What do you get if you cross aspirin with ibuprofen? Harvard chemistry professor Alán Aspuru-Guzik isn't sure, but he's trained software that could give him an answer by suggesting a molecular structure that combines properties of both drugs. The AI program could help the search for new drug compounds. Pharmaceutical research tends to rely on software that exhaustively crawls through giant pools of candidate molecules using rules written by chemists, and simulations that try to identify or predict useful structures. The former relies on humans thinking of everything, while the latter is limited by the accuracy of simulations and the computing power required.

Physicians have long used visual judgment of medical images to determine the course of cancer treatment. A new program package from Fraunhofer researchers reveals changes in images and facilitates this task using deep learning. The experts will demonstrate this software in Chicago from November 27 to December 2 at RSNA, the world's largest radiology meeting. Has a tumor shrunk during the course of treatment over several months, or have new tumors developed? To answer questions like these, physicians often perform CT and MRI scans.

Say you're a giant company that's heard about a fancy "new" technology called artificial intelligence and you're interested in adding some cutting-edge data crunching muscle to your business. Contrary to what the artificial intelligence-hype cycle might suggest, just adding popular buzzwords like "machine learning" to your vernacular isn't as easy as hooking a smartphone to a laptop. At the Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence conference this week put on by the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, several founders behind artificial intelligence startups that have been acquired by industry heavyweights like Salesforce.com crm, Uber, and Amazon amzn shared lessons they've learned since joining the big-time corporate world. Richard Socher, the founder of the A.I. startup MetaMind that was swallowed by Salesforce in April, explained on a panel what he's learned since joining the cloud software giant and becoming its chief scientist. Socher said he was pleased with the research that his small team worked on with two types of A.I. techniques called computer vision, in which software can learn to recognize images in pictures, and natural language processing, in which software learns to recognize text.

Just before the launch of Football Manager 2017 [official site], with the beta already released to the many people who preordered the game, I spoke to Sports Interactive director Miles Jacobson about the changes his team have made in this latest game in the series. We talked about AI improvements, Brexit, and whether Leicester winning the Premier League was a happy day or a sad day at Sports Interactive. With updates to the beta arriving regularly as the people playing provided feedback, commentary and complaints, Sports Interactive is a busy place around this time of year. The fortnight before launch day is an enormous playtest, in which more eyes are on the new version of the game than have been at any point during development. Jacobson seems happy to take time away from assessment of new release candidate builds to talk though.

Artificial intelligence is creeping into our daily lives in unexpected ways. It is not just transforming online services with innovations such as Apple's Siri voice recognition app, which will send emails when you instruct it to, or Microsoft's Skype translation services, which enable you to communicate online with people whose languages you do not speak. Wider applications of artificial intelligence, such as image and pattern recognition (classifying data or objects based on common features), natural language processing (how computers understand and respond to human speech) and machine learning (when software learns something without being programmed to do so) will soon be featuring in many products and services. Pest control In recent years, pest control company Rentokil Initial has been experimenting with rodent traps equipped with sensors and WiFi. These send data to a command centre, which the company has built with partners Google and PA Consulting.

One of Blizzard Entertainment's hottest video games is making the jump into a professional sports league. The studio, a division of video game publisher Activision Blizzard, announced Friday the launch of Overwatch League, a professional video gaming league kicking off its inaugural season during the second half of 2017. Details of the league were revealed during Blizzcon, the studio's annual fan event in Anaheim, Calif. Blizzard says the league will combine competitive video gaming -- better known as eSports -- with hallmarks of professional sports leagues like the National Football League, complete with teams based in various cities worldwide featuring owners who will cultivate team and player development. "Nothing like this has ever really been done before," said Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick during an interview with USA TODAY.

The 8.6 billion mobile devices on the planet have meant that quite often, getting a decent signal can be tough. However, researchers say a new drone could be the key. It can create an incredibly detailed 3D map of a city, allowing researchers to model how radio waves move through it. Researcher have devised a new method that involves taking aerial photographs of an area with a drone, which can be used as models to design radio links. Drones are equipped with a high quality cameras that can capture multiple points of view.

That's what makes it so useful – but it's also what makes it so dangerous. As WhatsApp and other chat apps have grown, they've also picked up their unfair share of scams. They come in many different forms, and are often very convincing. But the advice for steering clear and staying safe is the same as it is everywhere else on the internet, really. Just make sure that you stay vigilant and don't fall for anything that seems too good or too worrying to be true.

A team of scientists at IBM Research in Zurich, have created an artificial version of neurons using phase-change materials to store and process data. These phase change based artificial neurons can be used to detect patterns and discover correlations in the areas of big data and unsupervised machine learning. The results of the decade-long research to use phase-change materials for memory applications were recently published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The research team is led by Evangelos Eleftheriou. The development of energy-efficient, ultra-dense integrated neuromorphic technologies for applications in cognitive computing is getting a lot of attention.

Criteo is organizing the Machine Learning in the Real World workshop. This workshop aims at bringing together people from the industry and from academia to better understand which machine learning algorithms are used in practice and what we can do to improve them. Anyone who is involved in applying machine learning on real world data is welcome. This event is primarily intended for people with technical fluency in machine learning to help each other advance the state of the art. If you are interested in learning about the basics of the field, there are plenty of other great events in Paris which are probably more appropriate.