Every child gets a vision and hearing check in school on a regular basis. Dr. Moshe Fried, an Israeli plastic surgeon, believes an annual skin check is necessary as well, starting in the teens. This is why he agreed to be the medical consultant for Emerald Medical Applications' DermaCompare, a free smartphone app that can detect changes in marks and moles over time. The app alerts the user to changes that ought to be screened for cancer. "The skin is the biggest organ in the body," said Fried.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, no longer simply exists in science fiction movies and books. Scientists warn AI has and will continue to change almost every aspect of how people conduct business and live. Researchers say artificial intelligence can be a threat, as well as helpful, to humans. From the iPhone personal assistant Siri, to doing searches on the Internet, to the autopilot function, simple artificial intelligence has been around for some time, but is quickly getting more complex and more intelligent. "If we are going to make systems that are going to be more intelligent than us, it's absolutely essential for us to understand how to absolutely guarantee that they only do things that we are happy with," said Stuart Russell, computer science professor at the University of California Berkeley.

IT services provider Accenture announced its deal to acquire OPS Rules, an analytics consulting company based in the US. The acquisition of OPS Rules enables Accenture to expand its machine learning and operations analytics capabilities. Last year, Accenture also acquired Gapso, an analytics services and solutions provider in Brazil that assists enterprises to solve supply chain and logistics challenges. OPS Rules, founded in 2012, specializes in the application of data science to create supply chain and operations analytics solutions. The US head-quartered Accenture aims to add new operations analytics professionals to its team that apply machine learning and optimization techniques to develop innovative analytics approaches for clients.

Important advances have been made in the fuzzy quantification field. Nevertheless, some problems remain when we face the decision of selecting the most convenient model for a specific application. In the literature, several desirable adequacy properties have been proposed, but theoretical limits impede quantification models from simultaneously fulfilling every adequacy property that has been defined. Besides, the complexity of model definitions and adequacy properties makes very difficult for real users to understand the particularities of the different models that have been presented. In this work we will present several criteria conceived to help in the process of selecting the most adequate Quantifier Fuzzification Mechanisms for specific practical applications. In addition, some of the best known well-behaved models will be compared against this list of criteria. Based on this analysis, some guidance to choose fuzzy quantification models for practical applications will be provided.

The news and information ecosystem is in the midst of change -- again. Mobile-first consumption is on the rise, smart homes are becoming mainstream and connected cars will soon take over the roads of major cities around the world. Smart devices will require "smart content." It's only a matter of time before artificial intelligence becomes the backbone of the media industry of the future. Today, most people find information via search or social.

The problem is that if robot labor is cheaper and more reliable than human labor, why bother with the latter? The payback period for industrial robots (the time it takes for their extra costs to be paid off) is falling sharply. For a welding robot to be used in a Chinese factory, for example, the period has fallen from 5.3 years in 2010, to 1.7 years in 2015, say analysts from Citi. By 2017, they say it could be as low as 1.3 years. And more robots in factories equals fewer jobs for humans.

WIRE)--Accenture (NYSE:ACN) is expanding its machine learning and operations analytics capabilities by acquiring OPS Rules, a boutique analytics consulting company that specializes in the application of data science to create supply chain and operations analytics solutions. When the acquisition is completed, Accenture will add new operations analytics professionals to its team that apply machine learning and optimization techniques to develop fresh and innovative analytics approaches for clients across many industries. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Founded in 2012, OPS Rules has offices in Waltham, Massachusetts and Richardson, Texas. OPS Rules is led by David Simchi-Levi, a Professor of Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and renowned supply chain and operations analytics expert.

That's the projected galaxy haul of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, currently under construction in Chile. Starting around 2023, the LSST camera's 3,200 megapixels will soak up 15 terabytes of data every night, which will fill the biggest astronomical database ever built. Computer scientist Lior Shamir of Lawrence Technological University in Michigan says the amount of data defies comprehension. "With just a mountain of images, no one will ever inspect them one by one. You can never make a discovery," he says. "You need to convert it into something that machines can understand."

SK C&C has continued Korea's efforts to increase the usage and adoption of cloud computing within the region, announcing a new strategic alliance with IBM focused on the Watson cognitive computing platform. As part of the agreement, IBM will train Watson to understand and comprehend Korean, and South Korea-based developers will create a number of localized API's and services to increase adoption rates of such advanced cloud computing technologies in the region. Korean will be Watson's eighth language, lining up with English, French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, and Arabic. "Watson remains at the forefront of cognitive computing: advanced systems that learn at scale, understand with meaning, reason with purpose and interact with humans in natural ways," said David Kenny, GM for IBM Watson. "The South Korean marketplace is moving quickly to embrace the disruptive opportunities from next generation technology.

The refugee crisis is perhaps the single most challenging problem for Europe today. Hundreds of thousands of people have already traveled across dangerous sea passages from Turkish shores to Greek islands, resulting in thousands of dead and missing, despite the best rescue efforts from both sides. One of the main reasons is the total lack of any early warning-alerting system, which could provide some preparation time for the prompt and effective deployment of resources at the hot zones. This work is such an attempt for a systemic analysis of the refugee influx in Greece, aiming at (a) the statistical and signal-level characterization of the smuggling networks and (b) the formulation and preliminary assessment of such models for predictive purposes, i.e., as the basis of such an early warning-alerting protocol. To our knowledge, this is the first-ever attempt to design such a system, since this refugee crisis itself and its geographical properties are unique (intense event handling, little or no warning). The analysis employs a wide range of statistical, signal-based and matrix factorization (decomposition) techniques, including linear & linear-cosine regression, spectral analysis, ARMA, SVD, Probabilistic PCA, ICA, K-SVD for Dictionary Learning, as well as fractal dimension analysis. It is established that the behavioral patterns of the smuggling networks closely match (as expected) the regular burst and pause periods of store-and-forward networks in digital communications. There are also major periodic trends in the range of 6.2-6.5 days and strong correlations in lags of four or more days, with distinct preference in the Sunday-Monday 48-hour time frame. These results show that such models can be used successfully for short-term forecasting of the influx intensity, producing an invaluable operational asset for planners, decision-makers and first-responders.