Camera flashes often can make people's pupils look red in photos. More rarely, flashes can make them appear white – which is usually just a trick of the light but can be a sign of disease, including an eye cancer most common in young children. Since 2014, a free app that uses artificial intelligence to scan people's photos for instances of so-called white eye has been available for iOS or Android devices. That app, called the White Eye Detector, has now been tested on 50,000 photos of 20 children with confirmed eye diseases and 20 with normal eyes. The results suggest the affected children could have been diagnosed more than a year earlier on average with the help of the app, even though it spots only one out of every three photos with white eye.

Prosthetic legs with sensors can help people avoid unseen obstacles underfoot. Three people who have had a leg amputated found that they perceived such prostheses as an extension of their own body and were able to climb stairs more quickly than they could with a conventional prosthetic leg. Prosthetic limbs are often abandoned due to people's poor mobility when using them. The devices don't restore sensation, leaving people to rely on touch feedback from the stump meeting the socket. Stanisa Raspopovic at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and his colleagues modified a commercially available prosthetic leg by adding sensors to an insole on the foot and inside the knee.

In this Spotlight Podcast, we speak with David Brumley, the Chief Executive Officer at the security firm ForAllSecure* and a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Brumley is a noted expert on the use of machine learning and automation to cyber security problems. In this podcast, we talk about the growing demand for security automation tools and how the chronic cyber security talent shortage in North America and elsewhere is driving investment in automation. Every so often, a technology comes along that seems to perfectly capture the zeitgeist: representing all that is both promising and troubling about the future. In the 1960s, you think of plastic, which was a pillar of a massively expanding consumer culture in the United States that put "convenience" above all else.

The backlash that can occur when ads are placed alongside hateful online content is severe enough that some brands are pulling back on online spending and rethinking their digital media strategies. Despite promises that they would do better, platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and others are still struggling with the issue. Brands don't want their ads appearing alongside extremist content and hate speech, but flagging every piece of content that could be considered inappropriate is not an easy task. The challenge has opened the door for a new industry of "authenticators," which use technology to help brands avoid inappropriate content online. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, these technology providers are usually able to evaluate the quality of an ad impression in real-time and help their brand clients avoid anything that could be considered inappropriate.

Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis is teaming with Microsoft on a medical AI effort aimed at developing new data-driven techniques for drug discovery and development of specific therapies. The multi-year alliance announced this week would establish an AI innovation lab the drug maker would use to uncover new drug designs, cell and gene therapies as well as "personalized" therapies for macular degeneration. The partners said their collaboration would seek to connect the drug maker's broad data sets with Microsoft's AI technologies with the goal of creating new AI models and drug and therapy applications. Among the areas to be explored are computational-intensive life sciences projects ranging from generative chemistry to scaling cell and gene therapies, the partners said Tuesday (Oct. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Novartis (NYSE: NVS) also said they would collaborate on development next-generation AI platforms to support broader utilization of the technology across the drug maker's operations.

After three years of quietly toiling away on a robotic food system, Seattle startup Picnic has emerged from stealth mode with a system that assembles custom pizzas with little human intervention. Picnic -- previously known as Otto Robotics and Vivid Robotics -- is the latest entrant in a cohort of startups and industry giants trying to find ways to automate restaurant kitchens in the face of slim margins and labor shortages. It's highly variable," said Picnic CEO Clayton Wood. "We learned a lot about food science in the process of developing the system." Picnic invited me down to their headquarters in Seattle's Interbay neighborhood last week for a chance to sling pies with their secretive pizza robot. Walking up to the system, I was taken aback at how unassuming it looked. Picnic's platform had none of the industrial machismo of a Vulcan range. Instead, it looked like a white, kitchen-sized iPhone. Despite the simple exterior, the component parts were mesmerizing -- from the sauce ...

On Wednesday, Oct. 2, and Thursday, Oct. 3, 2019, Argonne hosts the fourth U.S. Department of Energy InnovationXLab Summit, focused on artificial intelligence, at the Drake Hotel in downtown Chicago. Attendance is by invitation only but some of the most highly anticipated presentations will be livecast. Don't miss these thought-provoking speakers sharing their visions of how AI, one of Argonne's key initiatives, will shape the world. And if you want to join the XLab conversation on social media, follow @argonne and #DOEFueledAI on Twitter. This week, the lab will be highly visible as a leader in science and technology.

This is a keynote highlight from the Strata Data Conference in New York 2019. You can also see other highlights from the event. Get a free trial today and find answers on the fly, or master something new and useful. Receive weekly insight from industry insiders--plus exclusive content, offers, and more on the topic of AI. Receive weekly insight from industry insiders--plus exclusive content, offers, and more on the topic of AI.

A global survey of C-level executives finds that AI is delivering real value to companies that use it across operations and within their core functions. Fueled by the buzz around powerful applications of artificial intelligence (AI), many business leaders are contemplating whether to introduce AI into their organizations. While practitioners and academics have outlined some of the strategic challenges of implementing AI, many executives are still seeking good models for how to generate competitive advantage from its application. To find out more about what contributes to successful AI adoption, we helped lead a survey by the McKinsey Global Institute of 3,000 C-level executives across 10 countries and 14 sectors. From that research, we identified five fundamental strategies for how to get the most out of AI's potential.

Under the best of circumstances, strengthening a workforce that reflects an employer's true business values, culture and growth objectives while filling critical talent needs represents a challenge. But with today's very low unemployment rates and ongoing skills gap, the formidable task of recruiting and retaining talent with the required skills to drive growth is even more difficult. Weathering that storm requires innovative thinking and technology to fill talent needs through well-stocked pipelines, which, in turn, will lead to optimized productivity and the desired increases in business growth. Research shows that the skills gap is not only very real, it's reaching serious proportions. The Society for Human Resource Management's survey of 1,028 HR professionals in late 2018 found that an eye-opening 83% say they had difficulty recruiting suitable candidates in the past 12 months.2