PETALING JAYA: Malaysian Integrated Medical Professional Association (Mimpa) president Dr Dhesi Baha Raja has won the Pistoia Alliance Life Science Award for developing a mobile app that predicts dengue outbreaks. Dr Dhesi developed an AIME (Artificial Intelligence in Medical Epidemiology), which is a disease-prediction mobile platform that employs technology and data to give people prior warning of when disease outbreaks might occur. Dr Dhesi, who led the team of six people, which developed the app, said that winning the award, organised by the Pistoia Alliance of King's College London, proves and validates the technology used as a tool for dengue prevention. He told The Star Online on Wednesday that he is looking to bring the app to Malaysia within the next three months and believes that the technology would be useful to combat Malaysia's dengue problem. Dr Dhesi said that he would be working with mobile digital service provider Webe and the Health Ministry soon.

As an investor of China's car-hailing app Yidao Yongche, LeEco envisions its future LeSEE cars to form a fleet of autonomous taxis, with their front lights indicating their availability using various colors. In the official video, the car has conventional front doors and rear suicide doors, and somehow, the back seats can apparently adapt to the shape of the passengers' bodies -- yep, smells like a concept. There are, however, touchscreens behind the front seats which can obviously take advantage of LeEco's rich video entertainment. Jia added that the car will also do face recognition and self-learning, but we'll have to wait for a future demo on those. The first LeSEE electric car will make its proper debut at the Beijing Auto Show on April 24th, and there's any new info to share then, we'll keep y'all posted.

Your closet is overflowing, spilling shoes, shirts, and underwear onto the floor. You think, "It's time to get organized." Now you have two problems. Specifically, you first need to decide what to keep, and second, how to arrange it. Fortunately, there is a small industry of people who think about these twin problems for a living, and they are more than happy to offer their advice. On what to keep, Martha Stewart says to ask yourself a few questions: "How long have I had it? Is it a duplicate of something I already own? When was the last time I wore it or used it?"

When I'm usually speaking about Artificial Intelligence, I'm involved in ethical conversations ranging from self-driving cars programmed to kill you in a crash for the bigger benefit of others – like school kids running front of your vehicle – to a robot world domination and human slavery. But today I wanted to write about chat bots. Yes, those little bots that will be appearing on your messenger apps in no time. Chat bot is an artificially intelligent bot, which allows you to have a pre-programmed conversation with a company or a media in your messenger app. It works just like you'd have a chat with your friends – except that you're speaking with a machine. Quite handy if you want to order for example a burger or a taxi via messenger app instead of browsing through different apps and sites.

VC Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz thinks it's a lot harder to predict financial cycles than it is to see a new computing platform coming down the pike. As he noted in a recent post, new cycles tend to begin every 10 to 15 years; assuming the 2007 introduction of the iPhone kicked off the last wave, we're fast heading toward the Next New Thing. Or things, technically, according to Dixon, who we caught up with yesterday. Among the trends that Dixon is watching closely, he says, are virtual reality, augmented reality, IoT, wearables, drones and cars. Not that it'll be easy to make money off these newer technologies. In fact, Dixon suggests it could be ridiculously challenging, given how quickly Facebook, Google, and Amazon are bringing aboard related talent.

A self-driving car built by Chongqing Changan Automobile Co, Ford's Chinese partner, has successfully driven 1,200 miles (nearly 2,000 kilometres) across China, Bloomberg reports. In a statement to the Shenzen stock exchange, the company revealed that the car had travelled from Chongqing in the southwest to Beijing in the northeast, using camera sensors and radar to test a variety of functions. These included lane-changing, automatic cruising, assisted driving in high traffic, traffic sign recognition, speed reduction and voice control. It made the journey in six days, which averages out at 200 miles per day. This is consistent with Google's 54 self-driving cars on public roads, which average between 185 and 275 miles per day.

When Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie found out she carried a faulty variant of the BRCA1 gene, her doctors told her she had an 87% chance of developing breast cancer. Armed with this knowledge, she chose to undergo a double mastectomy in 2013 to reduce the risk to around 5%. This kind of genetic testing can now be done much faster and at lower cost, giving clinicians the ability to target treatments more effectively. And combining this technological breakthrough with cloud computing and artificial intelligence is giving pharmaceutical companies the tools to develop drugs faster and with greater chance of success. One beneficiary of this new approach is Eric Dishman, founder of tech giant Intel's first health research and innovation laboratory in 1999 and a founding member of its digital health group in 2005.

Imagine yourself one hundred years from now. Yes, you're still alive, breathing through genetically engineered pig lungs, and having dinner at your favorite restaurant. A robot waiter rolls up to refill your glass of wine, which is equipped with a sensor that allows the restaurant to automatically deduct 10 from your Bitcoin account. Your companion, who doesn't actually speak the same language as you, is saying how much she loves her salad, which comes from a farm that uses precision agriculture techniques to boost productivity by effectively dividing fields into one-inch square plots that each receive customized fertilizer mixes based on their specific conditions. You understand her perfectly thanks to a small device in your ear that instantly translates her words and perfectly mimics her voice.

Nadine, a robot receptionist at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), is staring at the visitor in front of her. "I remember you," she says. "You were here last Saturday." The long-haired, uncannily human-looking robot pauses as her software runs through past interactions to figure out the most appropriate thing to say. Finally, she settles on: "We talked about your job."

If you suspect that your significant other is bringing others into your bedroom, you could have an adult conversation about it or seek couple's counseling. Alternatively, you can buy a 1,700 smart mattress called the Smarttress that will tell you when your partner is having sex with someone that isn't you. Smarttress is the invention of Durmet, a Spanish mattress company that was inspired by the fact that Madrid has the highest number of cheating spouses in Europe. It features 24 sensors within the springs, which the company calls the "Lover Detection System." These sensors know which areas of the mattress are receiving pressure and make a 3D map of the bed.