Thomson Reuters, a global content and technology company, recently released new research on generative AI that gauged the sentiment of professionals across legal, tax, and accounting firms in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. The research sought to better understand how the technology is perceived and applied within the professional services industry. The report uncovered a mix of optimism and caution in the adoption of generative AI. 

"Generative AI has the capacity to disrupt and redefine the professional landscape, but it is clear from our findings that there is a trust gap with professionals," said Steve Hasker, President and CEO, Thomson Reuters. "The future of professional work is set to be revolutionized by generative AI, and as an industry, we need to work together to find the right balance between the benefits of technology and any unintended consequences. We believe this will help our customers to first trust the transformative power of generative AI, and then harness the opportunity to shape the future of their professions." 

Amongst the professionals surveyed, the potential for generative AI is undeniably recognized; 78% of respondents believe generative AI tools such as ChatGPT can enhance legal or accounting work, with the proportion slightly higher for legal (82%) than for tax (73%). About half (52%) of all respondents believe generative AI should be used for legal and tax work.  

However, despite the research sharing strong feelings about generative AI’s potential utility, many within the legal and tax fields are still weighing their options before adopting the technology. Only 4% of respondents are currently using generative AI in their operations, with an additional 5% planning to do so. Interestingly, tax and accounting firms are more open to the idea, with a 15% adoption or planned adoption rate. 

Among those who have adopted or are planning to adopt generative AI technologies, research was the primary use case cited by respondents; about two-thirds of those in corporate legal and 80% of those in tax identified it as the most compelling use. Knowledge management, back-office functions, and question answering services were also cited as use cases of interest. 
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Risk perception seems to be the major stumbling block in the adoption of generative AI tools. A significant 69% of respondents expressed risk concerns, suggesting that fear may hold back a more widespread adoption. While the potential of generative AI tools is recognized, there is an air of uncertainty, underlining the need for establishing trust, as well as furthering education and strategic planning in its implementation. 

Despite concerns around the risks to privacy, security, and accuracy, very few organizations are actively taking steps to limit the use of generative AI or ChatGPT among employees. Twenty percent of respondents said their firm or company has warned employees against the unauthorized use of generative AI at work. Only 9% of all respondents, meanwhile, reported their organization had banned the unauthorized use of generative AI.  
 
Research Methodology 
The Thomson Reuters Institute conducted three separate online surveys for legal and tax professionals in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. The respondents were invited to take the survey via an online invitation, or as part of the Thomson Reuters Influencer Coalition panel.

• First survey: Aimed at mid-size and large law firms, ran between March 21-31, 2023, and received 443 applicable respondents.  
• Second survey: Aimed at corporate legal departments, ran between April 11-25, 2023, and received 587 applicable respondents.  
• Third survey: Aimed at tax and accounting firms and corporate tax departments, ran between May 3-15, 2023, and received 771 total applicable respondents. 

In total, the sample for the report is 1,801 respondents, of which 25% are from law firms, 33% are from corporate legal departments, 24% from tax and accounting firms, and 18% from corporate tax departments. Most of the respondents, 70%, were from the U.S., with 20% from the U.K. and 10% from Canada. 

Most respondents from law firms and tax firms were from mid-sized firms, representing 62% of law firm respondents and 55% of tax firm respondents. For corporate legal and tax, most respondents were from small or midsize departments: 88% of corporate legal respondents and 87% of corporate tax respondents were from departments of 50 people or fewer. 
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Those respondents completing the survey were also asked selected open-ended questions concerning their opinions on why generative AI should not be used for legal or tax work, as well as the potential risks of generative AI, and if they believed those risks existed. The Thomson Reuters Institute also conducted additional qualitative interviews to further expand generative AI beliefs, in addition to the survey responses. 

In a significant leap forward for wearable technology, a team of researchers at Stanford University has made remarkable progress in the development of electronic skin that possesses the ability to sense touch. This innovation has the potential to revolutionize industries ranging from healthcare to robotics, opening up new possibilities for human-machine interaction and sensory augmentation.

