My iPhone is now packed with helpers. It started with Siri, the digital assistant baked into iOS, that was waiting for me the moment I fired up my iPhone SE for the first time. But now Google is moving in on Apple's turf by releasing an iOS version of Google Assistant, its own take on a helper powered by artificial intelligence. Illustration: Tom's GuideAnd Google Assistant isn't even first app angling to replace Siri as my go-to iPhone helper. Cortana, Microsoft's digital assistant, has been available for iOS devices for more than a year.

Since joining UCLA's faculty in 1988, urology researcher Arie Belldegrun has developed a specialty: starting companies with the university's help. Belldegrun's track record includes selling his first company, the Santa Monica cancer therapy biotech Agensys Inc., for more than $500 million. In 2009, Belldegrun's Cougar Biotechnology was sold to Johnson & Johnson, for $1 billion. He's still running the cancer cell therapy firm, Kite Pharma, which recently ranked seventh in the MIT Technology Review's 2017 list of the 50 smartest companies. Belldegrun, 67, thinks most universities would have forced him to choose between being a full-time professor or an entrepreneur.

Now artificial intelligence is set to conquer the world of music. Swiss researchers say they have developed a computer algorithm that can generate new tunes in various musical genres after listening to more than 2,000 songs. And while it isn't quite at the level of Justin Bieber or Adele, future versions of the system may be fine-tuned to create songs that rival those by today's musicians. The deep artificial composer, or DAC, produces original melodies that are'quite agreeable to listen to', according to its developers at EPFL research university in Lausanne, Switzerland The DAC system is trained to'listen' to existing tunes to learn what works. It then teaches itself to predict the pitch and duration of every note following another.

'Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive, despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit," wrote former Facebook product manager Antonio García Martínez in 2016. "They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence. But the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they'd become precisely the sort of useless baggage you'd trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel." This is from his insider account of Silicon Valley, Chaos Monkeys. The book was a bestseller. The New York Times called it "an irresistible and indispensable 360-degree guide to the new technology establishment".

It should come as no surprise that the Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most eagerly anticipated trends in heavy industry. Powered by a host of technologies, including low-cost sensors, IP and wireless networks, private and public clouds, and powerful edge infrastructure, industrial IoT promises to transform the way companies provide products and services and interact with customers and partners. Simultaneously, another revolution is taking place in artificial intelligence (AI). For years, programmed intelligence based on simple rules and limited data inputs have powered various industrial applications. A robot arm that extracts a molded part from a chemical wash after certain conditions are met is an example of a narrow, "weak" AI.

Insurance and technology are inextricably linked. The risks we seek to manage have always been connected to the tools we use. But, as Accenture's 2017 Technology Vision for Insurance points out, this relationship recently reached an inflection point. In the past, humans generally changed themselves to make use of new technologies--we learned to drive, we learned to type, we learned to code. But now modern technologies are sophisticated enough to adapt themselves to us.

Theoretical neuroscientist, technologist and entrepreneur Dr Vivienne Ming looks to artificial intelligence and neuroprosthetics to augment humans. She spoke to Claire O'Connell. Artificial intelligence is a hot topic. From computers that can beat chess masters or diagnose disease, to the notion of autonomous machines putting humans out of jobs, there's a lot to think about. But, as with so many technologies, AI is just a tool, and it is how we use it that matters, according to theoretical neuroscientist and entrepreneur Dr Vivienne Ming, who was in Dublin last week.

Google has today awarded €706,000 ($800,000) to the UK's Press Association to develop robot reporters that can crank out 30,000 articles a month for local newspapers and bloggers. The cash injection is part of the advertising goliath's €150m Digital News Initiative, a three-year program that allegedly supports European journalism through technology (or, rather, helps websites get more readers and thus shift more Google ads). Now in its third and final year, the fund will bankroll 107 projects in 27 countries to the tune of €22m ($25m) in 2017. The Press Association project – codenamed RADAR, or Reporters and Data and Robots – will be a collaborative effort with Urbs Media, a UK startup that specializes in automated data journalism. The Press Association is Blighty's equivalent of America's Associated Press – a roving newswire that feeds stories to publications.

Amazon Rekognition makes it easy to detect, search for, and compare faces in images to find matches. In this post, we show how to use Amazon Rekognition to find distinct people in a video and identify the frames that they appear in. You could use face detection in videos, for example, to identify actors in a movie, find relatives and friends in a personal video library, or track people in video surveillance. First, we explain how the serverless solution finds distinct people in a video. Then, we explain how to implement the solution in your AWS account with AWS CloudFormation and to test it with a sample video.

AI could lead to "cliff-edge" scenario of mass unemployment, PWC warns The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) by businesses to replace workers could lead to a "cliff-edge" scenario where huge swathes of the working population suddenly lose their jobs as the technology reaches financial viability, the accounting firm PWC has warned. The professional services firm said AI had the power to overhaul business models and could leave workers sidelined and companies struggling to adjust unless preparations are made now. It said firms and the state must double down on their efforts to improve the education system and help workers retrain to ensure AI delivers the much-heralded boost to the UK economy. Jon Andrews, PwC's head of technology and investments, said: "There are different sectors that will be impacted in different ways. "The vast majority [of workers] will not see the change happening to them and they will have a very different job by 2030.