Imagine the following: You're a veterinarian and Max, a 7-year-old, neutered tabby cat has been brought to you because his owners have noticed he seems to be losing weight and his coat is looking scruffy. He seems to be using the litter box a lot more though it's hard to tell if he's actually urinating, and he has begun throwing up his food a few times a week. You have a suspicion and the lab results prove it. For Max and many other older cats, these clinical signs aren't just indications of old age but a disease that has become one of the leading causes of death for older cats – chronic kidney disease, or CKD. CKD is a common ailment, affecting 30-40 percent of cats over the age of 10.

We have a fraught relationship with chatbots. Designed to help resolve many of our customer support issues, most tend to complicate matters more, frustrate us and leave us in the precarious position of wanting to speak to a representative. Though companies are pouring significant sums of money into artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and more emerging technologies promising to make speaking to a bot pleasurable, the fact remains that most consumers still don't like them. Arash Rod, lead artist for San Francisco startup GameOn, doesn't think it needs to be that way. His company has developed successful chatbots for major sports brands and gaming companies, allowing them to engage more dynamically with their fans and vice versa.

Recap: the 2018 Blockchain Economic Forum in San Francisco The 2018 Blockchain Economic Forum (BEF), held in San Francisco from June 16–19, has been a fascinating and thought-provoking summit for blockchain and cryptocurrency experts, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts alike. As Forbes put it, the BEF "facilitate[s] the discussions of the most important topics of the crypto economy and its growing influence on the global economy." With companies raising billions of dollars in ICOs around the world and major enterprises exploring and implementing blockchain in nearly every industry imaginable, it's imperative that we have these discussions and encourage information-sharing and collaboration across sectors. The BEF ultimately helps to bridge the gap between blockchain and the traditional economy. Cortana, UNSC Artificial intelligence (SN: CTN 0452–9), is a smart artificial intelligence construct.

An important aspect of health monitoring is effective logging of food consumption. This can help management of diet-related diseases like obesity, diabetes, and even cardiovascular diseases. Moreover, food logging can help fitness enthusiasts, and people who wanting to achieve a target weight. However, food-logging is cumbersome, and requires not only taking additional effort to note down the food item consumed regularly, but also sufficient knowledge of the food item consumed (which is difficult due to the availability of a wide variety of cuisines). With increasing reliance on smart devices, we exploit the convenience offered through the use of smart phones and propose a smart-food logging system: FoodAI, which offers state-of-the-art deep-learning based image recognition capabilities.

An important aspect of health monitoring is effective logging of food consumption. This can help management of diet-related diseases like obesity, diabetes, and even cardiovascular diseases. Moreover, food logging can help fitness enthusiasts, and people who wanting to achieve a target weight. However, food-logging is cumbersome, and requires not only taking additional effort to note down the food item consumed regularly, but also sufficient knowledge of the food item consumed (which is difficult due to the availability of a wide variety of cuisines). With increasing reliance on smart devices, we exploit the convenience offered through the use of smart phones and propose a smart-food logging system: FoodAI, which offers state-of-the-art deep-learning based image recognition capabilities.

In Part 1 of this 3-part miniseries, we discussed the origins of artificial intelligence (AI), and we considered some low-hanging AI-enabled fruit in the form of speech recognition, voice control, and machine vision. In Part 2, we noted some of the positive applications of AI, like recognizing skin cancer, identifying the source of outbreaks of food poisoning, and the early detection of potential pandemics. In fact, there are so many feel-good possibilities for the future that they can make your head spin. In a moment, we'll ponder a few more of these before turning our attention to the dark side. Another topic we considered in Part 2 was the combination of mediated reality (MR) and AI, where mediated reality encompasses both augmented reality (AR) and deletive reality (DR). In the case of AR, information is added to the reality we are experiencing.

Cardiovascular diseases are the most common cause of death in the world. More than a third of deaths in Finland are caused by cardiovascular diseases. The current objective is to create an assessment, based on health data, of each person's risk of illness before they consult a doctor. Andrea Ganna, Group Leader from Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland FIMM at the University of Helsinki and instructor from Harvard Medical School, wants to establish a nationwide, personalised risk assessment as foundation for planning public health interventions. The assessment is based on the health, demographic and genetic information of the citizens.

A leaked paper suggests that Google has achieved a milestone known as quantum supremacy, using a quantum computer to perform a calculation that couldn't be achieved even with the world's most powerful supercomputers. It's a hotly anticipated goal, and one intended to mark the beginning of a new era of quantum computation (SN: 6/29/17). But it's also largely symbolic: The calculation in question serves no practical purpose and is designed to be difficult for classical computers, standard computers that are not rooted in quantum physics. On September 20, the Financial Times reported that a scientific paper, briefly published on a NASA website before being removed, claims that Google has built a quantum computer that achieved quantum supremacy. It's a benchmark that the company's quantum researchers, led by physicist John Martinis of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have set their sights on for years (SN: 3/5/18).

A new automated data analytics program is crucial for the early detection of signals and predications for regulated chemicals that may pose highly hazardous health risks at the Food and Drug Administration. The agency's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition first initiated the project, called the Emerging Chemical Hazard Intelligence Platform. It allows the center to anticipate potential chemicals associated with adverse health events before they get out of control, explained its Office of Food Additive Safety's Informatics and Information Systems Lead and Senior Policy Advisor Ernest Kwegyir-Afful. "Every time we have one these big [food safety] incidents, we have to drop everything so we can actually deal with it," said Kwegyir-Afful at SAS' Unleash Analytics: Making AI & Analytics Real event Aug. 20. This includes U.S. food supply chemical incidents, such as detecting products that increase the production of melanin in babies to measuring arsenic toxicity, he said.

This article aims to help data scientists and machine learning developers save precious time when faced with the challenges of preprocessing text data. It is based on a case study from the field of e-commerce and a presentation delivered during an ML meetup hosted by ShopGun and Nordic.ai on the 15th of February 2018 in Copenhagen. To make it easier to digest I've boiled it down to 5 helpful tips which I wish I'd known when I begun working on this project (each marked with a #). We will be using a tiny sample of our data and taking it through every recommended preprocessing step to really get a feel for what's going on. The way we preprocess data should usually be tailored to the problem that we're trying to solve.