The electronic skin, known as e-skin, mimics the sensory capabilities of human skin by integrating pressure sensors, stretchable circuitry, and a sophisticated neural network. The team accomplished this feat by combining advanced materials, flexible electronics, and machine learning algorithms. The result is a thin, flexible, and highly sensitive e-skin that can accurately perceive and respond to different levels of pressure and touch.

“We were inspired by the natural system and wanted to mimic it,” said Weichen Wang, whose team published its success in the journal Science. “Maybe we can someday help patients to not only restore motor function but also restore their sensations.”

One of the key advantages of this e-skin technology is its potential applications in prosthetics and healthcare. By incorporating this electronic skin into prosthetic limbs, individuals with limb loss or impairment can regain a sense of touch and better interact with their environment. This advancement holds great promise in improving the quality of life for amputees and enhancing their overall mobility and dexterity.

Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University in Boston Ravinder Dahiya is also researching the use of flexible electronics to create artificial skin. "If you pick up a glass of beer and you can't sense that it's not cold, then you won't get the right taste," he said.

Beyond healthcare, the Stanford team's electronic skin can also have a transformative impact on the field of robotics. Robots equipped with such touch-sensing capabilities can interact with objects and humans more intuitively and safely. This development paves the way for advancements in industrial automation, collaborative robotics, and human-robot interfaces, making robots more adaptable and capable of performing delicate tasks with precision.

The team's accomplishment at Stanford highlights the power of interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation. By combining expertise from various fields such as materials science, electrical engineering, and computer science, they have pushed the boundaries of what is possible in wearable technology. This breakthrough in electronic skin underscores the importance of fostering cross-disciplinary partnerships to tackle complex challenges and drive technological advancements.

This research, according to Joe McTernan of the American Orthotic and Prosthetic Association, stimulates technical improvements that might one day give amputees real-time biofeedback.

“Although this skin technology is fairly new, there has been significant research and development in recent years that have focused on creating a positive tactile experience for the patient,” he said.

Alejandro Carnicer-Lombarte, a bioelectronics researcher from the University of Cambridge, told the journal Nature that the Stanford team's closed-loop system, which links sensation to muscle action, is "very exciting...very much a proof of concept."

According to him, most researchers in the field of artificial prostheses focus on certain parts. “Combining those things, in sequence, is not trivial.”
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As the potential of e-skin continues to be explored and refined, it holds immense promise for the future. Imagine a world where wearable devices can seamlessly interact with users, robots could possess a sense of touch, and virtual reality becomes more immersive through haptic feedback. The Stanford team's pioneering work brings us closer to that reality, demonstrating the immense potential of electronic skin and its transformative impact across industries.

An improved and better-trained version of ChatGPT retook a simulated CPA test after an earlier failure and passed, similar to the roughly half of human applicants who fail on their first attempt. But does this trial suggest that ChatGPT will soon compete for accounting positions?

“This calls into question the 'competitive advantage' of the human accountant relative to the machine. To our knowledge, for the first time, AI has performed as well as most human accountants on a real-world accounting task. This raises important questions of how machine and accountant will work together in the future,” the study's authors said.

The worry around artificial intelligence (AI) is that it will eventually replace human labor. There are some tasks that a machine simply cannot perform, but there are others that will adapt to take advantage of AI's efficiency. The question is, do accounting jobs fall into that category? That may be the case, according to the most recent test, but only after certain AI system adjustments.

How ChatGPT Did It. Although ChatGPT has showed its abilities in a variety of applications, the researchers aimed to improve its effectiveness in student examinations like the CPA exam.

The chatbot was changed by the researchers using “chain of thought” prompting and a “10-shot” scenario, where it was taught with 10 examples. These techniques helped the AI become more knowledgeable about the topic and keep important concepts.

The upgrade from the initial version, ChatGPT 4.0, was the one that passed the CPA exam. Newer ChatGPT models, which have stronger training and reasoning capabilities, outscored older models on average by 16.5%, according to the study.

