology. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is proving no exception to this historical trend.

Is a specialist regulator needed?

In the first place, there is currently no consensus on whether the development of AI requires its own dedicated regulator or specific statutory regime. Gathering evidence for its May 2018 report “AI in the UK”, the Select Committee on AI of the House of Lords found that opinions were divided into three camps: “those who considered existing laws could do the job; those who thought that action was needed immediately; and those who proposed a more cautious and staged approach to regulation”¹.

The first of these categories – where it was argued that existing laws were sufficient – included strong interest groups such as TechUK (a major trade association) and the Law Society of England and Wales. The Committee did not explicitly endorse their view, but it did reject the second option of creating a new regulator, concluding that “AI-specific regulation, at this stage, would be inappropriate”².

The Committee therefore favoured no more than an incremental approach to new regulation. Nonetheless, the caveat “at this stage” is important. The conclusion that AI-specific regulation is inappropriate is not universally accepted, and could easily change over time as difficult cases of algorithmic decision-making become more widely reported.

Moreover, by the time the Committee reported, the Government had already announced the creation of a Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI), whose remit includes an ongoing inquiry into these questions.

The role of the CDEI

The establishment of the CDEI formed part of the UK Industrial Strategy, set out in November 2017³. It is therefore explicitly viewed as a key part of the environment that will make the UK an attractive place for AIdevelopers.

The CDEI was created in large part as a response to two reports issued in the previous year by the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons. In the first of these reports, entitled “The Big Data Dilemma”, the Committee proposed a body with the remit to address “the growing legal and ethical challenges associated with balancing privacy, anonymisation, security and public benefit”⁴ .

In the second report, “Robotics and Artificial Intelligence”, the Committee recommended the creation of a Commission on AI that would focus on “examining the social, ethical and legal implications of recent and potential developments in AI … as well as advising the Government of any regulation required on limits to its progression”⁵.

In practice, the role of the CDEI combines both of these functions. As set out in the Industrial Strategy, its overriding purpose is to “review the existing governance landscape and advise the government on how we can enable and ensure ethical, safe and innovative uses of data, including AI“.

It took a further year, until November 2018, before the CDEI was established and the Government published its formal terms of reference⁶. These include: (i) “reviewing the existing regulatory framework to identify gaps”; (ii) “identifying steps to ensure that the law, regulation and guidance keep pace with developments”; and (iii) “publishing recommendations to government on how it can support safe and ethical innovation in data and AIthrough policy and legislation”.

The current regulatory landscape

It is important to note that the CDEI is not a regulator, nor even a proto-regulator, for AI. It is an advisory body to the Government whose work will cover the question of whether further regulatory provision needs to be made in respect of AI, but which itself has no regulatory powers. While the suggestion is that the CDEI will in due course be established on a statutory basis, there is no proposal that this fundamental limitation on its role will change.

Moreover, its resources are limited and its remit extends far beyond questions relating to AI. At the time of writing, the CDEI has recently published its first annual work programme. Within this, the main work of direct relevance is an inquiry into algorithmic bias, which is not due to report to the Government until March 2020.

The current UK regulatory landscape in relation to AI can therefore be summarised broadly as follows.

First, there is no specific legal provision for the regulation of the development of AI or the use of AIapplications; however, a range of existing regulatory regimes may overlap this territory and be used to some extent to regulate these activities.

Of these regimes, the most significant single case is the data protection regime overseen by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). It is important both because it exhibits the greatest overlap of subject matter with algorithmic decision-making by AI, and because the ICO is one of the few regulators whose remit extends to other branches of Government, and therefore has the ability to regulate uses of AI in the public as well as the private sector. Its role and remit is considered more fully below.

However, the ICO is not unique in having some regulatory responsibility in this area. This is also true for the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission, Competition and Markets Authority, Office of Communications and a range of other sector regulators whose remit – and existing array of regulatory tools – provides them with the power to intervene when the use of AI affects citizens or consumers within the territory covered by their statutory powers.

