AI could fundamentally change the nature of patient care delivery. Are consumers and clinicians prepared for this much-anticipated innovation? Today's unprecedented increase in the volume of patient healthcare data has left the industry struggling to put that data to practical use. Artificial intelligence (AI), with its capability to draw "intelligent" inferences based on vast amounts of raw data, may hold the solution. Smart devices and robotics are already making tentative inroads to the healthcare marketplace.

Deep learning, a variation of machine learning (ML), represents the major driver toward artificial intelligence (AI). As deep learning delivers superior data fusion capabilities over other ML approaches, Gartner predicts that by 2019, deep learning will be a critical driver for best-in-class performance for demand, fraud and failure predictions. "Deep learning is here to stay and expands ML by allowing intermediate representations of the data," said Alexander Linden, research vice president at Gartner. "It ultimately solves complex, data-rich business problems. Deep learning can, for example, give promising results when interpreting medical images in order to diagnose cancer early. It can also help improve the sight of visually impaired people, control self-driving vehicles, or recognise and understand a specific person's speech."

If you're interested in drone deliveries, it's likely because you want your internet shopping dropped at your door within an hour of clicking "buy." And while companies like Amazon are working to make that happen, complicated logistics and thorny regulations mean it's likely to be years before you start hearing the whir of rotors on your front porch. Yet drones are already proving their worth with more urgent, medical, missions. The latest of these comes from Silicon Valley startup Matternet, which has been testing an autonomous drone network over Switzerland, shuttling blood and other medical samples between hospitals and testing facilities. "We have a vision of a distributed network, not hub and spoke, but true peer-to-peer," says Matternet CEO Andreas Raptopoulos.

FARMERS can now zap their crops with a handheld scanner to instantly determine nutritional content, which could prove crucial in mitigating the effects of climate change on food quality. It also brings similar consumer gadgets a step closer – so we can find out what is in our food for ourselves. The device, called GrainSense, analyses wheat, oats, rye and barley by scanning a sample with various frequencies of near-infrared light. The amount of each type of light that is absorbed allows it to precisely determine the levels of protein, moisture, oil and carbohydrate in the grain. This technique has been used for decades in the lab, but this is the first time it has been available instantly on a handheld device.

Israel is a country full of history, which is why they have more museums per capita than any other country. They also have the oldest continuously used cemetery in the world and the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Hearing that, you'd think that not a whole lot has changed over the years, but one thing that has constantly been evolving is their ability to innovate and be productive. Next to the U.S. and Canada, Israel has the largest number of publicly traded companies, which shows that they can also build successful businesses. Our recent article on "The Top-10 Biggest Startups in Israel by Funding" proved to be quite popular so we decided to do another article on the top 10 Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) startups.

Eyal Grayevsky has a plan to make Silicon Valley more diverse. Mya Systems, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company that he cofounded in 2012, has built its strategy on a single idea: Reduce the influence of humans in recruiting. "We're taking out bias from the process," he tells me. Simon Chandler is a freelance journalist covering tech, politics, and music. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.

AI has taken some steps into banking, but it also poised to transform how banks learn from and interact with customers. Financial services will lead the charge in the implementation of AI. Africa's mobile phone market has expanded to become larger than either the EU or the United States with some 650 million subscribers (2016 data). At the same time, Internet bandwidth has grown 20-fold as hundreds of thousands of kilometres of new cables have been laid across the continent to serve an increasing number of its 1.2 billion Africans. Augmented experience on how to recommend how much to spend and on what.

The Kangbashi district of Ordos, China, looks like a cosmopolitan city of the future. It's just 14 years old but already has all the trappings of a mature municipality. It has a large public library designed to mimic the shape of books on shelves. Elsewhere are a contemporary and cavernous airport, a spectacular-looking stadium, clusters of towering apartment buildings, spacious plazas and parks, a five-story food court with 400 vendors, an intricate opera house, and perfectly paved streets designed to connect more than 300,000 residents to the places they live, work, and play. Although Kangbashi has the appearance of a modern metropolis, the truth is apparent in the one thing it lacks: people. Kangbashi is one of hundreds of "ghost cities" rumored to dot the Chinese countryside. Erected at the height of China's real estate boom, they're pet projects of wealthy local governments that built them to be the center of a virtuous circle: Spending their economic windfalls on megacities, governments believed, would attract inhabitants from outlying agrarian communities, creating new urban centers with which to generate even more wealth.

Would you trust a robot to tell you how to vote? Scientists from Kimera Systems have developed a robot that will be able to help users make political decisions. The robot named'Nigel' uses artificial intelligence (AI) to become aware of its user's life and utilise the information by offering advice to user's including how to vote. Unlike other AI robots Nigel programmes itself as it goes, rather than teach itself how to perform and effectively carry out tasks. It works solely on how the user is themselves, for example if they offer traits of a left wing supporter he will adapt to that life style.

Millions of children around the world don't have access to basic education, such as reading, writing and arithmetic skills, and the problem is only getting worse. XPRIZE is looking to do something about it. Today, the organization announced the five finalists for the Global Learning XPRIZE; each will receive a $1 million. This particular challenge is designed around teaching basic learning to children around the world. The competition wanted easily scalable software solutions that would be relatively simple to implement.