Babylon Health founder Ali Parsa presenting the results of his AI-powered medical information software, which took a standard doctor's exam.Photo by Parmy Olson The lights were dimmed in an auditorium packed with doctors on Wednesday night at London's Royal College of Physicians. They were there to find out how AI might fundamentally change the way they work. On stage Dr. Mobasher Butt, a director at digital healthcare startup Babylon Health, stood before a podium to read out the results of an exam taken by his company's carefully trained AI doctor. The average passmark for the MRCGP exam, which trainee general practitioners take to test their ability to diagnose, has been 72% over the past five years. "How did Babylon Health do?" he asked, before waiting a beat.

LONDON (Reuters) - "This is nice, it tickles me," Kaspar the social robot tells four-year-old Finn as they play together at an autism school north of London. Kaspar, developed by the University of Hertfordshire, also sings song, imitates eating, plays the tambourine and combs his hair during their sessions aimed at helping Finn with his social interaction and communication. If Finn gets too rough, the similarly sized Kaspar cries: "Ouch, that hurt me." A therapist is on hand to encourage the child to rectify his behavior by tickling the robot's feet. Finn is one of around 170 autistic children that Kaspar has helped in a handful of schools and hospitals over the last 10 years.

Aron Chase is a 17-year-old student in London.Aron Chase Some artificial intelligence researchers at companies like Google and Facebook are now earning more money than investment bankers at Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. These researchers also have the privilege of working in a field of technology that's poised to have a major impact on the world we live in. But, for many people, it's not clear how to go about getting a job in AI. This week, 17-year-old Londoner Aron Chase asked Shane Legg -- the chief scientist and cofounder of DeepMind, an AI lab acquired by DeepMind for a reported £400 million -- for five pieces of advice for an AI enthusiast like himself. "Hey Shane I'm currently 17 from London England and am very passionate about AI, also learning about in-depth human needs. What would be the 5 pieces of advice and tips you would give to a young person like me?" Chase wrote on Twitter.

A new study has shown how computers and robots powered by artificial intelligence can read human eye movements to'read' human personalities. The eyes, they say, are the windows to the soul. And if that is true, computers and robots powered by sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms may soon have the ability to peer into your soul. That is the result of a new study on the connection between eye movements and personality, conducted by neuroscience researchers based at the University of South Australia and published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. "Eye movements during an everyday task predict aspects of our personality," wrote the researchers, led by University of South Australia neuroscientist Tobias Loetscher, whose team follows 42 study subjects around the university campus recording their eye movements, then determines their personality traits with "well-established questionnaires" for deterring personality type, according to a summary of the study published by the site Science Daily.

SAN FRANCISCO/HONG KONG/BEIJING – Google is preparing a version of its search engine for China that blocks results Beijing considers sensitive, according to people familiar with the situation. The initiative is code-named Dragonfly and is one of several options the company is pursuing for returning to China, the people said, while noting the timing is still up in the air. They asked not to be identified discussing private plans. The move would mark an abrupt about-face by the Alphabet Inc. unit and a win for China's communist government, which suppresses free speech online. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, whose parents brought him to the U.S. to escape communist Russia, led a dramatic exit from mainland China in 2010 after the company refused to self-censor search content.

Eight years after their very public falling out, could China and Google be pals once again? Whispers circulating Monday, first reported by The Intercept, suggested that Google would soon launch a Chinese version of its search engine that will kowtow to the Chinese Communist Party by scrubbing various bête noires: not least criticism of its human-rights record, calls for Tibetan independence and the bloodshed around Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989. Free speech advocates have condemned the rumors, which have since been confirmed by anonymous Google sources to other media. Amnesty International warned complying with the Great Firewall -- the world's most sophisticated state-censorship apparatus, employing at least 2 million online censors -- would constitute "a gross attack on freedom of information and internet freedom." It would also mean Google would have to block search results in China for currently verboten Western media, such as the New York Times, Bloomberg and, indeed, TIME.

Scientists have developed a new artificial intelligence system that can track a person's eye movements to identify their personality type. Researchers, including those from the University of Stuttgart in Germany and Flinders University in Australia used state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithms to demonstrate a link between personality and eye movements. Their findings show that people's eye movements reveal whether they are sociable, conscientious or curious, with the algorithm software reliably recognising four of the Big Five personality traits: neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Researchers tracked the eye movements of 42 participants as they undertook everyday tasks around a university campus, and subsequently assessed their personality traits using well-established questionnaires. The study provides new links between previously under-investigated eye movements and personality traits and delivers important insights for emerging fields of social signal processing and social robotics.

The country that wins the global race for dominance in artificial intelligence stands to capture enormous economic benefits, including potentially doubling its economic growth rates by 2035. Unfortunately, the United States is getting bad advice about how to compete. Over the past year, Canada, China, France, India, Japan, and the United Kingdom have all launched major government-backed initiatives to compete in AI. While the Trump administration has begun to focus on how to advance the technology, it has not developed a cohesive national strategy to match that of other countries. This has allowed the conversation about how policymakers in the United States should support AI to be dominated by proposals from advocates primarily concerned with staving off potential harms of AI by imposing restrictive regulations on the technology, rather than supporting its growth.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Maltese counterpart Joseph Muscat agreed Wednesday to closely cooperate in maintaining maritime order based on the rule of law. In a news conference after their meeting in Tokyo, Abe said the two leaders confirmed the importance of the issue. Malta is the home of the International Maritime Law Institute aimed at training specialists in the field. Abe said they also agreed to work together in resolving outstanding issues surrounding North Korea, including Japanese nationals abducted by Pyongyang in the 1970s and 1980s. On the economic front, Muscat, the first Maltese prime minister to visit Japan in 28 years, expressed hope for an early implementation of a free trade agreement Japan and the European Union signed last month.

Purchasing a home or car is an exciting moment in a person's life. Consumers may be comfortable with and even appreciate data-driven recommendations in the search process, for example, from websites that suggest homes based on properties they've previously viewed. But what if the decision to grant a mortgage or auto loan is made by a machine-learning algorithm? And what if the logic behind that algorithm's decision, especially if it rejects the application, is unclear? It's hard enough being denied a loan after going through the traditional process; being turned down by an artificial intelligence (AI)–powered system that can't be explained is that much worse.