From Bhutan's gross national happiness index to new year's resolutions, we are all fascinated with ways to get happier, but is technology getting us any closer? In collaboration with the Royal Society – please join us on January 16th-17th for 28 hours of hacking happiness and explore how machine learning can be used to measure, understand, predict and increase happiness. In this multidisciplinary hackathon, we hope to attract professionals from different disciplines, including machine learning, data science, design and software engineering to come together and develop innovative solutions addressing happiness. We are especially interested in ideas that emphasise human-AI collaboration. We would be interested to see ideas that address ways in which new machine learning systems can work together with people in a broad variety of topics such as conversational assistants, interactive AI, active learning, human-agent collaboration, crowd-sourcing or citizen science.

Ancient Greek physicians figured that our breath was a strong health indicator, but researchers from the Israel Institute of Technology have proven just how true that is. They developed a device that uses nanoparticles to identify 17 different diseases, including lung cancer and Parkinson's disease, from just a single breath. While the machine isn't accurate enough yet for real-life clinical diagnoses, it shows high promise as a quick, non-invasive test that could catch diseases in their early stages The team tested breath samples from more than 1,400 patients and identified 13 chemicals found in eight types of cancers, Crohn's disease, Parkinson's disease, pulmonary hypertension and other diseases. Each of those volatile organic compounds is present in varying amounts, forming a distinctive "fingerprint" for each ailment. "These odor signatures are what enables us to identify the diseases using the technology that we developed," says research lead Prof. Hossam Haick.

Having a firm belief that Artificial Intelligence will be the next biggest thing in technology arena tech titans are conducting a myriad of research on it. Eventually, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and alike are after A. I. Likewise, Google's counterpart in China, Baidu, Inc. is emphasizing on Artificial Intelligence vehemently. In fact, Baidu focuses on AI to conquer the internet industry. More than 5 years ago the company started building Baidu Brain. Baidu Brain is a robot which stimulates human brain.

We ask Siri for recommendations on where to eat, ask Google for directions to the restaurant, ask our car to play music or make a phone call, ask our house to turn on the lights and the heat before we get home. Deep Knowledge Ventures, a Hong Kong-based life science venture capital company, has already appointed an AI robot to its board of directors. The robot, called Vital (Validating Investment Tool for Advancing Life Sciences) was designed to analyze trends in the data of certain companies in an effort to predict successful investments. Vital is an equal member of the board and is expected to eventually be given an equal vote in all financial decisions made by the company. "The variables involved in the long-term success of a biotechnology company are many and complex," Deep Knowledge Ventures said in a statement.

Becoming more affordable and easier to program, they are widely present in our everyday life. You name the field, the robots are there: agriculture, tourism, e-commerce, medicine… They even help with household chores. With the accelerating speed of robotics development, it appears a very tempting field for investment. Last month, Credit Suisse's Global Equity Research team published a report examining its potential. We have already accepted big robots working in agriculture (e.g. Some of them, such as smartphones or sensors in cars, have already become an integral part of our lives; others, such as robots with tactile sensing, are still on the way.

Summary: Watson is a remarkably flexible and complete AI development platform. To understand how you might build new services for your current employer or imagine your own Watson-based startup, look at these 30 companies that are leading the way. In our recent reviews of historical Watson and the modern Watson of today we concluded that IBM's Watson Group may have the first or at least the current strongest comprehensive AI platform. This is the first time that we know of that all three elements of AI have been brought together in a single user friendly platform: image processing, text and speech processing, and knowledge retrieval. This is not so much a platform for data scientist to use to expand the capabilities of AI as it is a platform for business users (with the aid of data scientists) to exploit the capabilities of modern AI by building new products and services.

A visitor speaks to Baidu's robot Xiaodu at the 2015 Baidu World Conference in Beijing, China, September 8, 2015. How important is artificial intelligence (AI) to Baidu? Gone is the era of PC, and soon will we say goodbye to the era of mobile internet ... We believe that coming is the era of artificial intelligence. Andrew Ng, Baidu's chief scientist, has some experience in this area. During his previous tenure at Google parent Alphabet, he led the Google Brain AI project.

Driving your car until it breaks down on the road is never anyone's favorite way to learn the need for routine maintenance. But preventive or scheduled maintenance checks often miss many of the problems that can come up. An Israeli startup has come up with a better idea: Use artificial intelligence to listen for early warning signs that a car might be nearing a breakdown. The service of 3DSignals, a startup based in Kefar Sava, Israel, relies on the artificial intelligence technique known as deep learning to understand the noise patterns of troubled machines and predict problems in advance. The startup has even chatted with companies about using their service to automatically detect problems in future taxi fleets of driverless cars.

For the uninitiated, the Webster dictionary defines artificial intelligence (AI), the word buzzing like a bee of late, as the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behaviour. The concept is exactly like what the science fiction movies have portrayed since decades, of a machine that can analyse, think, act accordingly and aid humans (though in a lot of movies they become villainous). In the last half-a-decade, leaps in AI have been made with its application in wide ranging areas. Education is, albeit slowly, coming under the ambit of sectors that will be greatly affected (disrupted, if you will) by AI in near future. AI has actually become a part and parcel of our everyday lives even though the term is not used frequently.

Kengo Kyogoku borrows about ¥122,000 ($1,035) per month in addition to a scholarship and a part-time job, because his mother can't afford to pay his college fees at the prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo. "The amount is huge," said Kyogoku, a sophomore of communications and computer engineering. "I get depressed when I think about it. I wonder if I will have to pay it back forever. But I have no choice."