Alibaba (BABA) is charting a way to push the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in diagnostics and healthcare to make medical treatment more accessible, timely, and affordable. Alibaba Cloud is actively working on AI-powered solutions to tackle heath care problems in China and globally. Here's a look at Alibaba's efforts to bring AI to the healthcare arena and why this exercise matters. The World Health Organization database reveals that the world's most populous nation, China, has a shortage of physicians with only 1.49 doctors available for every 1,000 people, lower than 2.55 in the U.S., 2.8 in the UK, and 3.37 in Australia. There is a further shortage of specialist doctors (such as radiologists and oncologists) despite the huge workload; such mismatches increase the chances of misdiagnosis and wrong treatment.

A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox. Let's kick off our June review by looking at some great new robotics research and development in action: Inspired by arthropod insects and spiders, Harvard Professor George Whitesides and Alex Nemiroski--a former postdoctoral fellow in Whitesides' Harvard lab--have created a type of semi-soft robot capable of standing and walking. The team also created a robotic water strider capable of pushing itself along the liquid surface. The robots are described in a recently published paper in the journal Soft Robotics.

Microsoft hast just launched Seeing AI, an iOS app that it appropriately describes as a'talking camera for the blind'; I've been giving it a whirl this morning and it's actually pretty impressive. Fire up the free app and point your iPhone at anything, whether it's a document, a menu card, a room or even a friend, and Seeing AI will tell you what it is with its voice. I tried it on a bunch of objects and spaces, and the app was astonishingly quick and accurate for the most part. It managed to recognize a guitar, identified me by my face and told me just how far away I was, and even described my living room and shower with some basic details. It was also able to read out the blurb of a book and the ingredients on a ramen packet, and even identified the contents of a photo I sent to the app from the share sheet in Twitter.

The fight between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor promises to be the biggest bout of 2017, though it won't be cheap to watch. Buying the fight on pay-per-view will cost nearly $100, and no tickets can be had for fewer than $500. The upcoming Aug. 26 bout has been compared to the fight between Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao on May 2, 2015. It generated a record 4.6 million buys, even though it cost $99.95 in HD. Mayweather-McGregor will also cost $99.95,

The Premier League is considering live-streaming matches online, a new report claims. Viewing figures hit a seven-year low last season, and bosses are said to be "weighing up" the idea of making games available to watch through a Netflix-style streaming service. The dip has largely been blamed on the rise of so-called "fully loaded Kodi boxes", but increasingly expensive ticket prices and TV packages, as well as changing viewing habits, are also key factors. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

As automation becomes cheaper and robotics innovation accelerates, how we work and who we work with will change. In this excerpt from their new book, "Machine Platform Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future,"(W.W. Norton & Company) MIT Sloan's Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson identify five areas driving automation and consider where humans fit in the new world of work. San Francisco-based fast causal restaurant Eatsa -- where customers order, pay for, and receive meals without encountering any employees -- wants to do more than virtualize the task of ordering meals; it also wants to automate how they're prepared. Food preparation in its kitchens is highly optimized and standardized, and the main reason the company uses human cooks instead of robots is that the objects being processed -- avocados, tomatoes, eggplants, and so on -- are both irregularly shaped and not completely rigid. These traits present no real problems for humans, who have always lived in a world full of softish blobs. Most of the robots created so far, however, are much better at handling things that are completely rigid and do not vary from one to the next. This is because robots' senses of vision and touch have historically been quite primitive -- far inferior to ours -- and proper handling of a tomato generally entails seeing and feeling it with a lot of precision. It's also because it's been surprisingly hard to program robots to handle squishiness -- here again, we know more than we can tell -- so robot brains have lagged far behind ours, just as their senses have.

While artificial intelligence is becomes a major new tool for marketers, nearly one in two retailers are missing out on leveraging AI marketing to better understand customer behaviours, according to new research. The study, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Emarsys, looked at the growing role of AI in the retail and e-commerce industries. In an industry that's thought to be going through a'creativity crisis', there's some good news for retail marketers amongst the findings: The study, entitled'Building Trust and Confidence: AI Marketing Readiness in Retail and e-Commerce1', sought to understand if there is still a gap between the readiness of AI marketing solutions to execute on real-time B2C marketing campaigns, and the readiness of marketing tech users and business decision makers to adopt AI marketing technology. Businesses polled across US, UK, Germany, France and Australia had revenues from at least $50m to more than $5bn. The study highlighted that marketers and business decision makers polled believe AI-powered marketing will shift the role of marketing toward more strategic work (79%) and make marketing teams more efficient (86%) and effective (86%), as well as enabling them to focus on value-generating tasks as AI automates workflows (82%) and reinventing the way that marketers work (82%).

Seeing AI is a free app that narrates the world around you. Designed for the blind and low vision community, this ongoing research project harnesses the power of AI to open up the visual world and describe nearby people, text, and objects. Optimized for use with VoiceOver, the app enables you to recognize: • Short Text - Speaks text as soon as it appears in front of the camera. Seeing AI is built to help you achieve more by leveraging the power of the cloud and artificial intelligence. As the research progresses, more channels may be added.

The first colony on the moon might be full of robots instead of people, if a plan from the private space company Moon Express works out. It is aiming to build an unmanned lunar outpost, supported by a fleet of spacecraft explorers that would launch from low Earth orbit and deliver supplies to and land on the moon, according to The Verge. The MX explorer fleet would rely on the Electron rocket that the space company Rocket Lab has designed to launch out of New Zealand in order to get into space before heading to the moon. The lunar station, at the moon's south pole, could come as soon as 2020. The plan is to have robots staying around the clock on the moon to mine it for resources like minerals and then sell them, The Verge explains.

Microsoft has used its artificial intelligence chops to automatically add captions to your selfies and guess your age. Now, the company is applying similar tech to a more practical purpose: making everyday life easier for the visually impaired. The company's new Seeing AI app, which is now available for the iPhone, uses the smartphone's camera to detect and describe nearby people, text, and objects. The app not only recognizes a person based on his or her face, but can also relay mood based on facial expressions, estimate a person's proximity to the user, and describe physical characteristics. In a demo video, Seeing AI provided a description of a woman smiling by saying: "28 year old female wearing glasses looking happy."