Just occasionally, Alán Aspuru-Guzik has a movie-star moment, when fans half his age will stop him in the street. "They say, 'Hey, we know who you are'," he laughs. "Then they tell me that they also have a quantum start-up, and would love to talk to me about it." "I don't usually have time to talk, but I'm always happy to give them some tips." That affable approach is not uncommon in the quantum-computing community, says Aspuru-Guzik, who is a computer scientist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and co-founder of quantum-computing company Zapata Computing in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In the age of blockchains, 3D printing, CRISPR-Cas9 -- and the inevitable new technologies that are yet to emerge -- today's workforce is struggling to keep up with the latest developments. For large companies and executives, finding resources for workers to learn from that are current, reputable, and unbiased can be challenging. To address this unmet need, MIT has assembled a team of writers, educators, and subject matter experts from both academia and industry to power the Institute's newest online learning offering -- a digital content library designed to help organizations keep their workforces apprised of the latest developments in technology and science. Known as MIT Horizon, the platform contains bite-sized articles, videos, and podcasts on emerging technologies, with early topics including additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and robotics. "Technologies are advancing very rapidly, and we feel a responsibility at MIT to provide learning opportunities that can help today's workforce keep up with this pace of innovation," says Sanjay Sarma, MIT vice president for open learning.

Artificial intelligence can help us to solve some of society's most difficult challenges and create a safer, healthier and more prosperous world for all. I've already shared the exciting possibilities in the fields of healthcare and agriculture in previous posts. But there may be no area where the possibilities are more interesting – or more important – than education and skills. From personalized learning that takes advantage of AI to adapt teaching methods and materials to the needs of individual students, to automated grading that frees teachers from the drudgery of assessing tests so they have more time to work with students, to intelligent systems that are transforming how learners find and interact with information, the opportunities to improve education outcomes and accessibility will be truly transformational. There are many classrooms around the world where educators teach very diverse groups of students from different cultures, who speak multiple languages.

NEW YORK CITY--Uber is looking to get into pharmacy medication delivery. Prescription eyeglass company Warby Parker is moving into virtual eye exams, and audio equipment maker Bose wants to help consumers get better sleep through hearing technology. Consumer-focused companies are rapidly moving further into healthcare, and industry incumbents need to be ready for accelerating change: That was one of the big takeaways from CB Insights' Future of Health conference in Manhattan this week. It's not just startups attacking entrenched interests in healthcare; it's large companies as well, said CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal during the conference. "The field of play is changing pretty dramatically, and the competitive lines are constantly being redrawn," he said, noting Amazon's "unbundling" of the pharmacy, Apple's unbundling of the clinical trials process and Google's unbundling of the hospital.

Today we think of Artificial Intelligence(AI) as machines, robots, and software code. Will it be the same or change to become biological artifacts? The journey in AI so far while being inspired by the human brain is diverging from it and increasingly looks unsustainable. Unsustainable energy & data consumption to differences in representation compared to the brain's cortex and learning bottlenecks make a case for promising stem cell-based neural networks. Just hogs too much energy: Machines based AI can compute faster but just hog too much energy to do that.

Ohio-based ATG Business Travel Management plans by mid-2020 to release a voice-powered booking application thanks to a strategic partnership with IBM. Backed by historical travel and expense data, business traveler profiles and company policies, the new booking function will be "more than a chatbot," according to Tammy Krings, CEO at ATG Worldwide. Krings claimed that essentially "nothing has changed" for online booking tools since their introduction 25 years ago. "They have outlived their usefulness," she said. "They're no longer helping employees be productive. "Instead of having travelers walk through menus, we can offer them the most likely, policy-compliant option," Krings said during a Monday interview. "People are used to doing work on their phones, and they're used to talking to Siri.

Arka Dhar is the CEO at Zinier, an intelligent field service automation platform. Driving north on the 101 from Silicon Valley to San Francisco, there are dozens of billboards promoting new artificial intelligence (AI) ventures. According to PricewaterhouseCooper and CB Insights (via Bloomberg), venture capitalists poured a record $9.3 billion into AI startups last year, and this is just the beginning. For many business leaders, AI is still a buzzword. This largely stems from an obsessive marketing regime that hypes up technologies like AI, machine learning (ML) and the internet of things (IoT). But behind the billboards and eye-watering funding rounds are industry-disrupting technologies, and understanding their potential impact as well as how to get executive buy-in are pivotal to the future of work.

The United States is blacklisting a group of Chinese tech companies that develop facial recognition and other artificial intelligence technology that the U.S. says is being used to repress China's Muslim minority groups. A move Monday by the U.S. Commerce Department puts the companies on a so-called Entity List for acting contrary to American foreign policy interests. The blacklist effectively bars U.S. firms from selling technology to the Chinese companies without government approval. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a written statement Monday that the U.S. government "will not tolerate the brutal suppression of ethnic minorities within China." The blacklisted companies include Hikvision and Dahua, both of which are global providers of video surveillance technology.

The ads you see online could soon get harder to refuse, thanks to a new artificial intelligence (AI) system that predicts whether you'll like an ad before it has even run. Designed by a technical team in Brisbane and delivered to marketers through headquarters in Austin, Texas, Junction AI technology has hit a nerve in an industry where new display ads often fall flat after advertisers pay handsomely to place them in key outlets. Copywriters lean heavily on ad-writing techniques like A/B testing, but these only go so far in predicting whether online citizens will respond to a particular ad. This leaves advertisers all but guessing whether they have chosen the right words and images to convince potential new customers to click through. That's a challenge for marketers that are increasingly equipping content marketing organisations (CMOs) to drive deeper engagement with customers and prospects in an ever more-crowded advertising market expected to surge from $US226.6b

Speaking today at the Microsoft Government Leaders Summit in Washington, DC, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made the case for edge computing, even while pushing the Azure cloud as what he called "the world's computer." While Amazon, Google and other competitors may have something to say about that, marketing hype aside, many companies are still in the midst of transitioning to the cloud. Nadella says the future of computing could actually be at the edge, where computing is done locally before data is then transferred to the cloud for AI and machine learning purposes. What goes around, comes around. But as Nadella sees it, this is not going to be about either edge or cloud.