Industry News - Week of Oct. 21, 2019

IN THIS ISSUE: AI Gaining Trust Among Workers; Bio-circuitry Mimics Human Brain; Five Keys to Strategic Execution; Atlassian Buys 'Automation for Jira'; DroidCon 2019 Opens Thursday; SAP CEO Steps Down, Two Step Up

Workers Trust Robots More Than Managers: Report 
If your workers trust a machine more than they trust you as their manager, you're definately doing something wrong. A new study from TechRepublic found that 64 percent of employees with access to artificial intelligence systems at work trust the information and advice from those systems than that provided by their human overseers. 

Bio-Circuitry Mimics Human Brain
A team of government and private-sector researchers have demonstrated new computing circuitry that performs calculations in a way similar to the synapses of the human brain. The so-called bio-circuits use a lipid-based "memcapacitor" that combines memory with charge storage that researchers say could lead to sensory machine learning. 

Five Keys to Strategic Execution
If there's one thing that most war strategiests can agree on, it's that once a battle begins, the original plans go out the window. The same might be said of executing a corporate strategy, where good ideas in the boardroom often go awry in the trenches. Here are five simple ideas that might help keep things on track. 

Atlassian Buys 'Automation for Jira' 
Code Barrel, which developed the Automation for Jira plug-in for Atlassian's Jira issue tracking system, has been acquired by Atlassian. The tool, which reportedly is used by more than 6,000 organizations from Airbnb to Visa, allows repetitive Jira processes to be automated without the need for custom coding. Financial details were not disclosed. 

DroidCon 2019 Opens Thursday 
The annual DroidCon Android developers conference in London starts this Thursday, Oct. 24, and promises more than 70 top experts during its two-day schedule. Its five developer tracks include courses on architecture, cloud, devops, data, mobile and quality, as well as Java, JavaScript, .NET and Python languages. 

SAP CEO Steps Down, Two Take His Place
As Bill McDermott announced he would end his 10-year reign as CEO of enterprise software giant SAP, during which he shepherded the company's transition to the cloud, a pair of executives will take the reins as co-CEOs to manage what one analyst called a generational shift leadership and technology.