The most recent Version 4.0 averaged a score of 85.1 out of 100 and successfully completed all four sections of the exam, in contrast to the prior Version 3.5's average score of merely 53.1. The chatbot received an 87.5 in the part that rated highest, auditing and attestation (AUD).

Version 3.5 of ChatGPT took the CPA Exam in early May under the direction of trade publication Accounting Today. The chatbot got a pitiful 35% in financial accounting and reporting (FAR), its weakest category, and just 48% in business environment and concepts (BEC), its strongest category.

The researchers' test results show that ChatGPT's most recent iterations, which have the most sophisticated reasoning capabilities yet can handle virtually every evaluation. This finding could have significant ramifications for important areas, like accounting and auditing.
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ChatGPT has demonstrated its talents in several well-known exams, such as the Wharton MBA exam, the bar exam, and many AP exams.

Listen up if you want your headphones and speakers to produce better sound: Within the next few years, Bluetooth bandwidth will double, according to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG).

In a briefing held via Vimeo, the SIG stated it intends to increase the wireless transmission protocol's current capacity from about "4Mbps to 6Mbps — maybe up to 8Mbps" and would begin investigating the 6GHz frequency range to enable speedier transmission.

Compared to the 4.6Mbps required to carry lossless 24-bit/96kHz hi-res audio, Bluetooth 5.0 currently delivers variable rates between 125Kbps and 2Mbps. However, having twice as much bandwidth would enable data transfer in every Bluetooth-enabled gadget.

Unfortunately, Chuck Sabin, the SIG’s senior director of market development, said “When you ask us, 'Well, when is this going to happen?' It’s really too early to talk about timing but we do see this as securing the next 20-years-plus of performance enhancements for Bluetooth technology and the drive for more and more devices taking advantage of Bluetooth technology."

The Bluetooth SIG's announcement is interesting because it envisions a time when all headphones and speakers will be able to playback high-resolution audio, not just those with specialized chipsets and support for cutting-edge codecs like aptX Lossless or LDAC, which are only found on a select few products like the Sony WH-1000XM5.

Wi-Fi is a different strategy being pursued by audio makers to provide the speeds required to stream lossless audio. Lossless music can be delivered using Wi-Fi 6, which has a maximum speed of 9.6Gbps, but you must remain connected to your limited-range home network to do so.
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Wireless high-resolution audio is still a way off for Bluetooth, but according to Sabin, the Bluetooth SIG is working to expand the use of Bluetooth LE and Auracast in additional environments. The latter supports location-based Bluetooth, where multiple headphones can connect to a single source at once. The former enables Bluetooth devices to conserve battery life with a lower-powered compression technique. (If you picture a sports arena, a restaurant, or a gym, you're on the right track.)
It's difficult to predict when we'll start using these features because the Bluetooth SIG can only manage the technology's development—not its implementation, which is up to device makers like Sony, LG, and others.
We can only hope that gadget manufacturers will seize the chance that the next Bluetooth technology offers and include it in our beloved products as soon as possible.

The health functions of the Apple Watch are in the news again and are said to have saved at least two lives—one in Minnesota and one in Ohio. The feature taking the spotlight was Fall Detection.

Apple Watch user Michael Brodkorb was struck by a car in Minnesota before it fled the scene. When he could not react, his Apple Watch used Fall Detection to identify the impact and called 911. "I was just shocked," he said. "I mean, just the sheer force of what it's like to get hit by a vehicle."

Besides getting fast emergency response help, the Fall Detection feature warned his wife and kids. He ended up with rib and tailbone injuries. "It absolutely is a life-saving tool," Brodkorb said.

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, responded to an email Brodkorb sent to him, wishing him a swift recovery.

William Fryer, 83, of Cincinnati, was strolling along the Ohio River Trail when he fell. There was nobody nearby, but his Apple Watch saw the fall, alerted his daughter, and phoned emergency personnel.

