Revolutionary 3D printing technology may offer the key to helping deaf people to hear, without the need for hearing aids. Experts can now craft replacement parts for fragile bones, known as ossicles, which transmit external soundwaves towards the cochlear nerve. The researchers hope that these personalised devices could soon make hearing aids a thing of the past. Revolutionary 3D printing technology may offer the key to helping deaf people to hear, without the need for hearing aids. The researchers removed the ossicles from three dead bodies and took a CT scan to get specific measurements. They then used a 3D printer to create replicas to replace the bones they had removed.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will play a "massive" role in health care, a technology entrepreneur told CNBC on Thursday. Naveen Jain, the founder of health technology firm Viome, said that there is a big wave of AI coming into the health sector. "This is a tsunami that's coming," Jain told CNBC in a TV interview from the Slush technology conference in Helsinki, Finland. "The sensors are becoming so cheap. For the first time in our lifetime, we are able to look deep inside our body to know exactly what is going on." Viome offers a service that lets a user send in a stool sample to be analyzed by AI.

As IT evolves in the direction of more cloud adoption, more automation, and more artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and analytics, it's clear that the IT jobs landscape will change too. For example, tomorrow's CIO is likely to become more of a broker and orchestrator of cloud services, juggling the strategic concerns of the C-suite with more tactical demands from business units, and less of an overseer of enterprise applications in on-premises data centres. Meanwhile, IT staff are likely to spend more time in DevOps teams, integrating multiple cloud services and residual on-premises applications, and enforcing cyber-security, and less time tending racks of servers running siloed client-server apps, or deploying and supporting endpoint devices. ZDNet and TechRepublic looks at the dramatic effect of AI, big data, cloud computing, and automation on IT jobs, and how companies can adapt. Of course, some traditional IT jobs and tasks will remain, because revolutions don't happen overnight and there will be good reasons for keeping some workloads running in on-premises data centres. But there's no doubt which way the IT wind is blowing, across businesses of all sizes.

Artificial intelligence is already able to imitate the work of great artists, so why shouldn't it also be able to spot genuine works from forgeries? In a new paper, researches at Rutgers University in New Jersey and the Atelier for Restoration & Research of Paintings in the Netherlands examined how machine learning can be harnessed to more effectively spot fakes. The researchers tested the AI using a data set of 300 digitized drawings consisting of over 80,000 strokes from artists including Pablo Picasso, Henry Matisse and Egon Schiele, among others. Using a deep recurrent neural network (RNN), the AI was able to learn which strokes were typical of each artist, and then used that information to make educated guesses. The results showed that the AI was able to identify the individual strokes with an accuracy of between 70 to 90%.

The Nintendo Switch has undoubtedly become one of the biggest gadget entries in recent years, both in terms of revenue for its maker and also the appreciation that it has gained from users. The fact that the Switch -- launched on March 3 -- was the biggest selling product on both this year's Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales is proof that with this delectable video game console, Nintendo has scored one of its most significant hits outside of Japan, its country of origin. Behind this success were some great game titles that came to the Switch. From the brilliantly bloody horror game'Doom' to the smart revamp of an old character driven game, 'Super Mario Odyssey' to the stunningly gorgeous and seductively mysterious'The Legend of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild,' Nintendo has brought out games that appeal to people with a wide spectrum of tastes, to ensure that the Switch becomes the success that it is today. The latest entrant in this formidable and growing arsenal of game titles is'Xenoblade Chronicles 2.' Released Dec. 1, the game is a lavishly realized open world adventure that is already gaining rave reviews from users.

Melvin Wevers, a researcher in the Digital Humanities Group of the KNAW Humanities Cluster, created --a tool that analyses adverts in historical newspapers-- together with Juliette Lonij, as a Researcher-in-Residence at the Royal Library of the Netherlands. Clemens Neudecker, a researcher at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz, is working on making Europeana Newspapers --a huge set of historical newspapers-- available through Europeana Collections. Here, they tell us more about how their areas of expertise come together.... Tell us about SIAMESE - the tool you've developed to analyse images in newspapers. Melvin: SIAMESE uses machine-learning techniques (like Convolutional Neural Networks and Approximate Nearest Neighbour algorithms) to detect shapes and objects, and search for similar images. For instance, it can recognise visual elements representing a car in an advert, and come up with similar car ads.

Last week, Chancellor Philip Hammond announced in the Autumn Budget a £500m package of investment into tech initiatives, including the development of artificial intelligence. Which must have had the Channel 4 executives ordering trebles all round, because with perfect timing they've designated this week the "Rise of the Robots season", with a schedule that includes documentaries on the take-off of artificial intelligences (AIs) as consulting doctors, a David Tennant-narrated piece on the challenge of making robots as human as possible, and the one that's had the tabloids hot under the collar, today'sThe Sex Robots Are Coming – which needs little further explanation. Doctor Who and the Invasion of the Sex-Bots aside, though, is it actually possible that the dream of science fiction writers going back a century or more is on the verge of reality? Are we really about to live in the long-promised future of robots and AIs? As they used to say on the old Six Million Dollar Man TV show (point of order – Steve Austin was a cyborg, not a robot), we have the technology… or we're about to.

A former Scotland Yard detective has told BBC News he was "shocked" by the amount of pornography viewed on a parliamentary computer seized from the office of Damian Green. Neil Lewis said "thousands" of thumbnail images containing legal pornographic material had been found nine years ago on a desktop device in the Westminster office of Mr Green - who is now first secretary of state (Theresa May's deputy). Mr Lewis examined the computer during a 2008 inquiry into government leaks and has not spoken publicly before. Mr Green, Conservative MP for Ashford, Kent, has denied the allegations, saying he never watched or downloaded such material on the computer. What will happen to the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic after Brexit?

Adidas has ramped up interest in its recently launched female-focused community space Studio LDN, by using a chatbot to create an interactive booking process. The studio, which opened earlier this year, offers a series of weekly free-to-attend fitness sessions especially for women, with the ultimate goal of boosting brand engagement. The Facebook Messenger chatbot, created by marketing technology agency Byte London, is the only way to find out about sessions and register, so it has been integral to driving awareness and the success of the initiative. "One of the main appeals of a chatbot was that it allows for ongoing, deeper engagement with our consumers through regular one-to-one conversations," Sarah Gower, managing editor at Adidas London Newsroom, tells Marketing Week. "It also offers agility in a fast-paced social landscape with new broadcasts being published weekly."

AWS IoT 1-Click, AWS IoT Device Management, AWS IoT Device Defender, AWS IoT Analytics, Amazon FreeRTOS, and AWS Greengrass ML Inference make getting started with IoT as easy as one click, enable customers to rapidly onboard and easily manage large fleets of devices, audit and enforce consistent security policies, and analyze IoT device data at scale. Amazon FreeRTOS is an operating system that extends the rich functionality of AWS IoT to devices with very low computing power, such as lightbulbs, smoke detectors, and conveyor belts. And, AWS Greengrass ML Inference is a new capability for AWS Greengrass that allows machine learning models to be deployed directly to devices, where they can run machine learning inference to make decisions quickly, even when devices are not connected to the cloud. To get started, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/iot "AWS IoT Device Management has helped streamline our device onboarding, which has enabled us to meet our planned production throughput for connected devices. With AWS doing the undifferentiated heavy lifting for our IoT platform, we can spend more time on our customers than on our infrastructure."