Long ago I lived in Santa Cruz, California. Almost every morning I would throw on a wet suit, grab my surfboard out of the garage, and head to the rocky cliffs just a few blocks from my house. I would descend a well-worn path to the ocean below, paddle out to the break, and spend hours surrounded by kelp beds and barking sea lions, catching waves, feeling exhilarated, and floating on my board, a world away from the troubles on land. I have a family now and have lived for years in the generally wave-less realms of New York City. But a few months ago I suddenly felt that old hunger again. I wanted to race out to the garage and grab a board.

A drone successfully delivered medical supplies to the New Jersey coastline straight from the deck of a ship, marking the first ship-to-shore delivery in the US. The flight was designed to test whether drones could be used to carry human medical supplies to and from areas that cannot be access during major storms, earthquakes or other disasters. The test was run by disaster preparedness non-profit Field Innovation Team. Drone-firm Flirtey, which managed the first land-based drone delivery of medical supplies to a rural health clinic in July 2015, flew medical samples to Camp May in partnership with Dr Timothy Amukele, assistant professor of pathology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. While drones have already been muted as one way to deliver goods, such as Amazon's Air Prime drones, Amukele said that biological samples "are not like a shoe or a book, they are pretty fragile items".

Samsung Medison's new ultrasound system quickly screens for abnormalities. Artificial intelligence may be the new face of medical diagnostics. For the first time, a flavor of A.I. called deep learning is being implemented in new ultrasound imaging equipment to aid in breast exams and help patients avoid unnecessary biopsies. A new feature in Samsung Medison's ultrasound system uses a deep-learning algorithm to make recommendations about whether a breast abnormality is benign or cancerous. The "S-Detect for Breast" feature is now included in an upgrade to the company's RS80A ultrasound system and is commercially available in parts of Europe, the Middle East and Korea and is pending FDA approval in the U.S., according to PR manager Doug Kim.

VentureBeat's Bots Channel tracks all the important and interesting news related to the exploding field of bots and messaging. And each week we select the top stories and present them in in our free weekly newsletter, BotBeat. We include news stories by VentureBeat staff, guest articles from leading figures in the bots community and a good number of posts from a wide variety of outlets. You can subscribe to our BotBeat newsletter to receive all this information in your inbox every Thursday. The story most likely to be seen in your social media stream this week may have been this one about a bot that lets you ghost undesirable dates.

CIKM is a top-tier ACM conference in the areas of information retrieval, knowledge management and databases. Since 1992, it has successfully brought together leading researchers and developers from the three communities, with the purpose of identifying challenging problems facing the development of advanced knowledge and information systems, and shaping future research directions through the publication of high quality, applied and theoretical research findings. The infographic below describes India's participation at CIKM 2015. Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), a premier interdisciplinary conference, brings together researchers and practitioners from data science, data mining, knowledge discovery, large-scale data analytics, and big data. It was held at Sydney, Australia in 2015.

It was April of 2015 and I had just returned to a burning summer in India from my startup stint in London. I wasn't happy with the heat, but I've never been good with adjusting to climate change. But weather had little to do with my decision to sweat in the humidity of Mumbai. I wanted to see how the burst of smartphone adoption had impacted the lives of those traditionally used to a life without dependency on technology. There were quite a few trends that stuck out, but one in particular.

NIIT, a global leader in skills and talent development, today launched a course in Web App Development with MEAN Stack under the DigiNxt Series. The company has recently ventured into Digital Transformation to offer pioneering programs to young aspirants wishing to enter the digital services industry, as well as to IT professionals wishing to reskill themselves for the new digital world. The cutting-edge program will use the student-centred pedagogy of project-based learning to help them carve a successful career in the emerging digital era. Some of the famous web applications like LinkedIn, Netflix, Uber, Paypal, etc. have been built using MEAN Stack. AngularJS, Node.js (MEAN) represents a group of open source technologies which are known to synergize well together, thereby empowering students to launch their own web and mobile apps.

After great promise in the 1960s that machines would soon think like humans, progress stalled for decades. Only in the past 10 years or so has research picked up, and now there are several popular products on the market that do a decent job of at least recognizing spoken speech. For Björn Schuller, full professor and head of the chair of Complex and Intelligent Systems at the University of Passau, Germany, who grew up watching Knight Rider--a television show about a car that could talk--this is the fulfillment of a childhood fantasy. Schuller is a World Economic Forum Young Scientist who will speak at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China, from June 26 to 28.He recently spoke about the possibility of machines soon tuning in to human language quirks, behavior and emotion. How did you get interested in machine intelligence and speech recognition?

Fast reactions can help you drive defensively and avoid collisions. Many of the autonomous features in cars have reactive ability, such as adaptive cruise-control systems that adjust speed by sensing the distance from and the speed of the vehicle ahead. Toyota Motors wants its cars to go beyond reaction to prediction and evasion. To accomplish those more complex functions, Toyota is going to rely heavily on artificial intelligence, according to Reuters. Like Ford and Honda, Toyota is investing heavily in AI and robotics to improve safety and performance in the fast-approaching world of self-driving cars.

Artificial Intelligence has been discussed for a long time and often inappropriately: some say that it represents a great opportunity, while others say it could be the biggest threat to humanity. But many do not even know what it is exactly. Perhaps because it is a discipline by poorly defined contours, debated among scientists and philosophers, which presents theoretical and practical aspects as well as ethical. We can generally define the AI as a computer's ability to perform typical functions and reasoning of the human mind: according to this definition it is clear that today we already are surrounded by examples of AI, for example Google. The search engine of Mountain View, in fact, no longer shows just lists of links, but also direct answers to various questions (try typing "obama birth date" or "David Beckham's wife" and see the results).