He was found by Cincinnati police, who then had paramedics take him to the hospital. The huge blood clot that caused his fall was ultimately discovered by X-rays, although the symptoms of the blood clot were unusual because they went unnoticed. Fryer had the clot removed and expressed his gratitude that his Apple Watch had called for help.
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Opening the Apple Watch iPhone app, selecting Emergency SOS, then turning on the Fall Detection option will enable the Apple Watch's fall detection capability. For Apple Watch owners over 55, Fall Detection is turned on by default; however, younger Apple Watch owners can also activate it.

As Europe attempts to transition away from fossil fuel, Sweden is working on the first permanent electric road in the world, which will allow electric cars and trucks to charge while traveling.
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The E20 motorway has been chosen for the project by Trafikverket, the Swedish Transport Administration. In particular, it will construct the electric road system (ERS) along the 21-kilometer route between Hallsberg and Rebro, which is part of the route between Sweden’s two largest cities, Stockholm and Gothenburg.

The e-road is now in the procurement and final planning stages, and Trafikverket expects completing and launching it in 2025 or 2026.

How will it work? Which technology Trafikverket will employ for the ERS is still up in the air. There are now three types: 

1. Overhead conductive charging—Power is supplied from overhead wires to a vehicle by a pantograph in the first method of charging, much like how trams work. However, this technique is only appropriate for large, high-roof cars that can reach the power wires.
2. Ground-based conductive charging—Power is transferred from specialized rails or tracks placed below or on the road during conductive charging. A mechanical stick or arm that touches the rails assists the vehicles in charging. 
3. Ground-based inductive charging —Power is transferred between the vehicles and coils buried in the road without contact in the inductive system.

Sweden’s bet on electric roads. The challenging electrification of E20 comes after several productive ERS pilot projects across the nation. Trafikverket has been testing all three road charging technologies since 2016 in several locations across the nation, including Lund, Gotland, and Sandviken.

For good reason, trucks and buses have received most of the attention. According to one study, connecting the nation's largest cities with electrified roads would cut heavy-duty vehicle emissions by 1.2 million tonnes by 2030.

However, Sweden started experimenting with road pricing in 2018 on a 2-kilometer stretch between the Arlanda airport near Stockholm and a logistics hub in Rosenberg.

By 2030, when it plans to outlaw new fossil fuel-powered cars, the government wants to have deployed 2,000 km of ERS on public roads. However, it is debatable if wagering on e-roads is a wise course of action.
On the one hand, electric road infrastructure will make it possible to go farther between stops at charging stations, boosting EV usage and, thus, cutting carbon emissions.

In addition, an e-roads option to home charging would reduce the demand on the grid during peak hours, according to a recent research by Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. The team added that combining static and dynamic charging at home can cut battery size by as much as 70%.

“This would reduce the need for raw materials for batteries, and an electric car could also become cheaper for the consumer,” said Sten Karlsson, co-author of the study.

There is a significant counterargument, though: the high investment and maintenance expenses for a developing type of infrastructure that, as battery research picks up speed, may eventually become outdated.
However, the study's findings show that the risk isn't that high. According to the researchers, only 25% of the country's and Europe's roadways would need to be electrified for the system to function.

Sweden is not the only country creating e-roads; Italy, France, Germany, and the UK are also testing the technology. In fact, Europe’s interconnectivity might indeed give a winning chance to an electric road network.

The way we construct homes, cars, and even food is changing thanks to 3D printers. They may alter how transplant patients receive new organs in part because of researchers at Stanford University. Their innovative method might eventually enable the printing of organs from the patient’s own cells on demand.

Bioengineers Mark Skylar-Scott and his group have created a method that enables them to 3D-print living heart tissue. One day, they hope to print vital components of the heart, such as valves and ventricles, that would really develop with the patient.

In the US, one in every 100 babies is born with a cardiac problem. Even though they can receive transplants, the body may reject the transplants up to 20 or 30 years after they were given. Using a patient's own cells to bio-print a new organ could lower those incidences.

