Amazon is taking on Apple and Spotify in the streaming music market - and hopes undercutting them will give it the edge. Amazon Music Unlimited will cost 8 per month, or 80 a year, for members of Amazon's 99-a-year Prime loyalty program. Non-Prime members will pay 10 a month, the same monthly fee charged by Spotify and Apple Music, while owners of Amazon's Echo smart speaker will be able to get the unlimited music service on one device for 4 per month. This image provided by Amazon Music shows a display of Amazon Music Unlimited, a paid streaming music service Amazon is launching. The music service is being positioned to compete against existing services such as Spotify and Apple Music.

Some soft robots can wriggle into tight spots and swim like a real octopus. These ones developed by a team from the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), however, are also capable of doing something more: they can help with the physical rehabilitation of people recovering from injuries and illnesses. The EPFL team have created a number of flexible, reconfigurable machines that can mimic human muscles' movement. They're made of silicon and rubber -- though the team also made a variant using a thick paper shell -- and they can be controlled by manipulating how much air they have inside. One of the medical devices they created with their soft robots is a belt that keeps patients upright and controls their movements during rehabilitation exercises.

Marc Vollenweider is the CEO and co-founder of Evalueserve. As a former partner at McKinsey & Company in Zurich and India, Marc developed a deep interest in the world of data analytics, particularly how human minds and smart machines can successfully complement each other. He saw the potential for companies to enhance productivity, shorten their time-to-market, improve quality, and gain new capabilities by leveraging mind machine. Marc's fascination with innovation has led to the establishment of a series of internal ventures at Evalueserve. He is the co-inventor of the digital model of InsightBee, Evalueserve's new pay-as-you-go research and analytics solution.

In a head-to-head comparison, human doctors with access to the same information about medical history and symptoms as was put into a symptom checker got the diagnosis right 72 percent of the time, compared to 34 percent for the apps. The 23 online symptom checkers, some accessed via websites and others available as apps, included those offered by Web MD and the Mayo Clinic in the U.S. and the Isabel Symptom Checker in the U.K. "The current symptom checkers, I was not surprised do not outperform doctors," said senior author Dr. Ateev Mehrotra of Harvard Medical School in Boston. But in reality computers and human doctors may both be involved in a diagnosis, rather than pitted against each other, Mehrotra told Reuters Health. The researchers used a web platform called Human Dx to distribute 45 clinical vignettes - sets of medical history and symptom information - to 234 physicians. Doctors could not do a physical examination on the hypothetical patient or run tests, they had only the information provided.

The British government has been slammed for failing to respond to the coming advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence (A.I.), changes that will have a far-reaching impact on both the country and world. The science and technology select committee, a group of 10 members of parliament (MPs) that scrutinizes the government's science policies, warned on Wednesday that not enough is being done to prepare for the social and ethical issues that will arise from robots and A.I. "Artificial intelligence has some way to go before we see systems and robots as portrayed in the creative arts such as Star Wars," Dr Tania Mathias, interim chair of the committee and a Conservative MP, said in a statement. "But science fiction is slowly becoming science fact, and robotics and A.I. look destined to play an increasing role in our lives over the coming decades." As technologies progress, British politicians are slowly growing fearful that a complacent response could cause mass social upheaval if not properly managed. Labour MP and innovation spokesperson Jon Trickett warned at his party's conference last month that "we will have to make [technology] our servant," while Conservative MP and Brexit secretary David Davis told his party's conference that manual laborers are being replaced by robots.

The UK has a shot at leading the world in artificial intelligence and robotics governance, if not for Brexit. Britain's impending exit from the EU has cast doubts over crucial legal provisions for AI and robots, according to the results of an inquiry by the British parliament published today (Oct. To date, companies that stand to benefit from AI developments have so far been the ones leading the development of ethical guidelines around AI and robotics. Governments have been left behind, although the White House has also released its own, long awaited report on AI's impact today. The Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons, the British parliament's lower chamber, published its report after six months of gathering evidence from academics, companies like Google DeepMind and Microsoft, and experts on AI and robotics in general.

In a head-to-head comparison, human doctors with access to the same information about medical history and symptoms as was put into a symptom checker got the diagnosis right 72 percent of the time, compared to 34 percent for the apps. The 23 online symptom checkers, some accessed via websites and others available as apps, included those offered by Web MD and the Mayo Clinic in the U.S. and the Isabel Symptom Checker in the U.K. "The current symptom checkers, I was not surprised do not outperform doctors," said senior author Dr. Ateev Mehrotra of Harvard Medical School in Boston. But in reality computers and human doctors may both be involved in a diagnosis, rather than pitted against each other, Mehrotra told Reuters Health. The researchers used a web platform called Human Dx to distribute 45 clinical vignettes - sets of medical history and symptom information - to 234 physicians. Doctors could not do a physical examination on the hypothetical patient or run tests, they had only the information provided.

Artificial intelligence continues to have its moment in the spotlight, with a surge of interest in startups and efforts from huge tech companies to push the boundaries of how we might best use machine learning, computer vision and other areas of AI in the future. The latest development on that front comes from China's Huawei, which today announced that it would form a research partnership with UC Berkeley focused on AI, and fund it to the initial tune of 1 million. The alliance, between Huawei's Noah's Ark Laboratory and Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR), is being billed as a "strategic partnership into basic research", and it will cover areas like deep learning, reinforcement learning, machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision. "The two parties believe that this strategic partnership will fuel the advancement of AI technology and create completely new experiences for people, thus contributing greatly to society at large," Huawei notes. Some of these areas of AI you will have heard a lot about already.

Science fiction is slowly becoming science fact, claims science and technology committee. The UK is not well prepared for how artificial intelligence (AI) and robots will fundamentally reshape the way people live and work, lawmakers have warned in a report. The Science and Technology Committee urged the government to establish a commission for examining the social, ethical and legal implications of recent and potential developments in AI and robots. The committee's interim chairwoman Tania Mathias said: "At present, 'AI machines' have narrow and specific roles, such as in voice-recognition or playing the board game'Go'. "But science fiction is slowly becoming science fact, and robotics and AI look destined to play an increasing role in our lives over the coming decades." The report cited driverless cars, supercomputers that help with medical diagnoses, and intelligent tutoring systems as examples of areas where AI is transforming day to day life, raising questions on the transparency of AI decision-making and privacy. It also noted that the government's leadership in AI has been lacking even though UK-startups and universities have made huge contributions to the field from a technological point of view. Mathias said: "Some major technology companies – including Google and Amazon – have recently come together to form the'Partnership on AI'.

Founders Factory has received a multimillion pound investment from Chinese private equity firm CSC Group to help nurture AI talent in Europe and China. As part of the partnership, the accelerator and incubator launched by Brent Hoberman, Henry Lane Fox and Jim Meyerle, will invest in and scale five early stage AI startups and co-create two new companies a year. Founders Factory and CSC Group will work together to give AI startups access to the Chinese market and to import Chinese AI talent into the European tech ecosystem. Dania Zhou, CSC group senior managing director and CSC Union Co-Founder, commented on the news: "This is just the beginning of a long term relationship with Founders Factory; a relationship that will give us access to the best European talent through its unique model backed by other large corporate partners. The founding team has a great track record at building businesses; something we now want to do together with a focus on artificial intelligence."