Microsoft says it is going to "solve" cancer in the next 10 years. The company is working at treating the disease like a computer virus, that invades and corrupts the body's cells. Once it is able to do so, it will be able to monitor for them and even potentially reprogram them to be healthy again, experts working for Microsoft have said. The company has built a "biological computation" unit that says its ultimate aim is to make cells into living computers. As such, they could be programmed and reprogrammed to treat any diseases, such as cancer.

Machine learning developers who want to use Google's Go language as their development platform have a small but growing number of projects to choose from. Rather than call out to libraries written in other languages, chiefly C/C, developers can work with machine learning libraries written directly in Go. Existing machine learning libraries in other languages have a far larger culture of users, but there's clearly an interest in having Go toolkits that take advantage of the language's conveniences. GoLearn, described as a "batteries included" machine learning library, is one of the most prominent. "Simplicity, paired with customisability, is the goal," the developers write in their introduction to the project.

Xinhua News Media Holdings Ltd. said Monday it is seeking to raise up to 42.9 million Hong Kong dollars via a share placement and will use the net proceeds for general working capital. Macau Legend Development Ltd., which operates casino and hotels, said Monday Laurence Yuen resigned as executive vice president and chief financial officer effective immediately. Salesforce.com Inc. said it would embed artificial intelligence technology into its software for salespeople, making it the latest in a gaggle of companies racing to enhance workplace tools with human-like abilities. The company will demonstrate the new software at its annual user conference next month in San Francisco. Newcrest Mining Ltd. said it has agreed to sell its 50% stake in a Papua New Guinea gold operation to partner Harmony Gold Mining Co. Ltd. .

Grim news this week for PC makers, yet again, as they've been warned to fix their business model or just quit instead. It's not a huge surprise; first smartphones and then tablets have done away with the need for a PC to carry out many (perhaps even most) basic computing tasks - like email or web browsing. And the PC makers were far, far too slow to respond to the threat to their market, only recently finally coming up with the two-in-one devices and hybrid tablet-PC creations which have provided a certain amount of interest from consumers and businesses. Now as the chart below shows there's still a lot of PCs out there - and there will continue to be, too. But rather than being something that might get upgraded every three years, PC replacement cycles are slowing as many applications now run in the cloud, which makes local processing power less relevant.

Lines for the iPhone 7 wrapped around the block outside of Apple stores worldwide leading up to today's highly-anticipated launch, and as always, many hopefuls camped out for days to secure a spot. But, with the help of 100 tiny robots, some customers managed to be among the first to get their hands on the device without ever having to leave their homes. New Zealand firm Spark enlisted a fleet of Alpha 1 robots to stand in line in place of their human counterparts – and they can dance, do kung Fu, and live-stream their way through the queue. The'robot army' is made up of devices from Chinese company UBTECH, and each bot is paired with a Spark customer who can control their actions using a smartphone app. This means the robots can be made to do push-ups, Kung Fu, yoga, mimic Olympic sports, and dance.

Waiting in line for the latest iPhone gadget is a tedious task--people camp out for days and wait in line for the hope of nabbing the newest smartphone model. Now, robots can do the lining up for you. In New Zealand, where consumers got an early start purchasing iPhones courtesy of the time difference, miniature Alpha 1 robots stood in line for a hundred people. The "robot army" was purchased by Spark, an Apple carrier in New Zealand, for select customers to save their time while waiting in a queue. "Technology these days is so much more advanced than it used to be, so why shouldn't our customers have their tech queue for them instead?"

As one of the leading research hubs for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) worldwide, Macquarie University and US-based VoiceBox Technologies has announced an international research and development partnership. VoiceBox Technologies, is an award-winning pioneer of Contextual Natural Language Understanding (CNLU) and the leading innovator of next gen Voice Artificial Intelligence (Voice AI). VoiceBox is taking voice interaction NLU based systems to the next generation by employing AI techniques in advanced Semantic Language Understanding, large-scale data mining, Deep Neural Networks and advanced machine learning. Macquarie professor Dr. Mark Johnson has been named the Chief Scientific Officer of VoiceBox Australia and will lead the VoiceBox office as a Center of Excellence for Voice AI. Dr. Johnson is overseeing the advanced labs located on the university's campus in the heart of the Macquarie Park Innovation District (MPID).

After spending 10 years building a cloud accounting platform, New Zealand's Xero is looking to partner with banks to allow small businesses access to capital and debt. Speaking at Xerocon South in Brisbane, Xero CEO and co-founder Rod Drury said the issue with small business is that it is such a fragmented sector, and given how small some businesses are, it often becomes too risky for a bank to lend. "Our view is, if we can partner with large banks and deal with the issues of how to get them lending large pools of money to small business, that would be a very purposeful thing," he said. "If you get a bit more money, you can bring another container of raw materials in, you can bid for a larger project and you can create jobs." Drury said the idea to head down this path came after Xero realised the potential of its data.

What better way to demonstrate the capabilities of IBM's artificial intelligence system, Watson, than to show it working its hardest, and when it really matters? For the film IBM partnered with oil and gas company Woodside, and creative agency the Barbarian Group, to create '70 Miles from Shore with Watson: Woodside Energy and IBM'. The result is a two-minute journey that shows IBM's Watson working and learning, on one of the toughest work sites in the world – an oil rig. To produce a film on such an especially challenging scale required an experienced set of hands, and PSN Australia was enlisted for the job through Production Service Network's U.S. Liaison Carolyn Hill. Choosing to shoot on the rig for real as opposed to a studio levied some strict safety regulations on the team that had not been previously encountered.

BuildingIQ, a provider of energy management software headquartered in California, provides tools to commercial building owners and managers to improve the energy efficiency of their building operations. BuildingIQ offers solutions that use technology originally developed by the Energy Division of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia's national lab. The average commercial building wastes 30% of the energy it uses. Even simple changes, such as adjusting temperature settings and ensuring that lights are not on when no one is around, can produce substantial savings. BuildingIQ has responded by developing an energy management system driven by artificial intelligence (AI) that optimizes HVAC systems for maximum efficiency.