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With the advent of photography, a tiny fraction of 19th-century scientists believed they could develop methods of accurately identifying criminals by their facial features. While their hypotheses were eventually discredited, new artificial intelligence technology suggests their claims might've been valid after all. Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China have resurrected this facial recognition tradition and built a neural network that can supposedly pick out criminals by simply looking at their faces. TNW Conference is back for its 12th year. To accomplish this, the researchers used an array of machine-vision algorithms to examine a series of facial juxtapositions between photos of criminals and non-criminals with the goal of finding out whether a neural network can reliably tell them apart.

The holding company that owns the Kansas-based Sprint Corp. has pledged to invest up to $50 billion in U.S. startup companies and acquisitions. This vow was made by Masayoshi Son, chief executive of SoftBank Group, which owns Sprint. Son made the promise following a 45-minute meeting with President-elect Donald Trump yesterday. Son (pictured above) said SoftBank will make the investment from a $100 billion technology fund that the company previously said it would raise in part using its own capital and commitments from the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund. First announced in October, the SoftBank Vision Fund will create as many as 50,000 tech jobs in the U.S, according to Son.

This was the title of a very popular book published in 2012, featuring several job interview questions (brain teasers) asked by Google's hiring managers to candidates. They apparently dropped all these questions, as they found out that they were not good indicators of career success. I had one phone interview with Google long ago, and was rejected right away. The interviewer was just focused on very technical details, and spent all her time arguing about Lasso regression, and was clearly looking for a specialist, dismissing people with a broad range of skills and non-standard approach to solving tech problems. Big companies do not value things like intuition, innovation, vision or a disruptive mindset (despite claiming the contrary), and for good reasons.

Increasingly crowded imaging & diagnostics: 17 out of the 22 companies under imagining & diagnostics raised their first equity funding round since January 2015 (this includes 1st Seed or Series A rounds, as well as a first round raised by stealth startup Imagen Technologies). In 2014, Butterfly Networks raised a $100M Series C, backed by Aeris Capital and Stanford University. This was the third-largest equity round to AI in healthcare companies, after China-based iCarbonX's $154M mega-round and two $100M raises by oncology-focused Flatiron Health. VCs invest in drug discovery: Startups are using machine learning algorithms to reduce drug discovery times, and VCs have backed 6 out of the 8 startups on the map. Andreessen Horowitz recently seed-funded twoXAR, developer of the DUMA drug discovery platform; Khosla Ventures and Data Collective backed Atomwise, which published its first findings of Ebola treatment drugs last year, and has also partnered with MERCK; Lightspeed Venture Partners invested in Numedii in 2013; Foundation Capital participated in 3 equity funding rounds to Numerate.

Microsoft is joining Google and Amazon in the race for your home. This week, at an event in China, the venerable tech giant trumpeted the arrival of Project Evo, a sweeping plan to build hardware devices that work a lot like Google Home or the Amazon Echo. But this race is much bigger than some gadgets that sit on your coffee table. The prize is more than just the best home digital assistant. The biggest spoils go to the company that rides its assistant to artificial brains that are far smarter--and creates a market for using these brains to do just about anything. OpenAI Joins Microsoft on the Cloud's Next Big Front: Chips Intel Looks to a New Chip to Power the Coming Age of AI Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World's AI Talent Artificial Intelligence Just Broke Steve Jobs' Wall of Secrecy Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World's AI Talent Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World's AI Talent Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are all racing to build systems that recognize and truly understand natural language--how you and I talk.

The time of year when crystal balls get a viewing and many pundits put out their annual predictions for the coming year. Rather than thinking up my own, I figured I'd regurgitate what many others are expecting to happen. Chris Preimesberger (@editingwhiz), who does a monthly #eweekchat on twitter, covers many of the worries facing organizations. People focus so much on the'things' themselves rather than the risk of an internet connection. This list discusses how IoT will grow up in 2017, how having a service component will be key, the complete mess of standards and simply, 'just because you can connect something to the Internet doesn't mean that you should.' NW talks about how cyber attacks will get worse due to IoT and gives some ideas on how to protect your data in 2017.

Connected hospitals with intelligent messaging In today's hospitals, pacemakers, defibrillators and oximeters are all connected to the internet and share vitals immediately with doctors, in turn speeding response times. Hospitals have technicians, nurses, staff, billing departments, insurance providers, patients and patients' families as stakeholders, each with different requirements of information about the care given to patient. Unified Inbox offers an AI-based unified cloud IoT messaging platform for internet of things devices to connect various stakeholders, giving them the freedom to receive different messages at different frequency, with different senses of urgency in different mediums of their choice. Unified Inbox launched this at Nanyang Polytechnic in Singapore as "CUBE," the IoT-secured messaging gateway for healthcare. The artificial intelligence makes the hospitals connected, giving peace of mind to patients and their loved ones while improving efficiency in the overall hospital management and interaction with all stakeholders.

When shown an animation generated by artificial intelligence, famed animator Hayao Miyazaki was not impressed. "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself," said the man behind movies like Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, who was shown an AI-generated animation of a human-like being "walking on his head" using creepy movements that might be applied to, say, zombies in a video game. Referring to his experiences with a disabled friend, Miyazaki noted how difficult it was for him to execute something as simple as a high-five. "Now, thinking of him, I can't watch this stuff and think it's interesting," he said. "Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. If you really want to make creepy stuff you can go ahead and do it.

Nvidia cofounder Chris Malachowsky is eating a sausage omelet and sipping burnt coffee in a Denny's off the Berryessa overpass in San Jose. It was in this same dingy diner in April 1993 that three young electrical engineers--Malachowsky, Curtis Priem and Nvidia's current CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang--started a company devoted to making specialized chips that would generate faster and more realistic graphics for video games. East San Jose was a rough part of town back then--the front of the restaurant was pocked with bullet holes from people shooting at parked cop cars--and no one could have guessed that the three men drinking endless cups of coffee were laying the foundation for a company that would define computing in the early 21st century in the same way that Intel did in the 1990s. "There was no market in 1993, but we saw a wave coming," Malachowsky says. "There's a California surfing competition that happens in a five-month window every year. When they see some type of wave phenomenon or storm in Japan, they tell all the surfers to show up in California, because there's going to be a wave in two days. We were at the beginning."