The question is whether those regulators will have the institutional capacity and expertise to use those powers in respect of AI, or will sufficiently prioritise doing so against the competing demands on their limited resources. The answer is that this is highly doubtful. In its May 2018 report on “Algorithms in Decision-Making”, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee thought that this was an important area for exploration by the CDEI⁸, although it does not feature as a key aspect of that body’s initial work programme.

Second, the UK can be expected to explore, over time, whether additional detailed regulatory arrangements need to be made for specific AI use-cases. Of these, currently the most important and advanced piece of work relates to the use of AI in autonomous vehicles (AVs). In March 2018, the Government referred the regulatory framework for AVs to the Law Commission for England and Wales, and the Scottish Law Commission – bodies whose role is to examine major areas of law reform.

These bodies have already carried out a preliminary consultation and are now in the detailed policy-consideration phase of their work. However, they are not due to report to the Government until March 2021 on their analysis and final recommendations. Moreover, like the CDEI, they are advisory and not law-making bodies. Although their report will have significant weight, and even if its recommendations were to be immediately accepted by the Government (which is far from certain), it would be at least an additional two or three more years before legislation to implement them could begin to find its way onto the statute book.

Third, it is inevitable that there will continue to be significant scrutiny of the adequacy of the regulation of AI, both by the nascent CDEI and by a range of Parliamentary select committees with an interest in this area (as well as many interested parties in the private sector).

While none of these bodies has the power to legislate to fill regulatory gaps that emerge, they may be expected, over time, to identify issues that Government, or existing regulatory bodies, will then be under pressure to address.

Conclusion

A great deal has been written and said about the regulation of AI in the UK. However, the reality is that there is currently no overall coherent approach to the regulatory challenges posed by the rapid development of AIapplications.

The current landscape involves pressing into service existing regulators to use their powers – none of which were designed to address the specific issues raised by AI – as the need arises, while at the same time creating new institutional capacity (in the form of the CDEI) to keep the area under review, and subjecting specific important use-cases (like AVs) to a more detailed process of policy consideration.

In the long run, a more coherent regulatory environment may develop out of this incremental approach. However, all things considered, it is hard to avoid the truth of the judgment expressed by Jacob Turner that, despite the amount of fine words expressed on the subject, with respect to the UK’s regulation of AI, “specific policy developments remain elusive”

The post UK: Regulation Of Artificial Intelligence And Big Data In The UK appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.

Ranplan Wireless is collaborating with the University of Warwick on a project funded by Innovate UK’s Geospatial Commission to identify wireless blackspots to support the rollout of 5G and help improve urban and rural coverage.

The COCKPIT-5G project will use crowd blackspot intelligence sourcing and social media techniques along with sophisticated real-time natural language processing to curate consumer data and build up an accurate connectivity map of the UK. 

With the start of the 5G rollout in the UK, new cell sites are being planned to address the problems of service blackspots with poor or no signal at all and meet the demand for new services to support autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and the growing digital economy. 

Enhancing 5G coverage to all areas of the UK moves towards the UK Government’s ambition to become a global leader in 5G communication technologies.

The COCKPIT–5G project leverages the latest and best cutting-edge advances in social media viral campaigns and natural language machine learning to automatically build a database of blackspots and their geospatial and contextual information by understanding the consumer experience in real-time. 

“The aim of the project is to use customer centric data to improve network deployment efficiency and increase user satisfaction,” says Jie Zhang, Chief Scientific Officer at Ranplan Wireless. “The vision is for 5G wireless networks to self-regulateas this is the future of managing complex ‘on demand’ connectivity in dense environments. By being able to identify coverage blackspots means that operators can also more precisely determine where to place additional small cells to ensure quality of service and save on CAPEX.”

Dr Weisi Guo, from the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick, says: “COCKPIT-5G will enable the UK to be world-leaders in new technologies by getting 5G coverage in blackspots. Businesses will be better connected, which in turn improves manufacturing, and we can enhance AI and the development of autonomous vehicles.”

The post Social media data mining to be used to fix wireless UK blackspots with 5G rollout appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.