In the future, speaking may be all that's required to diagnose health issues. Beyond Verbal, an Israeli company specializing in analyzing emotion from vocal intonation, is set to launch a platform today that could be the first step in doing just that. Momentum by TNW is our New York technology event for anyone interested in helping their company grow. The Beyond mHealth Research Platform could usher in a brave new world of healthcare research by correlating distinct vocal features that are mostly imperceptible to humans. In doing so, these vocal'biomarkers' could alert your physician to the presence of anything from depression and stress to heart disease. This sort of early detection could prove to be the difference between life and death.

"Will work still be the place where we integrate individuals into societies?" asks End of Shift -- The Robots Are Taking Over, a new documentary on the future of work by filmmaker Klaus Martens that premiered last week on German and French public television (I make a brief appearance in it as well). It is a rhetorical question, and although not verbalized by the narrator before the end of the film, it is omnipresent from the first scene on and implicitly precludes all interviews and footage that Martens and his crew captured in Germany, France, Japan, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The topic is acute: An oft-cited Oxford study predicted in 2013 that software and robots will eliminate half of the human work force within the next two decades. This year's OECD report comes to a less pessimistic conclusion, emphasizing the heterogeneity of workers' tasks within occupations. It projects that "on average across the 21 OECD countries, 9 percent of jobs are automatable" (e.g. in Germany 12 percent, in France 9 percent, and in the US 9 percent), and low qualified workers will be most affected.

The pascal visual object classes (voc) challenge.

The implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for customer service are staggering and truly limitless. But until now, most customer service leaders have been unable to put intelligence in action. They lacked the army of data scientists needed to make sense of the data. And even if they were able to find and hire the data scientists - then what? How to integrate it with their existing customer service technology stack?

BANGALORE: Advancement in robotics, autonomous transport, AI and machine learning could impact more than 5 million people's jobs by 2020, according to World Economic Forum's recent study. 'The Future of Jobs' study states that over 5 million people's jobs are estimated to get impacted by technology advancement across verticals and some 2 million new highly-skilled jobs will be created by 2020. This study is one more indicator of how the wave of automation is expected to sweep across industries. And the global BPO (business process outsourcing) sector is too under its impact with the rise of AI, machine learning and RPA (robotic process automation) technology led automated services. Though, the automation wave is at its early stage, some of the Indian BPO firms led by their CIOs (Chief Information Officers) are already embracing it openly as a way to move forward by adopting new technology and enhancing employees' skills.

China's search engine giant Baidu jumped onto the bandwagon of artificial intelligence as it showcased a number of achievements and industry solutions such as voice recognition, graphics recognition and consumer profiling at the Baidu World Conference in Beijing today. "Most of these solutions would be available for our industry partners so that ordinary people can access these cutting edge technologies," Robin Li, chairman and CEO of Baidu told the keynote speech. Baidu Chief Scientist Andrew Ng announced the opening up of two open platforms, Baidu's deep learning research tools platform and its artificial intelligence portal to support a wide range of industries to enhance efficiency. It is also offering the software up to the global community of AI researchers, an approach adopted by many tech firms to attract top talents as well as to allow the company to shape the development of the research field. Graphics processing unit developer Nvidia's co-founder and CEO Jen Hsun Huang also announced at the conference it is to partner with Baidu to build a comprehensive autonomous driving platform that allows Baidu to get a self-driving vehicle on the road.

We have covered here at Equities many times the rising risk of cyber attacks and how new companies are coming out with unique products to prevent security hacks. One of the new companies we are following is SecBI (Security Business Intelligence). This Israel-based company was founded in 2014 under the leadership from experts at RSA. The company is headquartered in Be'er-Sheba as a part of the JCP Cyberlabs. SecBI's cyber-detection platform that combines advanced intelligent thinking-machine technology, cyber-security expertise and user feedback into a superior threat detector.

A robot has been detained by police at a political rally in Moscow, with authorities attempting to handcuff the machine. The rally was for Valery Kalachev, a candidate for the Russian Parliament, who had rented the robot for his campaign. Police have not confirmed why they detained the machine named Promobot, but local media was reporting the company behind the robot said police were called because it was "recording voters' opinions on [a] variety of topics for further processing and analysis by the candidate's team". A Promobot representative suggested it was detained because "perhaps this action wasn't authorised". Mr Kalachev has featured the robot at previous campaign stops.

Baidu, the world's No. 3 force in online advertising after Google and Facebook, sees artificial intelligence as the next big thing. And it's using AI to power advertising, voice recognition technology and self-driving cars. During its annual conference Thursday in Beijing, the search giant announced news on the autonomous vehicle front, saying it had won clearance from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test its cars there. It also signed a partnership with U.S. chip-maker Nvidia to work on self-driving cars together. Despite all the investment on futuristic projects, Baidu got nearly 93% of its revenue in the last quarter from online marketing.

Legal research can be the bane of every lawyer and law student's existence. From poring over textbooks in law libraries to trawling through cases online and offline to prepare for submissions, it is a process that can take hours. To ease the burden, a group of local entrepreneurs - some of whom are former lawyers - have designed a website that helps lawyers search faster, keep notes and organise their research better. Launched in January, Intelllex, meaning "intelligent law", has already attracted more than 1,000 users - about half of whom are lawyers and the rest law students. The service is currently free, but a subscription fee is likely to be introduced next year.