Innovation is among the key factors driving a country's economic and social growth. But what are the factors that make a country innovative? How do they differ across different parts of the world and different stages of development? In this work done in collaboration with the World Economic Forum (WEF), we analyze the scores obtained through executive opinion surveys that constitute the WEF's Global Competitiveness Index in conjunction with other country-level metrics and indicators to identify actionable levers of innovation. The findings can help country leaders and organizations shape the policies to drive developmental activities and increase the capacity of innovation.

Despite the hardware news this week, E3 2016 is still all about the games. For gamers, that means a bounty of new trailers revealing gameplay and cinematic introductions to new worlds. Whether you're a fan of the PC, Xbox One or PlayStation, it's hard not to get excited about what's ahead. This may be the most buzzed-about trailer coming out of E3 2016. The first game from "Metal Gear Solid" creator Hideo Kojima after his departure from Konami was always going to be a big deal, but then you add some really interesting visuals and a naked Norman Reedus, better known as Daryl from "The Walking Dead," holding a baby and that's a recipe for success.

Meet the future face of healthcare assistance - a friendly faced robot named Pepper. Its diction is still a little odd, and his movements sometimes a bit hesitant, but the robot is all geared up to help patients at two Belgian hospitals. The humanoid assistant, who has a screen on his chest and a round head, is the first robot in the world to be used to greet people in a medical setting, its software creators said. Two of Belgium's hospitals have installed Pepper robots in their receptions for trials. The robots will help patients in Ostend and Liege. In Liege, at the Centre Hospitalier Regional La Citadelle, the robot helper will remain in the hospital's reception area.

The traditional definition of artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to execute tasks and solve problems in ways normally attributed to humans. Some tasks that we consider simple--recognizing an object in a photo, driving a car--are incredibly complex for AI. Machines can surpass us when it comes to things like playing chess, but those machines are limited by the manual nature of their programming; a 30 gadget can beat us at a board game, but it can't do--or learn to do--anything else. This is where machine learning comes in. Show millions of cat photos to a machine, and it will hone its algorithms to improve at recognizing pictures of cats.

SAP SE is exploring augmented reality and intelligent assistant software in initiatives intended to boost employee productivity, according to new SAP CIO Thomas Saueressig, who at 31 is the youngest CIOworking for a global 2000 company. More productive employees will ultimately improve the business software maker's ability to serve customers, one of the German company's core tenets. "I fundamentally believe that the new generation and the expectations of our customers and our employees are changing so significantly," says Saueressig, who took over for Helen Arnold on May 1. "And we need to shift our focus purely on the end-user [employees and customers]." Saueressig is something of a rarity among first-time IT leaders. As a millennial, he is a member of a generation HPE CEO Meg Whitman describes as as supremely confident if not entitled.

Seven swimming robots will take to the sea later this month to help scientists investigate unanswered questions about India's monsoon season. After departing from the southern port city of Chennai, researchers will spend a month at sea releasing the torpedo-shaped underwater robots across a 400-kilometer (250-mi.) The robots, which will navigate to a depth of 1,000 meters, are programmed to transmit data measuring water salinity, temperature, and current via satellite. Lead researcher Adrian Matthews describes the Indian monsoon as "notoriously hard to predict." "It is a very complicated weather system and the processes are not understood or recorded in science," Dr. Matthews said in a press release.

This post is by Amy Nicholson, Technical Evangelist at Microsoft. Here's a task for you: Type "I want to get started with machine learning" into your favorite search engine. I get back a whole list of options from Coursera, Azure, Amazon, kdnuggets, reddit,… and I could continue on and on. So where should one get started? In this post, I share my experiences of using the Cortana Intelligence Gallery in conjunction with the Azure ML Studio, and how that combination helped me break down the otherwise high barriers into popular ML techniques and start building my own ML models as well as my knowledge about this space. A little bit of background into how I got into this project.

The IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (T-CIAIG) publishes archival journal quality original papers in computational intelligence and related areas in artificial intelligence applied to games, including but not limited to videogames, mathematical games, human–computer interactions in games, and games involving physical objects. Emphasis is placed on the use of these methods to improve performance in and understanding of the dynamics of games, as well as gaining insight into the properties of the methods as applied to games. It also includes using games as a platform for building intelligent embedded agents for the real world. Papers connecting games to all areas of computational intelligence and traditional AI are considered.

When will Siri come out on the Mac? Will Siri be on macOS Sierra? What features will Siri for Mac have? Apple announced a slew of new things at WWDC 2016 including the much anticipated introduction of Siri, its voice activated assistant, to its Mac computers. If you're after the full lowdown on the announcement of macOS Sierra, here is our roundup.

Google's DeepMind Health is a project that utilizes artificial intelligence to learn from data and make the healthcare process efficient. Included in the agreement are plans for developing hospital support systems such as bed and demand management software, financial control products, and private messaging and task management for junior doctors. Another key area in the partnership is real-time health prediction: the use of health care data to identify the risk of patient deterioration, death, and/or readmission. The agreement intends to "maximize the benefit of bringing together two parties who are centers of excellence in their respective fields, including improvements in clinical outcomes, patient safety, patient and staff experience, as well as cost reductions."