The first wave of AI hospital tools, including voice, patient experience and remote monitoring, are relatively easy to implement and deliver care to people with limited access. More highly specialized AI solutions will require higher expenses (until scale and reimbursement broaden access) and new capabilities. In mature markets like the US and EU, hospital viability will depend on their ability to adapt to the AI Era. The 5,534 US hospitals face an existential crisis. Median operating margins plummeted from 3.4 percent in 2015 to 2.7 percent in 2016 to under 2 percent in 2017.

That means it's time for our monthly, well, sort of Science Diction, as we call it. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Howard. Have you got a - what's the word - the good word for today? Prof. MARKEL: Well, the good word today is robot. What is the origin of the word robot?

ULSAN, SOUTH KOREA – When Lee Dong-hee came to Ulsan to work for Hyundai Heavy Industries five years ago, shipyards in the city known as Hyundai Town operated day and night and workers could make triple South Korea's annual average salary. But the 52-year-old was laid off in January, joining some 27,000 workers and subcontractors who lost their jobs at Hyundai Heavy between 2015 and 2017 as ship orders plunged. To support their family, Lee's wife took a minimum wage job at a Hyundai Motor supplier. His 20-year-old daughter, who entered a Hyundai Heavy-affiliated university hoping to land a job in Ulsan, is now looking for work elsewhere. The Lee family's fortunes mirror the decline of Ulsan, which is now reeling from Chinese competition, rising labor costs and its overreliance on Hyundai -- one of the giant, family-run conglomerates, known as chaebol, that dominate South Korea.

A series of recent news stories have highlighted the massive advances made in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Yitu created a technology called Dragonfly. Dragonfly can search and analyze billions of photographs and locate a single person in a matter of seconds. Connected to cameras in the Shanghai Metro, it identified over 500 criminals in a three month period. It's so powerful it can recognize people wearing disguises.

If you've been paying attention to the application of artificial intelligence in retail, you may feel like the buzz around the topic has gone from zero to "arrived" in less than a year. In retail time, even at the speed of the modern consumer, that is incredibly fast. Some of the hype has come from activity around specific use-cases for the application of AI in retail. Predictive analytics / forecasting – This is forecasting with an emphasis on either products, or customers. For products, retailers appear to be focusing on three main areas of opportunity.

Ministry of Defence: The recently-constituted Artificial Intelligence (AI) Task Force of the Ministry of Defence led by Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran on submitted its final report to Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on using AI for military superiority. They reportedly have made recommendations on how to make India a significant power in AI, in terms of both offensive and defensive needs, especially in aviation, naval, land systems, cyber, nuclear and biological warfare arenas. Initial tenders or RFIs (requests for information) will be floated over the next two years on dual-use AI capabilities.

BUYER'S remorse is often experienced in Silicon Valley by investors who plough money into risky startups only to see them fail. Some technology entrepreneurs are now suffering from seller's remorse. They are those whose young companies have grown big in part thanks to Chinese financial backing, but now feel under scrutiny because of an escalating fight between the two tech superpowers. One entrepreneur who took money from Danhua Capital, a Chinese venture-capital firm based near Stanford University, for example, only recently learned that the firm was established with help and funding from China's government. If there are issues down the line you may not know who you're dealing with," he laments. Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. In coming days President Donald Trump is expected to sign into effect the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernisation Act (FIRRMA), which establishes more vigilant reviews of foreign investments into American companies, ...

Are you an investor in Chinese technology stocks? Then you know it's been a tough year to stay invested. There is also the potential for a credit crisis as the great wall of "shadow banking" showed some cracks recently with the collapse of a peer-to-peer lending platform. But I try to look longer-term at what extraordinary Chinese companies are doing -- in the largest middle class on the planet --that model the success of great U.S. companies like Amazon (AMZN - Free Report) and Alphabet (GOOGL - Free Report) . The best two examples there would be Alibaba (BABA - Free Report), the "Amazon of China," and Baidu (BIDU - Free Report), the "Google of China."

A group of security researchers have exposed a flaw in the Amazon Echo that allows hackers to secretly listen to unsuspecting users' conversations - but only if they're savvy enough to be able to carry out the attack. In a presentation dubbed'Breaking Smart Speakers: We are Listening to You,' researchers from Chinese tech giant Tencent explained how they were able to build a doctored Echo speaker and use that to gain access to other Echo devices. The researchers have since notified Amazon of the vulnerability, and the company issued a patch in July. Hackers from Tencent's Blade security research team exposed a flaw in Amazon's Echo smart speaker that would allow someone to secretly spy on others and play random sounds'After several months of research, we successfully break the Amazon Echo by using multiple vulnerabilities in the Amazon Echo system, and [achieve] remote eavesdropping,' the researchers said in the presentation, which was given at the DEF CON security conference, according to Wired. 'When the attack [succeeds], we can control Amazon Echo for eavesdropping and send the voice data through network to the attacker.'

In this paper, we introduce the first principled adaptive-sampling procedure for learning a convex function in the $L_\infty$ norm, a problem that arises often in economics, psychology, and the social sciences. We present a function-specific measure of complexity and use it to prove that our algorithm is information-theoretically near-optimal in a strong, function-specific sense. We also corroborate our theoretical contributions with extensive numerical experiments, finding that our method substantially outperforms passive, uniform sampling for favorable synthetic and data-derived functions in low-noise settings with large sampling budgets. Our results also suggest an idealized `oracle strategy', which we use to gauge the potential for deploying the adaptive-sampling strategy on any function in any particular setting.