In the summer of 2009, the Israeli neuroscientist Henry Markram strode onto the TED stage in Oxford, England, and made an immodest proposal: Within a decade, he said, he and his colleagues would build a complete simulation of the human brain inside a supercomputer. They'd already spent years mapping the cells in the neocortex, the supposed seat of thought and perception. "It's a bit like going and cataloging a piece of the rain forest," Markram explained. "How many trees does it have? What shapes are the trees?"

In late January, more than a week before Covid-19 had been given that name, hospitals in Wuhan, China, began testing a new method to screen for the disease, using artificial intelligence. The plan involved chest CTs--three-dimensional scans of lungs displayed in finely detailed slices. By studying thousands of such images, an algorithm would learn to decipher whether a given patient's pneumonia appeared to stem from Covid-19 or something more routine, like influenza. In the US, as the virus spread in February, the idea appeared to hold promise: With conventional tests in short supply, here was a way to get more people screened, fast. Although various diagnostic algorithms have won approval from the US Food and Drug Administration--for wrist fractures, eye diseases, breast cancer--they generally spend months or years in development.

The soldier who is a split second quicker on the draw may walk away from a firefight unscathed; the ship that sinks an enemy vessel first may spare itself a volley of missiles. In cases where humans can't keep up with the pace of modern conflict, machines step in. When a rocket-propelled grenade is streaking toward an armored ground vehicle, an automated system onboard the vehicle identifies the threat, tracks it, and fires a countermeasure to intercept it, all before the crew inside is even aware. Similarly, US Navy ships equipped with the Aegis combat system can switch on Auto-Special mode, which automatically swats down incoming warheads according to carefully programmed rules. These kinds of defensive systems have been around for decades, and at least 30 countries now use them.

Tech giant Microsoft has announced to invest $75 million to build a new office at Atlanta, Georgia, by next year that will create 1,500 new jobs in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cloud space. The Satya Nadella-run enterprise will expand operations in the city's midtown area in a 523,000 square-foot facility in the popular Atlantic Station district. The facility, which will include a retail area, is slated to open in the summer of 2021. "We are excited that a global leader like Microsoft Corp. is expanding its investment in Georgia with tech jobs that will be truly beneficial to the company and our state," said Governor Brian P. Kemp. Microsoft's new facility will be a client-facing workplace that will focus on AI and cloud services, including retail space for engaging directly with customers.

As the novel coronavirus pandemic COVID-19 continues to spread across the globe, researchers are racing against time to find possible preventive measures, tests and cures to arrest the spread. While the pandemic enters the stage of community spread in many parts of the world, countries are running short of essential medical kits to test sufficient numbers of people. Testing is the need of the hour, and to catalyse the pace of testing, scientists have now developed an artificial intelligence-based diagnostic tool. The incredible new tool can help predict if an individual is likely to have COVID-19 disease, based on the symptoms they display. The discovery was recently published in the journal Nature Medicine.

Tesla is raising the price of its "self-driving" option on its electric vehicles worldwide starting with a $1,000 (£820) hike. Founder Elon Musk tweeted that the price "will continue to rise" as its technology improves. But the entrepreneur said the technology it's adding will be worth more than $100,000. Mr Musk has been in a battle with officials in California over the restarting of Tesla's US car assembly. Tesla's "full self-driving" (FSD) option is called Autopilot, although it isn't fully autonomous.

Uber Technologies Inc. was once a poster child for Silicon Valley's unchecked ambition. As recently as this year, the company was promising to usher in a self-driving revolution and popularize flying cars. But Uber now says it is slashing 3,000 jobs, sidelining extraneous projects and shuttering dozens of offices after the spread of the coronavirus slammed its ride-hailing business. The latest round of job cuts at the company brings the total since the start of the pandemic to 6,700, including thousands of layoffs earlier this month in customer support and human resources. The staff reductions now represent about a quarter of Uber's workforce.

Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have partnered to embed artificial intelligence capabilities into the Japanese company's latest imaging chip, a big boost for a camera product the electronics giant describes as a world first for commercial customers. The new module's big advantage is that it has its own processor and memory built in, which allows it to analyze video using AI tech like Microsoft's Azure, but in a self-contained system that's faster, simpler and more secure to operate than existing methods. The two companies are appealing to retail and logistics businesses with potential uses like optimizing warehouse and factory automation, quantifying the flow of customers through stores and making cars smarter about their drivers and environment. At a time of increasing public surveillance to help rein in the spread of the coronavirus, this new smart camera also has the potential to offer more privacy-conscious monitoring. And should its technology be adapted for personal devices, it even holds promise for advancing mobile photography. Instead of generating actual images, Sony's AI chip can analyze the video it sees and provide just metadata about what's in front of it -- saying instead of showing what's in its frame of vision.

Vanora Robots Pvt Ltd, a Mangaluru-based robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, has launched an unmanned robotic platform to disinfect the rooms in hospitals, schools, etc. Terming the robotic platform as a support system for the front-line fighters of Covid-19, Krishnan Nambiar, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Vanora Robots, told BusinessLine that that this fully functional unmanned robotic platform disperses high doses of'type C' ultraviolet rays to destroy the structure of bacteria, fungal spores, and many types of viruses, including various types of corona viruses. He said that the best way to fight anything that is multiplying out of control is to destroy it quicker than it multiplies. When UV light is used in a particular energy, the structure of micro-organisms dies. He said that Vanora Robot can disinfect a 140-sq.ft During this period, the robot gives full visual access to the person controlling it remotely.

I keep thinking of Agnieszka Kurant's liquid crystal paintings. I can't help but wonder if their forms are still changing, their gasoline-rainbow palettes still mutating, or whether they've gone quiet like the rest of us. Kurant's work sits in a central gallery of'Uncanny Valley', the Bay Area's first major exhibition to focus explicitly on how artists today are grappling with technologies that have – for the most part – come out of the region. The show's title is a nod, of course, to nearby Silicon Valley – of which San Francisco has increasingly become an annex – but also reflects the show's intent: to look not broadly at how technology has seeped into art, but at how the definition of what constitutes'humanness' has been blurred by advancements in artificial intelligence and how artists are metabolizing these developments. Kurant's work – which, for me, was the soul of the exhibition – relies heavily on technology that reflects human emotions in real time.