Sphero is moving beyond cute, connected rolling balls fast. Less than a month after introducing a tie-in for the animated movie franchise Cars, the company's now taking the wraps off of its first non-robotic product. And it's another toy built in partnership with Disney. Meet Sphero's Spider-Man, a replica of the beloved Marvel superhero than listens and responds to your voice commands. Unlike with its versions of BB-8 and Ultimate Lightning McQueen though, this Spider-Man doesn't depend on an app to be fully functional. Right behind the character's light-up eyes, there's an Android device, and all you have to do to turn the "premium rubber" doll into a talking and listening companion is click the spider on his chest.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is just beginning to come into its own in terms of its use by lawyers and within the legal industry. Within the next few years, we will find ourselves on the cusp of a revolution in the practice of law led by the adoption of artificial intelligence -- in particular, by in-house lawyers. Much like email changed the way we do business every day, AI will become ubiquitous -- an indispensable assistant to practically every lawyer. Those who do not adopt and embrace the change will get left behind. Those who do will ultimately find themselves freed up to do the two things there always seems to be too little time for: thinking and advising.

Mosquitos kill more humans every year than any other animal on the planet and conventional methods to reduce mosquito-borne illnesses haven't worked as well as many hoped. So we've been hard at work since receiving this USAID grant six months ago to reduce Zika incidence and related threats to public health. Our partners at the joint FAO/IAEA Insect Pest Control Lab in Vienna, Austria have been working to perfect the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) in order to sterilize and release male mosquitos in Zika hotspots. Releasing millions of said male mosquitos increases competition for female mosquitos, making it more difficult for non-sterilized males to find a mate. We learned last year at a USAID Co-Ideation Workshop that this technique can reduce the overall mosquito population in a given area by 90%.

Biography: Professor Moore is the Edward Rose Professor of Informatics and Director of the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics. He also serves as Senior Associate Dean for Informatics and Director of the Division of Informatics in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics. He came to Penn in 2015 from Dartmouth where he was Director of the Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Sciences. Prior to Dartmouth he served as Director of the Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education at Vanderbilt University. He has a PhD in Human Genetics and an MSc in Applied Statistics from the University of Michigan.

The online world isn't as simple as we've thought it to be. Behind the seemingly quiet and vast space of nothingness, huge amounts of data are uploaded and downloaded in fractions of a second. Data science does not only keeps track of these numbers, but also attempts to analyze and organize them. Algorithms are created to keep tabs on searches in search engines, analyze user data preference, and so on and so forth. The demand for qualified data scientists have become very high. A recent Bloomberg article predicted that there will be a shortage of data scientists in the US by the year 2018.

Before the giant E3 video game exhibition takes place every year, it is proceeded by a series of vast press events, where publishers hope to snag just a little of the world's attention with their latest mega releases. Filling huge venues and live-streamed to a global audience of millions, these one-hour hype-fests can make all the difference between blockbusting success and ignoble failure. Here, then, are our 17 favourite announcements, culled from all the pre-E3 shows. We've stuck to games that were either revealed for the first time on stage, or were finally confirmed after months of gossip, leaks and rumours. These are the titles we want to discover more about at the show, and over the months to come.

When Swedbank customers face a problem, they reach out to Nina, the bank's virtual assistant. Visitors to Mizuho Bank are greeted by Pepper, a humanoid robot standing four feet tall. Santander allows payments to be activated by voice, and JP Morgan Chase now uses machine learning to review commercial loan agreements in seconds, a task that used to take 3,60,000 manhours every year. Wherever you look in the world of financial services, you will find some form of artificial intelligence (AI) at work. AI technologies such as machine learning and speech recognition are quietly working behind the scenes to improve lending decisions and prevent fraud.

First Amazon announced plans to fully automate its new brick and mortar store with robots. Then we learned that Foxconn plans to automate 30 percent of its factory workforce by 2018. And recently, Wendy's announced plans to add automated kiosks at more than 1,000 stores. One thing is clear -- robots are changing the way we live and work. And this is just the beginning.

The skip-gram neural network model is actually surprisingly simple in its most basic form. Train a simple neural network with a single hidden layer to perform a certain task, but then we're not actually going to use that neural network for the task we trained it on! Instead, the goal is actually just to learn the weights of the hidden layer–we'll see that these weights are actually the "word vectors" that we're trying to learn. We're going to train the neural network to do the following. Given a specific word in the middle of a sentence (the input word), look at the words nearby and pick one at random.

Scientists have harnessed the power of'the Beast' to answer some of the most baffling questions about religion. The custom-built computer has developed a simulated virtual human mind capable of creating the impacts of terror on behavior - with the hopes of uncovering the truth behind why people become radicalized. The model had revealed that religious ritual observance would increase after terror-inspiring events drove people beyond a certain threshold of fear. Researches at Boston University first designed a computer simulation that predicts how many people would stay in a religion based on its strictness. It was then compared with defection rates from 18 Christian denominations.