Britain is betting that the rise of the machines will boost the economy as the country exits the European Union. As part of its strategy to champion specific industries, the U.K. government said in a statement on Sunday that it would invest 17.3 million pounds ($21.6 million) in university research on robotics and artificial intelligence. The government cited an estimate from consultancy Accenture that AI could add 654 billion pounds to the U.K. economy by 2035. "We are already pioneers in today's artificial intelligence revolution and the digital strategy will build on our strengths to make sure U.K.-based scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs continue to be at the forefront," Culture Secretary Karen Bradley said in the statement, which referenced AI's contribution to smartphone voice and touch recognition technologies. The announcement is part of U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May's plan to identify industries worth supporting to help transform the economy and boost productivity.

The dramatic drop in the cost of genome sequencing, combined with rapidly evolving artificial intelligence, is moving precision medicine into mainstream healthcare. Sanjay Chikarmane, senior vice president at Illumina, told an briefing at HIMSS17 in Orlando on Monday that the US$100 genome is now in sight. Illumina is an US company focused on genetics sequencing and analysing big data for biological insights. The company is also the major partner for the UK Government's 100k Genome project, providing most of the infrastructure through a £78 million partnership with the Genomics England. During the briefing, Illumina announced a new partnership with Philips.

"Go, go!" was the thought racing through Grégoire Courtine's mind. The French neuroscientist was watching a macaque monkey as it hunched aggressively at one end of a treadmill. His team had used a blade to slice halfway through the animal's spinal cord, paralyzing its right leg. Now Courtine wanted to prove he could get the monkey walking again. To do it, he and colleagues had installed a recording device beneath its skull, touching its motor cortex, and sutured a pad of flexible electrodes around the animal's spinal cord, below the injury.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. Apple is preparing to rebuild Siri and take the fight to Amazon and Google, but how does the current version stack up against the current AI industry leader, Alexa? If you're considering buying Google's AI tech, check out how it fared against Alexa in this head-to-head.

Five'table ronde' or round table were organised mostly with academics on the different aspects of the societal moves due to Artificial Intelligence (AI or IA in French): It was pointed that some milestone progress on deep learning has been achieved. Machines have surpassed human champions in most intellectually challenging games, including Chess, Scrabble, Othello, even Jeopardy. On March 2016, the Google AlphaGo DeepMind's Artificial Intelligence program beat Lee Sedol, the strongest Go player in the world. Go--a 2,500-year-old game is far more complex than Chess. An exceptional powerful computer had to process more than 30 million moves.

A blind man who narrowly escaped death when he was gunned down in the Philippines has developed software he hopes will offer life-changing independence to blind people. Marx Melencio was buying fried rice with his wife at a roadside store in Manila when he was shot in the chest and the head in an apparently random attack. The first bullet hit him 3mm from his heart. The second missed his brain by 2mm but singed his optic nerve, rendering him blind. Witnesses say the man who fired the gun was under the influence of both alcohol and drugs, but he's never been convicted.

The government is due to announce a £17.3m ($22m) investment in artificial intelligence and robotics research carried out by British universities. It is part of the government's digital strategy, to be published by Culture Secretary Karen Bradley on Wednesday. A report by Accenture released last year estimated that AI could contribute up to £654bn to the UK economy by 2035. But the government was criticised last year for its support of the UK tech scene. As part of the new digital strategy, computer scientist Prof Dame Wendy Hall and tech CEO Jerome Pesenti, former chief data scientist at IBM, have been asked to review the UK's artificial intelligence sector.

Firstly, my response contains some bias, because I work at Google Brain and I really like it there. My opinions are my own, and I do not speak for the rest of my colleagues or Alphabet as a whole. I rank "leaders in AI research" among tech companies as follows: I would say Deepmind is probably #1 right now, in terms of AI research. Their publications are highly respected within the research community, and span a myriad of topics such as Deep Reinforcement Learning, Bayesian Neural Nets, Robotics, transfer learning, and others. Being London-based, they recruit heavily from Oxford and Cambridge, which are great ML feeder programs in Europe.

What would it look like to ask a deep learning AI system to watch every political television advertisement of the 2016 presidential campaign season for two months and describe what it sees? That was the question I asked last February when I collaborated with the Internet Archive to take all 267 political ads they had identified (which had aired a collective 72,807 times as monitored by the Archive) and ran them frame-by-frame through Google's Cloud Vision API, producing what is likely the first large-scale application of production deep learning algorithms to describe the visual narratives of political advertising on television. Now, what if we took this same approach and instead of examining television, we looked at a quarter billion news photographs compiled from online news outlets in nearly every country of the world over the course of 2016? What would AI see in that vast archive of the visual narratives of the world's media? Google's Cloud Vision API is a commercial cloud service that accepts as input any arbitrary photograph and uses deep learning algorithms to catalog a wealth of data about each image, including a list of objects and activities it depicts, recognizable logos, OCR text recognition in almost 80 languages, levels of violence, an estimate of visual sentiment and even the precise location on earth the image appears to depict.

I made this announcement to 54,210 members of the Digital Health group on LinkedIn. If you're on LinkedIn, please do join the group, which allows you to opt in to receiving these announcements in addition to connecting with thousands of other global stakeholders in digital health. Note that I will continue to update this announcement up until sending out the final version via LinkedIn. Dr. Watson, AI, has stumbled in a very costly way at the renowned MD Anderson Cancer Center. As Matthew Herper, Sr. Editor for Pharma & Healthcare at Forbes writes, MD Anderson has benched IBM's Watson in a "setback for artificial intelligence in medicine".