In the third issue of this monthly digest series you can find out how Microsoft is bringing AI to the visually impaired, how to colorize your grayscale images, why a Google car caused a crash for the first time, and much more. Last Thursday, Microsoft showed off its Seeing AI app for the first time. It's still under development, but it looks extremely promising. Using a smartphone camera or a pair of camera-equipped smart glasses, the Seeing AI app can identify things in your environment--people, objects, and even emotions--to provide important context for what's going on around you. By a swipe of hand, the user can instruct the app to take a snapshot of the current visual scene and run it through image recognition software.

In the October5, 2015 issue of the Wall Street Journal, there appeared a feature article titled: "Scientists Tap Dragonfly Vision to Build a Better Bionic Eye", with the subtitle: "Artificial-intelligence system could aid the blind and help create a better driverless car." The actual article was written by Rachel Pannett and starts as follows: "What can humans learn from dragonflies? Australian researchers have developed an artificial-intelligence system based on a dragonfly's vision that they say could help improve the eyesight of people who can see almost nothing. The system also is expected to find applications in automated technologies that rely on artificial sight, such as robots and driverless cars." In this article, the dragonfly's remarkable ability as a predator is mentioned.

AI or Artificial Intelligence recently made global news when an AI program beat a human opponent at GO (a Chinese board game). This win underscores the significant progress made in machine learning and the ability of a computer to model human logic. The game is so complex that up until this point experts had thought that it would take ten more years before a computer could beat humans at GO. Unbeknownst to many, Google is behind DeepMind, the company which built the AlphaGo computer program that won the game. Google is very public about their devotion to using machine learning in their products and services. With access to vast resources of data to draw upon, Google has become one of the biggest corporate sponsors of AI, investing heavily in it for videos, speech, translation and search.

If its first quarter is anything to go by, 2016 may be shaping up historically as the 1491 of space discovery. The month preceding Valentine's Day alone provided what would once have been a year's worth of cosmic news. Blue Origin, the aerospace company owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, took one giant leap toward a new Age of Discovery by relaunching and landing a rocket that had already made a round-trip journey through the stratosphere – a revolutionary moment in private space exploration. A pair of researchers kicked off a frenzied planet hunt by demonstrating that a massive, heretofore undetected planet could be lurking on the outer edge of our solar system. Cosmologist Stephen Hawking suggested that unforeseen effects of rapid scientific progress might, paradoxically, cause the extinction of life on Earth in the next thousand years or so, adding, "By that time, we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race." And scientists announced they'd detected gravitational waves, evidence of a billion-year-old collision between black holes, thus confirming the final and most obscure principle of Einstein's theory of relativity – and opening a window that may soon offer a glimpse of the universe's very creation.

In Melbourne, Australia, Stefan Harrer is running an artificial software brain atop an artificial hardware brain in an effort to analyze a brain that isn't artificial at all. Ultimately, he and his colleagues envision merging these three brains together so that the artificial can augment the real. Harrer is an IBM researcher stationed at the company's Australian research lab. Together with neurologists at the University of Melbourne, he's developing a computing system that can analyze your brain waves in an effort to predict epileptic seizures. 'Our aim is to replace broken neural systems with machines.'

CHOPCHOP is an app that guides you through cooking a several-course meal with the help of Artificial Intelligence – and without sweat! The young team came a long way during their EuropeanPioneers time: In December 2015 CHOPCHOP has been launched supported by the EuropenPioneers team. We spoke with the founder JinA what happened after that. EuropeanPioneer: Hi JinA, what are you up to these days? We also have a new team member that joined us recently to make improvements to our algorithm, which is exciting.

Today we are rolling out automatic alternative (alt) text on Facebook for iOS. Automatic alt text provides visually impaired and blind people with a text description of a photo using object recognition technology. Starting today, people using a screen reader to access Facebook on an iOS device will hear a list of items that may be shown in a photo. This feature is now available in English for people in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. We plan to roll it out to more platforms, languages, and markets soon.

A smartphone-based system for diagnosing respiratory diseases achieved an accuracy of 89 percent in a recent clinical study of 524 pediatric patients conducted by the company at Joondalup Health Campus (JHC) and Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH) in Perth, Western Australia. Perth-based ResApp essentially uses the smartphone microphone as a stethoscope to listen to a patient's breathing. But instead of relying solely on a doctor's ears to form a diagnosis from those sounds, ResApp has been developing machine-learning algorithms that will automatically determine which respiratory condition a patient might have, including pneumonia, asthma, bronchiolitis and COPD. In the future, the company hopes to integrate those algorithms into telehealth offerings as well as making them available for clinical use. ResApp released data from this trial previously in November, but that data set included fewer patients.

Bergan Flannigan, of Plattsburgh, N.Y., says she used to "get a lot of stares" when she wore her prosthetic leg with the metal pipe exposed. "I feel like people don't look as much" with the cover, she says, "which I like." Bergan Flannigan, of Plattsburgh, N.Y., says she used to "get a lot of stares" when she wore her prosthetic leg with the metal pipe exposed. "I feel like people don't look as much" with the cover, she says, "which I like." Prosthetic limbs for people who have lost an arm or a leg have come a long way in the past decade.

Artificial Intelligence is starting to play a big role in our daily life, and judging by recent developments in the field, it looks like the importance of AI will only increase in time. While some people worry that advancements in AI could replace jobs in the long run, it's difficult to argue with the idea that artificial intelligence can bring countless benefits in numerous fields, ranging from production to automotive and healthcare. Needless to say, companies have different takes on machine learning, and artificial intelligence is used in more than one way. In Facebook's case, AI will start playing a role in making social media interaction more meaningful to blind and visually impaired Facebook users who, starting today, can use a new feature called "automatic alternative text" in order to get a more detailed description of Facebook photos. One of the main reasons why Facebook enjoys as much popularity as it does today is because of photo sharing.