"It is ambitious, but we believe that a lot of the basic building blocks to start a project like this are in place," Skylar-Scott said.

The method is an illustration of bio-printing, a technique that uses living cells to produce structures that resemble organs. Although the idea of modern bio-printing is not new, the process is laborious. Typically, one cell must be printed at a time. A single human heart would require more than a thousand years to create, even if 1,000 cells were printed per second.

By printing with organoids, collections of tens of thousands of cells, Skylar-Scott and his team have created a technique for accelerating the process. “We take millions of those and condense them into what is essentially a human stem cell mayonnaise, that we can then print through the printer,” he said.

Once the cells are printed, they take on the general shape of tissue that can then have blood vessel networks printed within them.

The group has already created a self-pumping structure that resembles a human vein and is made of tubes. Printing a larger structure, such as a useful chamber that could be grafted onto an existing heart, would be the next stage.
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Although we're probably at least two decades away from a fully printed heart, Skylar-Scott said he believes a heart valve printed using this technique could be implanted in a human patient in as little as five years.

Even while there is rising concern about how generative AI can disrupt the world's labor markets, accountants may be able to sigh with relief, even if only temporarily. Recent studies show that my chosen profession may be spared replacement since the ChatGPT language model doesn’t do well with math!

The fastest growing and most well-known AI platform to date, ChatGPT's artificial intelligence language model, which excels at behavioral learning, storytelling, and other creative tasks, has prompted questions about its potential to enable students to cheat on assignments and exams. The bot passed the bar exam with a 90th percentile score, completed 13 out of 15 AP tests, and scored almost perfectly on the Graduate Record Exam (GRE).

"When this technology first came out, everyone was worried that students could now use it to cheat," Brigham Young University accounting professor David Wood noted. "But opportunities to cheat have always existed. So, for us, we’re trying to focus on what we can do with this technology now that we couldn’t do before to improve the teaching process for faculty and the learning process for students. Testing it out was eye-opening."

However, as a later study led by Wood discovered, the platform often has trouble comprehending mathematical procedures and frequently embellishes data to hide errors when they occur!

According to Wood's research, ChatGPT's ability to pass accounting tests was compared to that of actual accounting students. 186 academic institutions from 14 countries submitted 25,181 questions on information systems, auditing, financial accounting, managerial accounting, and taxation. Undergraduate students at BYU added 2,268 more textbook test bank questions to the repository used for the study.

A combination of multiple choice, true/false, and written response prompts were used to deliver the questions in various formats with varied degrees of difficulty.

According to the survey, students outperformed ChatGPT by almost 30%, scoring an average of 76.7% compared to ChatGPT's 47.4%.

Only 11.3% of the questions were answered correctly by ChatGPT, mostly in the areas of auditing and accounting information systems. The chatbot scored substantially worse on short-answer questions, only scoring between 28.7% and 39.1%. It also performed better while answering multiple choice and true/false questions, earning 59.5% and 68.7% on each format, respectively.
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According to a press release from Jessica Wood, a BYU student who took part in the study, "It's not perfect; you're not going to be using it for everything. Using ChatGPT alone to learn is a fool's errand,"

It's not always better to go bigger, especially when it comes to technology. The InfiRay P2 Pro thermal camera then comes into play. It promises to be the tiniest thermal camera in the world and connects directly to your smartphone's tiny USB port.

It is incredibly tiny, weighing only 9g, and about a quarter's diameter at just over an inch. So it's cool. Why do you need a thermal camera on your smartphone?


Because it uses the phone to display its photographs. One important use case is HVAC engineers and electricians who frequently require access to a thermal camera for their work.
The size of this camera doesn’t prevent it from packing a punch, however. Many thermal cameras suffer from a stutter image. However, because the P2 Pro runs at 25Hz, it can record both motion and still images. At 256 x 192 pixels, the resolution is also higher than most other thermal cameras. Compared to what photographers are often used to, this seems laughably low, but for a thermal camera, that is very good.

