In the event of a c-section, if a robot suggested who should perform it, would you listen? Ninety percent of the time, nurses and physicians did. A robot programmed by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) suggests where to move patients and who should perform caesarian sections. The team from CSAIL thinks robots are most effective in helping with one of the most "complex" tasks in the labor ward of the hospital: scheduling. "The aim of the work was to develop artificial intelligence that can learn from people about how the labor and delivery unit works, so that robots can better anticipate how to be helpful or when to stay out of the way--and maybe even help by collaborating in making challenging decisions," says MIT professor Julie Shah, senior author on two papers based on CSAIL's research.

A panel of Venture Capitalists from throughout the Bay Area come together to discuss how Artificial Intelligence is catching the eyes of investors across the globe. Panelists discuss the growth of the field and the recent shift in investment from different types of disruptive technologies to AI specifically.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A former Google engineer, whose speech recognition software is used in more than a billion Android smartphones, has launched a company that uses blockchain technology to build a new operating system for banks. Paul Taylor, a Cambridge University academic with an expertise in artificial intelligence, speech synthesis and machine learning, started working on the system, called Vault OS, two years ago in a basement in London's Shoreditch district, known for being a tech start-up hub. The technology, which underpins the digital currency bitcoin, creates a shared database in which participants can trace every transaction ever made. The ledger is tamper-proof and transparent, meaning that transactions can be processed without the need for third-party verification. The system also negates the need for costly in-house data centers, as it uses cloud-based systems, which banks can use on a "pay-as-you-go" basis, which means that there is no single point of failure.

Diagnosing cancer is about to get more accurate, with the help of artificial intelligence. Pathologists have diagnosed diseases in more or less the same way for the past 100 years, by laboring over a microscope reviewing biopsy samples on little glass slides. Working almost robotically, they sift through millions of normal cells to identify just a few diseased ones. The task is tedious and prone to human error. But now, scientists and engineers have created a technique that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and can differentiate cancer cells from normal cells almost as well as a top-notch pathologist.

With the increase in adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs), proper utilization of the charging infrastructure is an emerging challenge for service providers. Overstaying of an EV after a charging event is a key contributor to low utilization. Since overstaying is easily detectable by monitoring the power drawn from the charger, managing this problem primarily involves designing an appropriate "penalty" during the overstaying period. Higher penalties do discourage overstaying; however, due to uncertainty in parking duration, less people would find such penalties acceptable, leading to decreased utilization (and revenue). To analyze this central trade-off, we develop a novel framework that integrates models for realistic user behavior into queueing dynamics to locate the optimal penalty from the points of view of utilization and revenue, for different values of the external charging demand. Next, when the model parameters are unknown, we show how an online learning algorithm, such as UCB, can be adapted to learn the optimal penalty. Our experimental validation, based on charging data from London, shows that an appropriate penalty can increase both utilization and revenue while significantly reducing overstaying.

Japan is famously wary of immigration, fearing that foreign workers will undermine job security and upset familiar ways of life. But there is one kind of industrious interloper that is greeted more enthusiastically in Japan than in any other country. Robots or "immigrants from the future", as my colleague Oliver Morton calls them, are unusually well assimilated into Japanese society. Japan's obsession with robots is well documented. Foreign journalists seem to like Japan's affection for robots almost as much as Japan likes robots.

With the general availability of the "Knights Landing" Xeon Phi many core processors from Intel last month, some of the largest supercomputing labs on the planet are getting their first taste of what the future style of high performance computing could look like for the rest of us. We are not suggesting that the Xeon Phi processor will be the only compute engine that will be deployed to run traditional simulation and modeling applications as well as data analytics, graph processing, and deep learning algorithms. But we are suggesting that this style of compute engine – it is more than a processor since it includes high bandwidth memory and fabric interconnect adapters on a single package – is what the future looks like. And that goes for Knights family processors and co-processors as well as the "Pascal" and "Volta" accelerators made by Nvidia, the Sparc64-XIfx and ARM chips that will be used in the used in the Post-K system in Japan made by Fujitsu, the Matrix2000 DSP accelerator being created by China for one of its pre-exascale systems, or the CPU-GPU hybrids based on its "Zen" Opterons that AMD is cooking up for supercomputing systems in the United States and, with licensing partners, in China. During the recent ISC16 supercomputing conference in Frankfurt, Germany, Intel gathered up the executives in charge of some of the largest supercomputing facilities on the planet who are also – not coincidentally, but absolutely intentionally – also early adopters of the Knights Landing Xeon Phi and, in some cases, the Omni-Path interconnect that is a kicker to Intel's True Scale InfiniBand networking.

Dyson has been teasing a robot vacuum for more than a decade. Two years ago, it finally unveiled one--but it wasn't available in the U.S. Today in New York, Dyson introduced the 360 Eye robot vacuum cleaner to Americans. Already on sale in Japan, the Eye will finally be available to U.S consumers on August 1 at an initial price of 999. With that kind of a price tag, Dyson is showing how confident it is in the 360 Eye's engineering. We've been following this automatic floor cleaner since IFA Berlin 2014.

A mall security robot has effectively redefined the term artificial intelligence after it barreled into a toddler last week at a northern California shopping center, running him over and leaving him with various bumps and bruises. The robot, weighing in at 300 pounds and standing at 5 feet, is typically an attraction for patrons at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto. But this time around it was more of an attractive nuisance, the 16-month-old boy's mother told KGO-TV, the local ABC affiliate. "The robot hit my son's head and he fell down facing down on the floor and the robot did not stop and it kept moving forward," said Tiffany Teng said. The runaway robot caused the young boy to experience a sore head, swelling in a foot and bruising on a leg.

Japanese auto manufacturer Nissan Motor Co unveiled to the media on July 12 its new self driving technology'ProPilot,' which assists the driver in maintaining speed during heavy traffic, changing lanes, and other driving maneuvers on a highway. Nissan's 2016 model Serena will be the first model to have the ProPilot technology, which is made possible by relatively simple technologies including a front-facing camera, an electronic parking break, and a 7-inch display monitor inside the car. "As part of the first step in (pursuing) our self driving technology called ProPilot, we are implementing the system into Serena. This is part of the company's roadmap, which in 2016 we begin implementing ProPilot (technology) that works within a single lane on highways," Nissan's Manager of Advanced driver assistance systems engineering department, Kiwamu Aoyanagi, said. By 2018, Nissan aims to have ProPilot be able to operate multiple lane changes, and by 2020, to be able to turn left and right at intersections.