Samsung has acquired the Viv AI Assistant creators of the Siri. The famous Apple assistant was co-founded by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer, and Chris Brigham. Apple acquired Siri in 2010 but the trio left Apple in 2012. Since then, they founded Viv, which continues to operate as an independent company. Viv is being touted as the global brain, thanks to its intelligent interface.

Humans may live longer and longer, but eventually we all grow old and die. This leads to a simple question: Is there an intrinsic maximum limit to human lifespan or not? There are two equally simple answers. Either there is a limit or there isn't. Soft pretzels are one of the best things to come out of concession stands, but homemade pretzels are a million times better.

Machine learning is kind of magic right? But is it the kind of magic that can make us rich? And I don't mean lucrative consulting gig rich, I mean digging valuable metals out of the ground rich. Also I'd been meaning to try out some transfer learning and looking around for a good topic to try it on. Transfer learning is where you take a pre-trained convolution (or other) network and use it for your task.

The "creepy clown crisis" is a case study in the science of the heebie-jeebies. Clowns are creeping across America, lurking in the woods and generally freaking out the general public. Over the past few months, "clown sightings" have become a thing, occupying a dark crevice in the popular imagination that was once filled by UFO or Slender Man sightings. And like all viral trends, this one is spreading, with creepy-clown alerts popping up in England, Australia, Canada, and Scotland. Whether they're teenage pranksters, a movie-marketing ploy, figments of the imagination, or really out to do harm (all possibly true in some cases), the clowns are universally described with one word: creepy.

For the third quarter of 2016, MobiHealthNews tracked just shy of 600 million in deals. While a few large deals anchored the quarter, the majority of the 45 we tracked this quarter were small; only seven were more than 20 million, most were 10 million or less. For this analysis, we've omitted investments in joint ventures like Verily and Sanofi's OnDuo as well as grant funding. Read on for the 45 deals in the digital health space we tracked throughout the quarter, listed in order from largest to smallest amount of funding. Canada-based wearable technology company Thalmic Labs, which makes the connected armband Myo, raised 120 million in Series B funding in a round led by Intel Capital, the Amazon Alexa Fund and Fidelity Investments Canada.

Self-driving cars sporting Tesla shells as their exterior and featuring technology from German manufacturer Bosch were to be tested on Australia's public roads beginning this week. An autonomous automobile developed by German manufacturer Bosch in collaboration with the Australian government were to be tested on Australia's public roads this week. The cars, which employ video cameras, radar, LiDAR, and global-positioning systems to sense their environment, reportedly are designed to navigate roads with or without driver input. University of Southern California professor Jeffrey Miller suggests the six LiDAR sensors in the vehicle indicate Bosch depends more on LiDAR than on cameras for situational awareness. Carnegie Mellon University's John Dolan says the sensors are "fairly standard for research-level autonomous cars," although he notes the stereo cameras are less common.

Daniel Lélis Baggio started his work in computer vision through medical image processing at InCor (Instituto do Coração Heart Institute) in São Paulo, where he worked with intra-vascular ultrasound image segmentation. Since then, he has focused on GPGPU and ported the segmentation algorithm to work with NVIDIA's CUDA. He has also dived into six degrees of freedom head tracking with a natural user interface group through a project called ehci (http://code.google.com/p/ehci/). He now works for the Brazilian Air Force. Shervin Emami (born in Iran) taught himself electronics and hobby robotics during his early teens in Australia.

That's the premise of Nugit, a Singapore-based startup focused on marketing that raised 5.2 million in fresh funding from Sequoia Capital's India fund this week. Nugit landed undisclosed seed funding from 500 Startups and The Hub Singapore last year. Founded by Australia-born marketing executive David Sanderson, Nugit sits between its customers and their data platforms -- it supports 15 right now, including Facebook Ad Manager, Google AdWords and DoubleClick -- to help make sense of realms of information. The idea is to make a digital marketer's job easier by cutting down on noise and producing "decision-ready reports," such as PowerPoint presentations, graphics and other visualizations. The company started out automating many of the processes that marketers are faced with when dealing with data, such as cleaning information and aligning it, until Sanderson -- formerly of GroupM and other ad agencies -- realized that computers could go beyond that and deliver insight that is difficult or seriously time-consuming for humans.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

PREDICTING HOW artificial intelligence technology will evolve in the following ten or 20 years, or even beyond, is very difficult to say the least. However, certain is the fact that there is much to be gained to go around for everyone. It is estimated that by the year 2018, robots will literally be supervising more than three million of us at work; and by 2020, smart machines will become a major investment priority amongst at least 30% of all CIOs. As we speak many different fields spanning from customer service to journalism are already being set aside by increasingly able AI that can replicate human abilities and experience. Already before our eyes is an aspect that we once thought only belonged in future technology.