PARIS - An artificial intelligence program developed in China that combs through test results, health records and even handwritten notes diagnosed childhood diseases as accurately as doctors, researchers said Monday. From the flu and asthma to life-threatening pneumonia and meningitis, the system consistently matched or out-performed primary care pediatricians, they reported in Nature Medicine. Dozens of studies in recent months have detailed how AI is revolutionizing the detection of diseases including cancers, genetic disorders and Alzheimer's. AI-based technology learns and improves in a way similar to humans, but has virtually unlimited capacity for data processing and storage. "I believe that it will be able to perform most of the jobs a doctor does," said senior author Kang Zhang, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots rank among the top 10 trends in digital marketing this year, said an industry expert, noting that the trends will help one be ready for challenges awaiting one's business in 2019. With everybody talking about AI, don't be afraid AI will take over the world. But for sure it may have significant impact on your business sooner or later. Mechanisms will be helpful in analyzing your consumers' behaviour and their search patterns. Making the most out of it, utilizing data from social media platforms and blog posts, you'll be able to track customer journey and understand how your users and are looking for desired products and services.

Jtekt Corp., a Nagoya-based parts manufacturer affiliated with Toyota Motor Corp., has developed an upgraded version of Ninja, the brand name for its bearings used for skateboards, ahead of skateboarding making its Olympic debut at the 2020 Tokyo Games. By making use of its technological prowess in the manufacture of industrial robot bearings, the firm says it succeeded in creating skateboard bearings that can rotate at higher speeds while maintaining durability. The new type is already being tested by Kihana Ogawa, a 17-year-old skateboarder hoping to take part in the 2020 Games after representing Japan in last year's Park Skateboarding World Championships. "I hope that skateboarding will attract attention at the (2020) Olympics, so that more people will become aware of the power of bearings," said Yasuhiro Sakamoto, 47, head of the firm's development team. A bearing is a component that supports the axis of rotation in machines, including vehicles, wind turbine generators and bullet train wheels.

WASHINGTON/BEIJING - The Trump administration said the U.S. president still wants to meet China's Xi Jinping in an effort to end the trade war, a sign of optimism as negotiators from the world's two biggest economies start their latest round of talks this week. "He wants to meet with President Xi very soon," White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said Monday on Fox News. "This president wants a deal. He wants it to be fair to Americans and American workers and American interests." Uncertainty whether the leaders will meet to finalize an agreement has stoked concerns that negotiations are faltering as the March 1 deadline approaches. If there's no deal by then, President Donald Trump has threatened to more than double the rate of tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports.

The owner of the wrecked Fukushima No. 1 power plant is trying this week to touch melted fuel at the bottom of the plant for the first time since the disaster almost eight years ago, a tiny but key step toward retrieving the radioactive material amid a ¥21.5 trillion ($195 billion) cleanup effort. Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings Inc. will on Wednesday insert a robot developed by Toshiba Corp. to make contact with material believed to contain melted fuel inside the containment vessel of the unit 2 reactor, one of three units that melted down after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. "We plan to confirm if we can move or lift the debris or if it crumbles," Joji Hara, a spokesman for Tepco said by phone Friday. Tepco doesn't plan to collect samples during the survey. The country is seeking to clean up the Fukushima disaster, the world's worst atomic accident since Chernobyl, which prompted a mass shutdown of its reactors.

Shall we take another case study to be precise? You want to buy a new washing machine for your Bangalore home. So, you go to your favorite home improvement retail store to check out the model. Also, you had already bought a water purifier from the same store before three years. Now on the website, you select a washing machine model along with your family and want it delivered to the home.

Six of the 11 artificial intelligence (AI) startups that are considered to be unicorns – which means to have a value of one billion U.S. dollars or above – come from China, according to CB Insights, a research firm that tracks venture capital and startups. SenseTime took the top spot with a valuation of $4.5 billion dollars, followed by Yitu Technology at 2.3 billion U.S. dollars and smaller unicorns 4Paradigm, Horizon Robotics and Momenta. The annual report published by CB Insights compiles a list of 100 of the most promising private companies. The selection is based on several factors, including patent activity, investor profile and market potential. From emerging startups to established unicorns, the cohort is a mix of startups in different stages of funding and product commercialization.

After the President largely avoided the subject of AI in his SOTU address, a new directive could shape the nascent sector as it spills into everything from healthcare to military warfare. Trump's "American AI Initiative" directs federal agencies to prioritize AI in their research and development, however it did not announce any specific funding assigned for these goals. It also includes language aimed at increasing efforts to educate American workers using a mix of programs spearheaded by the National Council for the American Worker and AI fellowships care of federal agencies. In addition, it calls upon the government to improve access to cloud computing and data-sharing for the development of new AI systems. The executive order comes amid growing concerns over China's push to become a global AI superpower and the threat of job losses in the impending age of automation. The initiative also urges federal branches to establish a regulatory framework for AI across industrial sectors.

Executives in Davos this year had a lot to discuss, such as the uncertainties surrounding the future of the planet with David Attenborough and the political instability pertaining to Brexit. Second only to the US-China trade deal however, 2019's most discussed topic in Davos was Artificial Intelligence. Two questions in particular seemed to capture the imaginations (and itineraries!) of attendees this year: Whilst the full impact of AI may seem far down the line, how far away exactly are we from a reality where these questions begin to hit home in a tangible way? In the 10th anniversary of the'Deloitte Tech Trends' published this year, one of the key trends titled "AI-fuelled organisations" posits that there are three phases of intelligence across the evolution of AI: Today's organisations primarily find themselves in the first phase and many of them are evolving to the second. "To become a true AI-fuelled organisation, a company may need to fundamentally rethink the way humans and machines interact within working environments. Executives should also consider deploying machine learning and other cognitive tools systematically across every core business process and enterprise operation to support data driven decision-making."

Since 1953, when the term Artificial Intelligence was coined byJohn McCarthyin the Dartmouth Conference, we have achieved unthinkable highs: we have taught machines to see, to recognize images or text; we have taught them to read, to listen, speak, or translate.In spite of all of that, they are not even close to achieving full human-capacities; they don't comprehend, they don't understand or learn further beyond the environment in which they are placed. They have unmatched computing power, but little to none true creativity; a superb ability to combine and analyze probabilities, but not a single spark of unsupervised creativity. If someone tells you that the "singularity", the moment in which Artificial Intelligence achieves a definitive human-like character and overpasses our own biological limits on intelligence, is around the corner they are a bit too optimist -the consensus among experts in thatwe are still decades away from a singularity point, and some think we might never get to a true human-like intelligence-. Regardless of the time to a future in which we have to address machines as intellectually equal or superior, the revolution of AI is unstoppable in so many other ways. The amount of resources and talent devoted by the largest global corporations is accelerating a new industrial revolution in which the speed of adoption is increasingly faster than the pace of adaptation.