A blockchain-driven platform wants to reduce the influence that biased shop assistants and product marketers have on consumers in the skincare industry, and instead create an ecosystem where shoppers can receive expert, impartial advice from qualified dermatologists. Opu Labs says consumers are currently overwhelmed with an avalanche of information online and believes they are not getting the service they deserve. For the millions of people out there with skin conditions, it's often difficult to find the right treatments to cosmetically and medically deal with their complaints. The company believes that artificial intelligence (AI) and big data holds the key to making shoppers better informed – helping them to save money and dramatically reduce the amount of time they spend researching which products to buy. One of the centerpieces of the start-up's offering is Opu AI. Here, users can upload an image of their face which will be analyzed for redness, wrinkles, hyperpigmentation or acne across four specific regions.

Following this, the US government gave funding to McCarthy and fellow scientist Marvin Minsky to develop AI to help strengthen their stance in the Cold War with Russia. Efforts were made to use artificial intelligence to understand the patterns behind the Russian language, which they hoped would enable them to translate Russian documents on a larger scale more quickly. Government funding for AI was slashed as not enough progress had been made. In 1973, Professor Sir James Lighthill argued that machines would never be capable of achieving more than an "experienced amateur" level of chess. Deep Blue was capable of analysing up to 200 million potential positions a second.

According to a recent paper in Neuron, our brains are meant to act as information filters. Put in a big pile of messy data, filter for the useful bits, then clear out any irrelevant details in order to tell a story or make a decision. The unused pieces are deleted in order to make space for new data -- like running a disk cleanup on a computer. In neurobiology terms, forgetting happens when synaptic connections between neurons weaken or are eliminated over time, and as new neurons develop, they rewire the circuits of the hippocampus, overwriting existing memories (New Atlas). In order to adapt effectively, humans need to be able to strategically forget.

Any Star Wars fan knows that the chances of successfully navigating an asteroid field are approximately 3,720 to 1. The odds are probably significantly higher against today's autonomous drones, which fly quite a bit slower than sublight speed and without the mad skills of Han Solo. Researchers at MIT believe they have hit upon a solution--more than one, actually--to train drones to move quickly through a crowded, complex environment, though we're probably light years away from navigating through hostile star systems. One solution, dubbed "Flight Goggles," involves streaming a virtual reality environment to the drone as it flies through empty space. "The system is at the intersection of motion capture equipment, drone technology, and high-bandwidth communications," Sertac Karaman, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, told Singularity Hub. "We had to develop a number of hardware and software components to make it work."

Telexistence Inc is a Tokyo-based robotic startup that I stumbled upon that made me think about the future of retail. Telexistence unveiled its first mass production prototype for Model H. The premise is simple, the drone is dormant until a user logs on with a VR headset and starts moving it around. While the kit in the video is bulky (and I am not sure why that is the case) in the future it's likely to be as simple as logging into a social network. In a way, this is the future that Mark Zuckerburg wants and one I can see happen en mass if drones start to really take off.

He estimates that he talks or texts, on average, with each CEO in his portfolio three or four times a week. He visits potential customers with Jörg Lamprecht, CEO of Dedrone, a 75-employee drone-security firm. "It's not about the investments," Mr. Chambers says about his portfolio. "I want to first be a strategic partner with the CEO, where I am his or her most trusted adviser, mentor--a coach." Mr. Chambers is part of a wave of big-time CEOs and executives who, instead of more conventional retirements of just sitting on a couple of big-company boards, are embarking on second chapters as guiding lights on the startup scene.

Singapore-based AI startup Silent Eight has won the top spot at the RegTech Association Australia's inaugural pitch fest this year. Silent Eight's artificial intelligence-based tools help financial institutions combat money laundering and terrorism financing. According to Silent Eight's website, it has a passion for AI and a relentless drive to revolutionise the science of due diligence. "To that end, we have invented a groundbreaking system with Artificial Intelligence at its heart, powering through with Machine Learning. Our system has proven so effective, we are working with a number of larger banks and financial institutions to give them a powerful tool to combat Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing."

Nanbu Bijin Co. in Ninohe, Iwate Prefecture, is developing an AI tool to find the best time to drain water in the steeping process for rice before it gets steamed. The company aims to see AI put in practical use in several years. "We would like to develop AI to partner with our workers to help resolve the manpower shortage (at breweries in Japan)," said Nanbu Bijin President Kosuke Kuji, 46. The company, whose origins date back to the early 1900s, won the top sake title in the junmai category for its Nanbu Bijin Tokubetsu Junmai at the International Wine Challenge 2017. Junmai sake is made of only rice, kōji (mold) and water.

CHENNAI: Drafting legal contracts -- be it employment documents or the highly complex merger agreements -- has been a constant pain for larger corporates. For smaller enterprises that may not be able to hire legal organisations to vet such documents in detail, it is even harder to manage and map laws to particular contracts. With the development of Artificial Intelligence, legal contract mapping and management has been automated to a large extent and is turning out to be an area of growth for technology start-ups such as SpotDraft, which makes about $5 million in revenue every month. Amid Indian players like VakilSearch, Legal Desk and Near Law, SpotDraft is one of the first few to provide contract management services using Artificial Intelligence. The legal tech start-up, founded by Harvard Law School graduate Shashank Bijapur, along with Madhav Bhagat, a former software developer at Google, looks to expand its operations from its home base in India to European countries, Singapore and Hong Kong, among others, this year to cash in on the rapid growth in the $80 billion contract automation market.

Biomind, an artificial intelligence (AI) machine, can read MRI scans and diagnose neurological conditions like tumours in a second, its maker, Hanalytics, has claimed. In contrast, a doctor will take an hour on average to study the images and draw up a report, the Singapore start-up said. But while AI machines like Bio-mind are increasingly outperforming humans, they can never totally replace them. This was a recurring theme at the inaugural Sino-Singapore Artificial Intelligence Forum yesterday. The reason has to do with the importance of the human touch.