The P2 Pro also boasts a magnetic macro lens, which is an intriguing feature. This handy flat addition simply clips onto the device's front. It's rather ingenious and foolproof. The camera is available both with and without this lens.
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The camera's temperature range, which is sufficient for most needs, is -20ºC to 550ºC (-4ºF to 1044ºF). The camera is available for $249 or $299 with a macro lens.

According to a study lead by Li Qian, PhD, at the UNC School of Medicine, a protein that aids in the formation of neurons also functions to reprogram scar tissue cells into heart muscle cells, particularly when working with another protein.

Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine have made important strides in the exciting fields of cellular reprogramming and organ regeneration, and their findings could have a substantial impact on the development of future treatments for damaged hearts.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found a more streamlined and effective way to transform scar tissue cells (fibroblasts) into healthy heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) in a study that was published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

The fibrous, stiff tissue that causes heart failure after a heart attack or because of cardiac disease is created by fibroblasts. Researchers are looking into the possibility of treating or maybe one day curing this widespread and deadly illness by converting fibroblasts into cardiomyocytes.

Surprisingly, a gene activity-controlling protein called Ascl1, which is well recognized to be an essential protein involved in converting fibroblasts into neurons, turned out to be the key to the new cardiomyocyte-making approach. Ascl1 was once assumed to be neuron-specific by researchers.

“It’s an outside-the-box finding, and we expect it to be useful in developing future cardiac therapies and potentially other kinds of therapeutic cellular reprogramming,” said study senior author Li Qian, PhD, associate professor in the UNC Department of Pathology and Lab Medicine and associate director of the McAllister Heart Institute at the UNC School of Medicine.

In the past 15 years, researchers have created several methods to convert adult cells into stem cells and then drive those stem cells to differentiate into other types of adult cells. Recently, researchers have discovered strategies to reprogram cells directly from one mature cell type to another.

It has been hoped that once these techniques are as safe, effective, and efficient as possible, clinicians will provide a straightforward injection to patients to transform harmful cells into helpful ones.

“Reprogramming fibroblasts has long been one of the important goals in the field,” Qian said. “Fibroblast over-activity underlies many major diseases and conditions including heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, liver disease, kidney disease, and the scar-like brain damage that occurs after strokes.”

In the new study, Qian's team used three currently used approaches to reprogram mice fibroblasts into cardiomyocytes, liver cells, and neurons. This team also included co-first authors Haofei Wang, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher, and MD/PhD student Benjamin Keepers. Their goal was to document and contrast the variations in gene activity patterns and variables that control gene activity during these three separate reprogrammings.

Unexpectedly, the scientists discovered that converting fibroblasts into neurons activated a group of genes related to cardiomyocytes. They quickly discovered that Ascl1, one of the master-programmer "transcription factor" proteins that had been employed to create the neurons, was the cause of this activation.

The researchers added Ascl1 to the three-transcription factor cocktail they had been using to create cardiomyocytes to see what would happen because Ascl1 activated cardiomyocyte genes. They were shocked to see that it significantly increased reprogramming efficiency—the percentage of effectively reprogrammed cells—by over ten times. In reality, they discovered that only Ascl1 and another transcription factor known as Mef2c remained from their original cocktail of three factors.

Further research revealed that Ascl1 activates the genes for both cardiomyocytes and neurons on its own, but that it shifts away from the pro-neuron position in the presence of Mef2c. Ascl1 activates a wide range of genes related to cardiomyocytes in cooperation with Mef2c.

“Ascl1 and Mef2c work together to exert pro-cardiomyocyte effects that neither factor alone exerts, making for a potent reprogramming cocktail,” Qian said.

The findings show that the key transcription factors involved in direct cellular reprogramming are not always exclusive to the cell type being altered.
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More importantly, they represent a development toward potential cell-reprogramming treatments for serious diseases. To repair failing hearts, Qian and her team plan to create a two-in-one synthetic protein that combines the active components of Ascl1 and Mef2c.