Microsoft acquires AI-powered scheduling service Genee, to be shut down and merged with Office ... 'Software is eating the world': How robots, drones and artificial intelligence will change everything

Feels like a home away from home. Microsoft acquires AI-powered scheduling service Genee, to be shut down and merged with Office ... 'Software is eating the world': How robots, drones and artificial intelligence will change everything

Iraq built an armed robotic vehicle, according to Baghdad Post, and it could be used to take back a town occupied by ISIS. Based on Defense One's translation of the story, the robot is car-sized and tank-like, equipped with an automatic machine gun and a rocket launcher. It also has four cameras to be able to show operators its field of view, since it's controlled using a laptop from a kilometer away. That distance means its operators still have to be on the battlefield, but at least they can stay hidden and safe while the machine does its job. It's not exactly clear who built this vehicle nicknamed "Alrobot" (that's Arabic for robot).

In 2011, a supercomputer won 1 million on Jeopardy! In 2016, that same supercomputer is tackling a challenge quantified not in millions of dollars but in millions of cancer patients. The goal is to use Watson's natural language processing to mine the medical literature and a patient's records to provide treatment advice. And this month the Watson computer system is drastically expanding its reach--from one hospital in Thailand to six in India and a planned 21 more in China. This instantiation of Watson, dubbed Watson for Oncology, is an artificial intelligence system that has access to millions of pages of medical textbooks and journal articles.

The bank has paid A 300,000 for Chip, one of only three REEM robots from Spanish firm PAL Robotics in the world, according to the Australian. Chip is at the centre of a new two year academic partnership with University of Technology Sydney (UTS), the Australian Technology Network of Universities (ATN), and property development giant Stockland. Commbank's Sydney innovation lab will be used as a testing environment for students and academics of Australia's leading technology universities to conduct research and development in social robotics using Chip. Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, group executive, institutional banking and markets, CommBank, says: "The development of robotics and artificial intelligence will affect all of us in the future...This research will help us better understand the impact social robotics will have on the lives of people, customers and industries across Australia." In Japan robots have already started to make their way into bank branches.

The hottest news last week came out of the Intel INTC Developer Forum (IDF) 2016. But Facebook's FB decision to open source its artificial intelligence (A.I.) research, Alphabet's GOOGL Duo and Oracle ORCL asking for a retrial in its case against Alphabet over Java also made headlines. This was a mega event where Intel talked about everything but PCs. The company seems to think that the next big thing driving chip growth for PCs is VR capabilities (since it's a computationally intensive exercise, it's a good way to sell its chips). To that end, it announced Project Alloy, a reference design for cordless headgear that merges the AR and VR worlds and runs on Microsoft's MSFT Windows Holographic OS.

With the use of education chatbots, Prepathon CEO Allwin Agnel explained that the artificial intelligence-driven education technology bots are able to execute precise and detailed tasks that can improve or alter educational experiences by facilitating personalized learning. As the equity gap in American education continues, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been urging educators, investors and tech companies to be more open in investing time and money in artificial intelligence-driven education technology programs. Gates believed that these AI-based EdTech platforms could personalize and revolutionize school learning experience while eliminating the equity gap. With that said, Gates is reportedly excited about the evolving field of personalized learning and artificial intelligence tutor bots. According to Venture Beat, the world's richest man will also like the Mumbai-based company called Prepathon as it opted to create bots with specialized single concentration and purpose.

It's hard to imagine 2016 Presidential election candidates trying to figure out how to use an AI personal assistant, much less lead us into a new era of a digital solutions economy powered by AI. For the last 50 years, technology has been the fundamental driving force for the growth of our economy. My grandparents, who were born in Europe saw the advent of truly life altering technologies at that time such as automobiles, electricity and refrigeration. Over the years being a CTO and venture capitalist, I've recognized that the rate of change and innovation have been accelerating – in particular over the past decade it seems. Facebook, a social networking service was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his Harvard roommates in 2004.

In the 1930s journalists from publications like the New York Times and Time magazine would regularly visit Nikola Tesla at his home on the 20th floor of the Hotel Governor Clinton in Manhattan. There the elderly Tesla would regale them with stories of his early days as an inventor and often opined about what was in store for the future. Last year we looked at Tesla's prediction that eugenics and the forced sterilization of criminals and other supposed undesirables would somehow purify the human race by the year 2100. Today we have more from that particular article which appeared in the February 9, 1935, issue of Liberty magazine. The article is unique because it wasn't conducted as a simple interview like so many of Tesla's other media appearances from this time, but rather is credited as "by Nikola Tesla, as told to George Sylvester Viereck."

China is building its next-generation cruise missiles using "high-level artificial intelligence" to make them suitable for specific combat situations. A senior missile designer has claimed that Chinese engineers have been studying the use of artificial intelligence in missiles for years and are now pushing ahead to turn it into reality. Wang Changqing, director of the general design department of the Third Academy of the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp, told the state-run China Daily that flexible and modular design for future weapons was the need of the hour. A modular missile system is flexible and multifunctional, and enables manufacturers to cut down on the development and storage costs, a senior researcher at the Beijing Hiwing Scientific and Technological Information Institute, told the paper on condition of anonymity. Terming the plans to develop the modular cruise missiles a "promising approach", he added that such weapons also prolong the operational range and duration of a mission.