Artificial intelligence--the mimicking of human cognition by computers--was once a fable in science fiction but is becoming reality in medicine. The combination of big data and artificial intelligence, referred to by some as the fourth industrial revolution,1 will change radiology and pathology along with other medical specialties. Although reports of radiologists and pathologists being replaced by computers seem exaggerated,2 these specialties must plan strategically for a future in which artificial intelligence is part of the health care workforce. Radiologists have always revered machines and technology. In 1960, Lusted predicted "an electronic scanner-computer to examine chest photofluorograms, to separate the clearly normal chest films from the abnormal chest films."3

The combined domestic output of eight major Japanese automakers fell 3.2 percent in October from a year earlier to 743,086 vehicles for the first decline in three months, according to data from major automakers. Six of the eight carmakers reported declines, with Mitsubishi Motors Corp.'s domestic output tumbling 23.4 percent to 44,279 vehicles due to a temporary halt of minicar production in the wake of a fuel economy data manipulation scandal that erupted in April. Toyota Motor Corp. said Tuesday its domestic output fell 6.1 percent in October to 260,426 vehicles, the first decline in three months, reflecting slower growth in exports to the Middle East and North America. Domestic production at Suzuki Motor Corp. dived 13.3 percent from the year before to 62,206 vehicles due to sluggish sales of its minicars -- or vehicles with engines no larger than 660 cc -- since a tax hike on that vehicle category. Nissan Motor Co.'s output at home jumped 36.6 percent to 95,490 vehicles thanks mainly to strong sales of its new Serena minivan, which is equipped with self-driving vehicle technology.

Is it time to buy into AI stocks? Artificial intelligence can pick our stocks. But should investors be picking artificial intelligence? AI has long been a popular theme in sci-fi movies, but its potential is now entering the real world as computers start driving cars, beating the world's best Go player, figuring out what we want to buy (in my case, apparently, a Lexus) and constructing investment portfolios. To continue reading this article, you must be a Globe Unlimited subscriber.

SkyPixel and drone maker DJI teamed up for a contest that features both'enthusiast' and'professional' groups to which users can submit their photos taken by drones. Pictured is'Infinite road to Transylvania', an image by Calin Stan. Apple's spaceship is almost ready for takeoff: Latest drone... Meet Tim, the rolling robot that keeps CERN running:... Australia's Great Barrier Reef in crisis as scientists... From ripping flesh from the dead to EATING their remains:... Apple's spaceship is almost ready for takeoff: Latest drone... Meet Tim, the rolling robot that keeps CERN running:... Australia's Great Barrier Reef in crisis as scientists... From ripping flesh from the dead to EATING their remains:... Dirkie Heydenrych is next with his'Ship Wreck at L'Agulhas' (pictured), which he used a DJI Phantom 3 Advance drone to capture. It shows a deteriorating vessel in the sea off the coast of South Africa. 'Dronie' by Manish Mamtani is next, which he used a DJI Phantom 3 while shooting in New Hampshire.

Fedscoop: Autonomy and artificial intelligence may be integral to the Defense Department's Third Offset Strategy, but making those technologies useful will require IT investments to integrate them into defense systems, a new report says. "Both the DOD and the Intelligence Community, they are investing in these technologies. So artificial intelligence is a big priority area, machine learning, all these technologies," Matthew Hummer, director of analytics at big-data and analytics firm Govini, told FedScoop. "But they haven't really done a good job of integrating it into the current Distributed Common Ground Systems. And that's because those systems really need pretty much a big overhaul to be able to do that."

Mobile means that, for the first time, pretty much everyone on earth will have a camera, taking vastly more images than were ever taken on film ('How many pictures?'). This feels like a profound change on a par with, say, the transistor radio making music ubiquitous. Then, the image sensor in a phone is more than just a camera that takes pictures - it's also part of new ways of thinking about mobile UIs and services ('Imaging, Snapchat and mobile'), and part of a general shift in what a computer can do ('From mobile first to mobile native'). Meanwhile, image sensors are part of a flood of cheap commodity components coming out of the smartphone supply chain, that enable all kinds of other connected devices - everything from the Amazon Echo and Google Home to an August door lock or Snapchat Spectacles (and of course a botnet of hacked IoT devices). When combined with cloud services and, increasingly, machine learning, these are no longer just cameras or microphones but new endpoints or distribution for services - they're unbundled pieces of apps.

The fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning are moving so quickly that any notion of ethics is lagging decades behind, or left to works of science fiction. This might explain a new study out of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which says computers can tell whether you will be a criminal based on nothing more than your facial features. The bankrupt attempt to infer moral qualities from physiology was a popular pursuit for millennia, particularly among those who wanted to justify the supremacy of one racial group over another. But phrenology, which involved studying the cranium to determine someone's character and intelligence, was debunked around the time of the Industrial Revolution, and few outside of the pseudo-scientific fringe would still claim that the shape of your mouth or size of your eyelids might predict whether you'll become a rapist or thief. Not so in the modern age of Artificial Intelligence, apparently: In a paper titled "Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images," two Shanghai Jiao Tong University researchers say they fed "facial images of 1,856 real persons" into computers and found "some discriminating structural features for predicting criminality, such as lip curvature, eye inner corner distance, and the so-called nose-mouth angle."

Facial recognition software is most commonly known as a tool to help police identify a suspected criminal by using machine learning algorithms to analyze his or her face against a database of thousands or millions of other faces. The larger the database, with a greater variety of facial features, the smarter and more successful the software becomes – effectively learning from its mistakes to improve its accuracy. Now, this type of artificial intelligence is starting to be used in fighting a specific but pervasive type of crime – illegal fishing. Rather than picking out faces, the software tracks the movement of fishing boats to root out illegal behavior. And soon, using a twist on facial recognition, it may be able to recognize when a boat's haul includes endangered and protected fish.

From emotionally cognisant AI friends to experiences that respond to your body language, we're about to go on a tour of some of the most advanced and exciting forms of future human-computer interaction, powered by the emotionally intelligent web. To understand this future, we first have to turn to our distant past. Roughly two million years before the first human, in Africa, we find an early precursor to man: the hominid. At this time, many human-like species were facing extinction. Hominids were under intense evolutionary pressures to survive, competing fiercely with other groups for scarce resources.

Neil Prakash, an Australian recruiter for the Islamic State group (also called ISIS), was arrested somewhere in the Middle East after surviving drone attacks by the FBI, the New York Times reported Thursday. The 25-year-old, who was linked to militant plots in Australia and had appeared in several ISIS propaganda videos, was believed killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq in April. According to the Times, which cited an unnamed senior American military official, Prakash was wounded in an airstrike earlier this year but survived. Another senior U.S. military official reportedly said the former Melbourne resident was arrested some time in the last few weeks by an unidentified Middle Eastern government. Prakash, who converted to Islam from Buddhism and took the name Abu Khaled al-Cambodi, left Australia in 2013 and has been recruiting fighters for ISIS since then.