Self-driving robots will soon start delivering food and groceries. This month Starship Technologies is rolling out its six-wheeled delivery robots in London, Dusseldorf, Bern, and Hamburg, Quartz reports.

SUMMARY: Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies offer great promise for creating new and innovative products, growing the economy, and advancing national priorities in areas such as education, mental and physical health, addressing climate change, and more. Like any transformative technology, however, AI carries risks and presents complex policy challenges along a number of different fronts. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is interested in developing a view of AI across all sectors for the purpose of recommending directions for research and determining challenges and opportunities in this field. The views of the American people, including stakeholders such as consumers, academic and industry researchers, private companies, and charitable foundations, are important to inform an understanding of current and future needs for AI in diverse fields. The purpose of this RFI is to solicit feedback on overarching questions in AI, including AI research and the tools, technologies, and training that are needed to answer these questions.

A park ranger treads carefully through the trees, stopping to listen for signs of the poacher he's tailing. Killed for skins, medicine and trophy hunting, the worldwide population of tigers has been reduced to near-extinction at about 3,200. The scale of destruction is increasing, and it will take a three-pronged approach to battle the corruption and financial incentives driving the illegal trade: tackling the source, transmission and demand for wild animal products. Supply could be dealt with by park rangers catching the poachers before they attack, but finding a single poacher in thousands of square kilometers can be almost impossible, and in the poorest areas, resources are so constrained that poachers are not being intercepted at all. Artificial intelligence and game theory are the surprising elements in the arsenal of weapons used to combat this problem.

Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that allows computer programs to learn when exposed to new data without being programmed. Now, researchers in The Netherlands have coupled machine learning methods with a special MRI technique that measures the perfusion, or tissue absorption rate, of blood throughout the brain to detect early forms of dementia, such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI), according to a new study published online in the journal Radiology. "MRI can help with the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease," said principal investigator Alle Meije Wink, Ph.D., from the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam. "However, the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease is problematic." Scientists have long known that Alzheimer's disease is a gradual process and that the brain undergoes functional changes before the structural changes associated with the disease show up on imaging results.

If they come bearing hot French fries and gooey pizza, I, for one, will welcome our new robot overlords with open arms. The artificial intelligence revolution is one step closer to that reality in Europe, where a food delivery service, a package delivery company, and a retail chain are testing out autonomous robot couriers. Food delivery companies Just Eat and Pronto will be trying out the self-driving robots in London, while Germain retail chain Metro AG and German parcel delivery company Hermes will test them out in Dusseldorf, Germany, and Bern, Switzlerland, as well as another undisclosed German city, says the robot's maker, Starship Technologies. Starship Technologies, a London-based company started by two Skype co-founders, has been testing the so-called "ground drones" in Europe over the last nine months, but these trials will mark the first time businesses will be using the technology to deliver real orders to paying customers, Allan Martinson, Starship's chief operating officer tells Bloomberg. Each company's trial will involve anywhere between five and 10 robots in one or two areas of each city.

Across the world there is an estimated 285 million visually impaired people, and 39 million of these are blind. Conditions like age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy can be picked up is using digital screenings, which are highly complex and take a lot of time to analyse. Now Google's DeepMind Health is teaming up with a London eye hospital to investigate how machine learning could help analyse these scans efficiently and effectively. Moorfields Eue Hospital in London has announced a new medical research partnership with Google's DeepMind Health that could revolutionise the way professionals carry out eye tests and lead to earlier detection of common eye diseases Diabetes is on the rise. It's estimated that 1 in 11 of the world's adult population are affected.

Studying micro-organisms usually requires a petri dish, but a group of researchers in Norway decided to make things a little more exciting, in a three dimensional throwback to the 1980s. The team recreated the maze from the Japanese arcade classic Pac-Man, on a tiny scale, and set two kinds of microorganisms loose. They then monitored the creatures' behaviour, to learn more about the dynamics between predator and prey microorganisms. The researchers recreated the legendary labyrinth from the game Pac-Man (shown left) on a tiny scale less than 0.04 inches (one millimetre) in diameter, shown right The three dimensional labyrinth was filled with microscopic prey and predators swimming around in a fluid filled with nutrients. Single celled organisms, the prey, along with multi-cellular'rotifers', the predators, were released into the nutrient-laden fluid maze.

As computers around the world get smarter and more powerful, internet heavyweight Google is determined to stay ahead of the game. The company said on Wednesday that it is buying a French artificial intelligence company called Moodstocks that specializes in image recognition. Moodstocks focuses on building image-recognition capabilities into phones, and first introduced software that could do this back in 2012. Over the past two and a half years it has extended its reach into physical object recognition, the company says on its website. Joining forces with Google, Moodstocks said, will allow the company "to deploy our work at scale" and "build great image recognition tools within Google."

The knock at the door from a harassed delivery driver clutching a plastic bag full of food could be about to end. A fleet of autonomous wheeled drones are to be used on the streets of central London to carry meals ordered through the Just Eat takeaway app. Meals will be placed inside the insulated compartments of the droids and customers will be given a secure code to open them when it arrives at their door. Customers order their food online and are given a secret code which will give access to the six-wheel drone (pictured) upon arrival at their door. Unlike robots designed to resemble humans, the Starship's bot is purely functional with a large compartment to hold deliveries, the equivalent size of two grocery bags.

Google announced today that it has acquired Paris-based Moodstocks, a startup that has developed machine learning technology to bolster the image recognition features on smartphones. "We continue to pursue our machine learning and research efforts," wrote Vincent Simonet, head of the research and development team for France Google, "and Moodstocks is the latest proof of our commitment to this area." Today, we're thrilled to announce that we've reached an agreement to join forces with Google in order to deploy our work at scale. We expect the acquisition to be completed in the next few weeks. Our focus will be to build great image recognition tools within Google, but rest assured that current paying Moodstocks customers will be able to use it until the end of their subscription.