Google today hinted at a near future where its artificial intelligence capabilities underpin its collection of cloud-based applications aimed at the workplace, Google Apps. At an event in Tokyo, the Internet giant announced a new application and a revamp of another, with some AI smarts injected into both. The new product is called Springboard, and it's intended to let Google Apps customers search through the content of the documents they store in their Google Drive, along with their contacts and calendar entries, all in one place. It will also use AI, Google says, to proactively find information that may be relevant to what you're working on. Google also says it has rebuilt Google Sites, its lightweight tool for creating websites and intranet sites for use by work teams.

Analysts are saying that Apple's upcoming updates to its Siri voice assistant should help the company address criticisms that it can't compete on artificial intelligence. Apple is now opening Siri to apps made by other companies, and like Google and Microsoft, it's bringing the digital assistant to desktop and laptop computers. It's also making Siri smarter by using what Apple calls differential privacy. Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy explains it as Apple using non-personal information in aggregate to teach Siri new tricks, then having all the personalization take place on the individual device. It's in contrast to Google's approach of doing everything over the internet -- that is, in the "cloud."

Two Belgian hospitals have added an innovative staff member to their reception desks: humanoid robots called Pepper. The robots took up assistant reception duties at hospitals in Ostend and Liege on Monday.. Related: Man v machine: can computers cook, write and paint better than us? The humanoid assistant, which has a screen on his chest and a round head, is the first robot in the world to be used to greet people in a medical setting, his software creators said. Standing 140cm (4ft 7in) tall and equipped with wheels under his white frame, Pepper can recognise the human voice in 20 languages and detect if he is talking to a man, woman or child. In Liege the robot helper, who costs about 30,000 ( 23,000), will for the moment remain in the hospital's reception area. But at the AZ Damiaan hospital in Ostend, he can accompany visitors to the department they are looking for, said Raphaël Tassart of the Belgian firm Zora Bots which developed the software inside his robot brain.

SAN FRANCISCO – Apple is working to make its iPhone and other gadgets smarter, responding to competitors' recent moves by building more artificial intelligence into its Siri digital assistant, photos, maps and other online services. The tech giant kicked off its annual software conference by announcing new software features for the Apple Watch and Apple TV, as well, while unveiling a new design for the Apple Music service. It's also extending Apple Pay to the web, so users can pay for purchases made on their Mac computers using the fingerprint authorization on their iPhone or Apple Watch. Most of these new features won't arrive until this fall. At a time when sales of its flagship iPhone are slowing, Apple seemed determined to show that it can make its gadgets indispensable, or at least as useful as its competitors' products.

Google is investing significantly in artificial intelligence to power its search engines, and on Monday it announced how it's applying those investments to the enterprise sphere. At its global enterprise event series, Google Atmosphere, in Tokyo on Monday, Google executives unveiled Google Springboard, a new app that helps users find the information they need more efficiently. It also assists users by proactively providing "actionable" information and recommendations, Prabhakar Raghavan, vice president of engineering for Google Apps, said in a blog post. Raghavan noted that according to a McKinsey survey, the average knowledge worker spends the equivalent of a full day a week searching for and gathering information. Meanwhile, Google on Monday also announced a redesigned version of Google Sites, one the most popular products for enterprise customers.

The gunman who attacked a Florida LGBT nightclub had attended the club before the attack and had used a gay dating and chat app, witnesses said. Kevin West, a regular at Pulse nightclub, said Omar Mateen messaged him on and off for a year before the shooting using the gay chat and dating app Jack'd. West was dropping off a friend at the club when he noticed Mateen – whom he knew by sight but not by name – crossing the street wearing a dark cap and carrying a black cellphone about 1 a.m., an hour before the shooting. "He walked directly past me. I said, 'Hey,' and he turned and said, 'Hey,'" and nodded his head, West said.

HE need to study and analyze complex systems arises in many fields. Nowadays, in more and more applications and devices, many sensors are used to collect and to record multiple channels of data, a fact that increases the amount of information available to analyze the state of the system of interest. In such cases, it is typically insufficient to study each channel separately. Yet, the ability to gain a deep understanding of the true state of the system from the overwhelming amount of collected data from multiple (usually different) sources of information is challenging; it calls for the development of new technologies and novel ways to observe the system of interest and to fuse the available information [1]. For example, the study of human physiology in many fields of medicine is performed by simultaneously monitoring various medical features through electroencephalography (EEG) signals, electrocardiography (ECG) signals, respiratory signals, etc. Each type of measurement carries different and specific information, while our purpose is to systematically discover an accurate description of the state of the patient/person. A commonly-used method that has the ability to reveal correlations between multiple different sets, which often furthers our understanding of the system, is the Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) [2]-[4]. CCA is a well known and studied algorithm, where linear projections maximizing the correlation between the two data sets are constructed.

Artificial technology is the future of the world. Why not position yourself with one of the most lucrative industries of the next 50 years: biotech! IBIS World says about biotechnology: "The industry is expected to continue prospering over the next five years, with the Asia-Pacific region making significant investments to gain a foothold in the market..." According to Wikipedia: "Biotechnology is the use of living systems and organisms to develop or make products, or "any technological application that uses biological systems, living organisms or derivatives thereof, to make or modify products or processes for specific use" (UN Convention on Biological Diversity, Art. 2). Depending on the tools and applications, it often overlaps with the (related) fields of bioengineering, biomedical engineering, biomanufacturing, etc." Biotech-now.org But in reality, health care outpaced the tech sector in 2014 by generating over 28 billion in economic activity and employing over 20% of San Francisco workers."

The tech giant kicked off its annual software conference by announcing new software features for the Apple Watch and Apple TV, as well, while unveiling a new design for the Apple Music service. It's also extending Apple Pay to the web, so users can pay for purchases made on their Mac computers. Most of these new features won't arrive until this fall. At a time when sales of its flagship iPhone are slowing, Apple seemed determined to show that it can make its gadgets indispensable, or at least as useful as its competitors' products. Still, the tech giant is taking a cautious approach to integrating computer intelligence into its online services.

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham and Jon Swartz offer their take on Apple's WWDC developer conference, and how it stacked up to recent Facebook and Google sessions for developers. SAN FRANCISCO -- We've been here before, crammed in a luxurious theater, music pulsating, fellow reporters tweeting, anxiously awaiting Apple's vision to match the razzle-dazzle from recent Facebook and Google events. At WWDC, Apple's annual conference for software developers, there was a fleeting flash Monday of what it has in story for the "it" technology of the moment: artificial intelligence. For several minutes during a two-hour presentation, Apple offered a glimpse into its immediate plans for Siri, the voice-activated agent that stands to get more relevant with better AI. Siri will be able to scan Apple TV for genre-specific movies, Apple execs said. It will book rides on Uber and Lyft, and will make payments via Square Cash and others.