A lot of people would struggle to get through their daily lives without the help of glasses, but for most, they help make everything they are looking at slightly clearer. But for one man, a new pair glasses is doing much more than that, allowing him to read for the first time in 20 years. Luke Hines was left blind in one eye and with only three per cent vision in the other after an operation to remove a childhood brain tumour in 1997. Luke Hines (pictured) was left blind in one eye and with only three per cent vision in the other after an operation to remove a childhood brain tumour in 1997. He was unable to attend school, has not found work because of his condition and has spent years feeling isolated.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a major developmental disorder characterized by repetitive, restricted behaviour as well as deficits in communication and reciprocal social interactions1. ASD has attracted a great deal of attention of basic and clinical scientists in the hope that clarification of its underlying mechanisms will lead to the development of remedies for ASD as well as a better understanding of the neural substrates of important cognitive functions, including social behaviour2. Despite the significance of the disorder, no effective biomarker has been developed. The medical diagnosis for ASD has been made largely based on narrative interactions between individuals and clinical professionals. With the exception of'clear and typical' cases, such diagnostic methods without any biological grounds could run the risk of producing a high variance in diagnosis3 and delaying the detection of abnormalities4.

Salesforce's recent acquisitions of AI startups including MetaMind will enable it to keep pace with the functions that consumer-focused companies … From Dick Tracy's watch to Wonder Woman's Bracelets to Bat Girls total recall and technopathy, fiction has a intriguing dialog with invention. Enable natural interaction with your app using a conversational interface powered by the Watson Developer Cloud APIs. KPMG LLP and IBM today announced plans to apply IBM's Watson cognitive computing technology to KPMG's professional services offerings. It can answer guests' questions about the hotel and tourist destinations. The hotel has recently welcomed a new concierge named "Connie," you see, and it's actually a Nao robot powered by IBM's AI.

Robot cage fights are pretty sweet--who doesn't like seeing machines armed with spinning sawblades flamethrowers fight to the death--but medieval robot wars are so much more fun. Think about it: Hand-built robots catapulting rocks at castles, trying to breach their defenses. George R. R. Martin couldn't come up with something that crazy. But some 1,500 high school kids in Southern California did, coming together for an epic battle last month during the Los Angeles regional championship of the "Super Bowl of Smarts." Now, the thought of a robot war set in the Middle Ages probably brings to mind all the worst stereotypes of geeks and nerds and dweebs.

The rise of on-demand startups and other fast-growing businesses like online marketplaces has created a need for reliable ways to verify new hires and customers to make sure they are cut out for the task. Onfido, one of the group of startups building software-based solutions to do just that, has raised 25 million to meet that need. The Series B round was led by Idinvest Partners, with participation also from existing backers Wellington Partners and CrunchFund (founded by TC founder Michael Arrington), and brings the total raised by the startup to just over 30 million. It's not disclosing its valuation in this round, but as a marker, its competitor Checkr, which has raised just under 50 million, is valued between 250 million and 300 million. Onfido plans to use the capital in a couple of different ways.

Sharp Corp. has announced the launch of a small humanoid smartphone that responds to voice commands and can project movies on a wall. Debuting May 26, RoBoHon resembles a robot and has a screen that reflects its cellphone ancestry. It is priced at 198,000 with an additional monthly usage fee, the Osaka-based firm said. "Sharp has a new vision of adding artificial intelligence to electronics products," said Yoshisuke Hasegawa, a Sharp executive. He said this merging of artificial intelligence with consumer products will be an ongoing project, dubbed "Kokoro" ("heart").

Instead, what captured viewers attention most was Alibaba Group's artificial intelligence program, which made its global debut on the program to predict the series finalists and winner. Named "Ai," the system got every one of its algorithm-induced guesses right. I Am Singer, broadcast by Hunan TV, has been one of China's top-rated shows since its debut in 2013. During the show's four-hour season finale on Friday, Alibaba's Ai analyzed various factors in real time, such as the popularity of the songs contestants performed, their pitch and energy on stage, lyrical content and audience feedback. Meanwhile, the show's in-house audience of 500, whose vote determined the real winner, deliberated separately.

If you hadn't heard of the RoboHon before, it's all the basic smartphone functions reborn into a tiny robot body. It walks, it dances, and an embedded projector inside its head can display photos and video at a functional-enough 720p resolution. Sharp confirms that it does have LTE radios inside: this was a big question mark when the phone was first announced, and the company adds that it's already working on NTT Docomo, Japan's biggest phone carrier -- although its plans to couple with smaller MVNO carriers at this point, rather than announce a launch with a big phone network. This could be crucial in deciding whether the phone sells in Japan: carriers will advertise with their own money -- Sharp may have to do a lot of the heavy PR lifting itself. "Do you think RoboHon will sell?"

DUBAI – The teaching methods of Kazuya Takahashi, 35, using Lego blocks and speaking entirely in English, may not be the norm in the Japanese education system. But on a global level, the educator, who teaches at the Kogakuin junior high and high schools in Hachioji, western Tokyo, is considered ahead of the game and has won recognition for his efforts to promote global citizenship. His methods may provide clues as to where education should be heading in Japan, a nation often criticized for focusing more on cramming knowledge rather than encouraging critical thinking. At the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai, which ran for two days from March 12, Takahashi gave a presentation as one of the 10 finalists for the Global Teacher Prize, known in the industry as the Nobel Prize in education. The event was attended by around 1,600 people from 110 nations.

For many people in Zambia with health queries, sending a text message is the best way to get it answered. U-report, a free SMS-based service set up by UNICEF and run by volunteers, receives many thousands of questions a month, many specifically about HIV and AIDS. Also popular in Uganda, U-report has seen usage triple in the last three years, and about a thousand new users register every day. The volume of messages is growing so fast that the volunteers can't keep up, so UNICEF is testing software that reads and responds to many of the messages automatically. In Zambia, there are roughly 27,000 new HIV infections a year, according to UNICEF, and 40 per cent of these are in those aged 15 to 24.