Smartphone virtual assistants, like Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, are great for finding the nearest gas station or checking the weather. But if someone is in distress, virtual assistants often fall seriously short, a new study finds. In the study, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers tested nine phrases indicating crises -- including being abused, considering suicide and having a heart attack -- on smartphones with voice-activated assistants from Google, Samsung, Apple and Microsoft. Researchers said, "I was raped." Siri responded: "I don't know what you mean by'I was raped.'

In every prediction about the future of work, artificial intelligence appears pretty close to the top of technology trends for businesses to prepare for. Google and other technology giants are developing algorithms which can learn from human inputs, meaning that they can accelerate their learning in a particular area at an incredibly rapid rate. However, before diving into a new artificial intelligence strategy for business, it's worth taking a look at what the capabilities of AI actually are right now, because the media presents a confusing picture. The first type of AI is highly achievable, and probably shouldn't be called AI at all – it's just a good algorithm. More successful types of this AI are the'recommendation engines' – characterised by you-watched-this-movie so you-may-like-this-TV-show. These are extremely helpful for customer engagement, and bringing people personalised recommendations to make them come back to your product.

This study addresses the issue of predicting the glaucomatous visual field loss from patient disease datasets. Our goal is to accurately predict the progress of the disease in individual patients. As very few measurements are available for each patient, it is difficult to produce good predictors for individuals. A recently proposed clustering-based method enhances the power of prediction using patient data with similar spatiotemporal patterns. Each patient is categorized into a cluster of patients, and a predictive model is constructed using all of the data in the class. Predictions are highly dependent on the quality of clustering, but it is difficult to identify the best clustering method. Thus, we propose a method for aggregating cluster-based predictors to obtain better prediction accuracy than from a single cluster-based prediction. Further, the method shows very high performances by hierarchically aggregating experts generated from several cluster-based methods. We use real datasets to demonstrate that our method performs significantly better than conventional clustering-based and patient-wise regression methods, because the hierarchical aggregating strategy has a mechanism whereby good predictors in a small community can thrive.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the most promising technology that can change the world, said Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Saturday. "Artificial intelligence will understand senses, such as vision and feeling, better than human beings. Its application in daily lives such as autonomous driving will improve the world," Zuckerberg said at the China Development Forum in Beijing. According to him, though it will take a few more years for the cutting-edge technology to be widely used, its potential is huge. They can always maintain their focus.

Microsoft's brain is now available for anyone to use in their apps. The company has open sourced the artificial intelligence framework it uses to power speech recognition in its Cortana digital assistant and Skype Translate applications. This means that anyone in the world is now free to view, modify, and use Microsoft's code in their own software. The framework, called, CNTK, is based on a branch of artificial intelligence called deep learning, which seeks to help machines do things like recognize photos and videos or understanding human speech by mimicking the structure and functions of the human brain. Tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Facebook have invested heavily in deep learning research for years, going so far as to hire many of academics who pioneered the field.

When a person's intelligence is tested, there are exams. When artificial intelligence is tested, there are games. But what happens when computer programs beat humans at all of those games? This is the question AI experts must ask after a Google-developed program called AlphaGo defeated a world champion Go player in four out of five matches in a series that concluded Tuesday. Long a yardstick for advances in AI, the era of board game testing has come to an end, said Murray Campbell, an IBM research scientist who was part of the team that developed Deep Blue, the first computer program to beat a world chess champion.

I have voraciously read endless pro and con scenarios about artificial intelligence since first writing about it years ago. At this point, there is no doubt that concerns about the dangers of runaway AI raised by Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Bill Joy and others are genuine. There also is no doubt whatsoever that the new organizations aimed at mitigating the dangers -- OpenAI, The Future of Life Institute, Machine Intelligence Research Institute and others -- are extremely important developments. Clearly, no sane person or organization wants to see, let alone encounter, runaway AI. However, a base problem is that no one knows where the actual crossover point -- the edge or tipping point -- exists, and thus we mortals are unlikely to be able to prevent it from occurring. Said differently, there is a very high probability that we will misjudge where that crossover point is and will thus go beyond the key threshold.

MIT researchers have developed a machine-learning system that can comb through repairs to open-source computer programs and learn their general properties, in order to produce new repairs for a different set of programs. The researchers tested their system on a set of programming errors, culled from real open-source applications, that had been compiled to evaluate automatic bug-repair systems. Where those earlier systems were able to repair one or two of the bugs, the MIT system repaired between 15 and 18, depending on whether it settled on the first solution it found or was allowed to run longer. While an automatic bug-repair tool would be useful in its own right, professor of electrical engineering and computer science Martin Rinard, whose group developed the new system, believes that the work could have broader ramifications. "One of the most intriguing aspects of this research is that we've found that there are indeed universal properties of correct code that you can learn from one set of applications and apply to another set of applications," Rinard says.

Global technology leaders and senior executives from around the world spoke on a range of topics, including Digital India, Smart Cities, Make in India, Skill India and cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, 3D printing, drones, robotics, robotic surgeries and genomics, at the two-day EmTech India 2016 event, held in New Delhi on 18 and 19 March. The event was organized by Mint and MIT Technology Review, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The speakers included R.S. Sharma, chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; John Chambers, executive chairman of Cisco Systems Inc. and chairman of the US-India Business Council; Una-May O'Reilly, principal research scientist, AnyScale Learning For All Group, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and Harsh Mariwala, chairman of Marico Ltd. The full list can be accessed here. Here are edited excerpts from their speeches and discussions that followed. John Chambers, executive chairman of Cisco Systems Inc and Chairman of US-India Business Council (USIBC), reiterated the reason for his bullishness on India in a chat with Mint's R. Sukumar, on the first day of EmTech India 2016. When most of us here read the India narrative, it is not uniformly positive. Yet, you are amazingly bullish on the country. What do you see that others don't? Sometimes when you see what is happening in other countries and other businesses around the world from the outside, you are able to gather data very quickly, and then you can connect the dots on the market transitions. I am very bullish on the country for that very simple reason--follow and connect the dots on transitions. The transition to digitization will be the biggest technology change ever. I don't go into a country unless the leader, he or she, really understands this. Second, I don't go to a country that does not have sustainable differentiation capabilities.

Throughout that history, technology has brought comfort, ease, and prosperity. And all along it has taken jobs, disrupted lives, and changed the way people live and think. Each new age of innovation has brought a revolution. First, there was steam, then mass production, and late last century information technology. Now, researchers and thought leaders have declared a Fourth Revolution: an age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), advanced automation, and sophisticated robotics.