Connected hospitals with intelligent messaging In today's hospitals, pacemakers, defibrillators and oximeters are all connected to the internet and share vitals immediately with doctors, in turn speeding response times. Hospitals have technicians, nurses, staff, billing departments, insurance providers, patients and patients' families as stakeholders, each with different requirements of information about the care given to patient. Unified Inbox offers an AI-based unified cloud IoT messaging platform for internet of things devices to connect various stakeholders, giving them the freedom to receive different messages at different frequency, with different senses of urgency in different mediums of their choice. Unified Inbox launched this at Nanyang Polytechnic in Singapore as "CUBE," the IoT-secured messaging gateway for healthcare. The artificial intelligence makes the hospitals connected, giving peace of mind to patients and their loved ones while improving efficiency in the overall hospital management and interaction with all stakeholders.

The American workforce is going to change dramatically as robots and automation continue to take the place of humans. To combat that, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar has pledged nearly half a million dollars to test a universal basic income program. The cash will come from the Omidyar Network, the tech mogul's philanthropic investment firm and be doled out to people living in Kenya through a program called GiveDirectly. The money will be used to run a 12-year pilot program to test the feasibility of universal basic income. Through the program, a group of 6,000 Kenyan citizens will be granted regular stipends for the duration of the experiment. About 20,000 more people will also receive some form of cash to supplement their income.

A North-East fintech company is using artificial intelligence (AI) and speech recognition software to allow users to discuss their financial accounts with their phone. Darlington-based MyFirmsApp creates custom app platforms for accountants and has recently secured the right to use next generation AI platform, Amazon Lex. The software will allow the company to build apps with'human-like intelligence' that can see, hear, speak, understand and interact with the world around them. The new tech will allow accountants and their customers to have a conversational experience when using their app. CEO Joel Oliver believes that being able to create chat bots using Amazon Lex will help accountants carry out simple tasks and allow them to become more productive.

Microsoft's new Artificial Intelligence and Research Group announced that its Microsoft Cognitive Services includes now 25 tools forming the backbone for Cortana digital assistant and the Skype Translator. According to Hot Hardware, two of the new APIs created by the company's new Artificial Intelligence and Research Group are the Content Moderator and Bing Speech. Bing Speech is capable of both converting text to speech and translating speech into text. Microsoft's speech recognition technology uses language and acoustic models to in order to distinguish between similar-sounding words and to customize its services for a specific language. In order to narrow the focus of the recognition engine, a Custom Speech Service lets developers supply their own data.

An Introduction to'Machine Learning' -- I came across this article and thought it was worth a share, the original article was surrounded in adverts and difficult to read, so I make no apologies for plagiarizing it! I have kept the original link at the bottom of the article, enjoy . . . The concept that a computer program can learn and adapt to new data without human interference. Machine learning is a field of artificial intelligence that keeps a computer's built-in algorithms current regardless of changes in the worldwide economy. If you would like to try your first Machine Learning Experiment -- take a look at this easy walkthrough https://t.co/JHwAShjRgj

Ever have a hard time understanding a road sign in another country? Computer vision startup Mapillary thinks it has a solution. You know how Google hopes to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful?" Swedish startup Mapillary wants to do the same thing with the world's road signs. As it turns out, from warnings about polar bears to alerts concerning "invisible cows," there are some pretty darn unusual roadside messages you'll come across as you travel the globe.

Ahmed Elgoni felt like he'd struck gold. The 24-year-old video game developer from South Africa had in November secured a ticket to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco -- a cultural mecca for anyone who wants to make video games. A sponsor would cover the cost of his round-trip flight from Cape Town. Just two weeks ago, he received his visa to enter the U.S. Then President Trump signed an executive order banning refugees and travelers from seven countries. Elgoni grew up in South Africa, but he was born in Sudan -- one of the countries listed as part of the travel ban. As a dual citizen, he now doesn't know if he can attend GDC, which runs from Feb. 27 to March 3. "No one's sure of what's happening," he said.

The machine-learned smarts that enable Microsoft's Skype Translator, Bing and Cortana to accomplish tasks such as translating conversations, compiling knowledge and understanding the intent of spoken words are increasingly finding their way into third-party applications that people use every day. These advances in the democratization of artificial intelligence are coming in part from Microsoft Cognitive Services, a collection of 25 tools that allow developers to add features such as emotion and sentiment detection, vision and speech recognition, and language understanding to their applications with zero expertise in machine learning. "Cognitive Services is about taking all of the machine learning and AI smarts that we have in this company and exposing them to developers through easy-to-use APIs, so that they don't have to invent the technology themselves," said Mike Seltzer, a principal researcher in the Speech and Dialog Research Group at Microsoft's research lab in Redmond, Washington. "In most cases, it takes a ton of time, a ton of data, a ton of expertise, and a ton of compute to build a state-of-the-art machine-learned model," he explained. Take one of the tools that deals with speech recognition, for example.

Quadcopter drones are great for aerial photography, racing, and backing up Lady Gaga during the Super Bowl halftime show. But puny propellers don't cut it for serious jobs, which is why military missions and humanitarian aid drops use unmanned aerial drones that resemble airplanes. Fixed-wing drones can fly further and carry more. The trouble is, winged aircraft can't takeoff or land vertically like quadcopters, and the hybrid machines that combine the utility of wings and the ease of quads tend to be complex and expensive. Further compounding the challenge, fixed-wing drones need runaways, which you don't often find in the remote locations where drones are most useful.

Conventionally, skin cancer's primarily diagnosed visually. It starts with a clinical screenings, then, if needed, followed by dermoscopic analyses, a biopsies and histopathological examinations. A team mainly from Stanford University, California, has reported in Nature that mHealth can provide an alternative. Classifying skin lesions using images is challenging, owing to fine-grained variabilities in their appearance. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) offer potential for dealing with fine-grained object categories. The team demonstrates skin lesion classifications using a single CNN, trained end-to-end directly from images using only pixels and disease labels as inputs.