A robot named Well-e will take therapy patients from the CHI Health Immanuel Rehabilitation Institute on a virtual field trip of the zoo. Well-e will connect patients receiving therapy for spinal cord and traumatic brain injuries with animals of the world from their wheelchairs and hospital beds.

Artificial intelligence is infiltrating every industry, allowing vehicles to navigate without drivers, assisting doctors with medical diagnoses, and mimicking the way humans speak. But for all the authentic and exciting ways it's transforming the tasks computers can perform, there's a lot of hype, too. As Jeremy Achin, CEO of newly minted unicorn DataRobot, puts it: "Everyone knows you have to have machine learning in your story or you're not sexy." The inherently broad term gets bandied about so often that it can start to feel meaningless and can be trotted out by companies to gussy up even simple data analysis. To help cut through the noise, Forbes and data partner Meritech Capital put together a list of private, U.S.-based companies that are wielding some subset of artificial intelligence in a meaningful way and demonstrating real business potential from doing so. One makes robots that can whir around shoppers to help workers restock shelves. Another scans recruiting pitches for unconscious bias. A third analyzes massive data sets to make street-by-street weather predictions. To be included on the list, companies needed techniques like machine learning (where systems learn from data to improve on tasks), natural language processing (which enables programs to "understand" written or spoken language), or computer vision (which relates to how machines "see") to be a core part of their business model and future success. Find all the details on our methodology here. The honorees span categories like human resources, security, insurance, and finance, with healthcare, transportation, and infrastructure startups best represented on the list.

People harbour lingering fears about the impact of robots on their jobs and welfare, but machines in the workplace have produced benefits that researchers believe are likely to continue. But for that to happen, challenges such as earning workers' trust and improving safety and human-robot interaction must be overcome. In the EU, 72% of people are scared that technology could steal their jobs. With predictions that robots and automation could replace nearly half of jobs in developed countries, the concern is understandable. Workers are worried that they will be expected to work at a quicker pace when new technology, such as robots, is put in place, says Professor Anu-Hanna Anttila, head of research at the Finnish Industrial Union in Helsinki, who has studied factory workers' attitudes towards technology in the workplace.

The term "influencer" has been populating the digital sphere for a long time now, and so far, it has gone largely undefined. As we know it, an influencer can be anyone that holds influence over their audience, community, or platform. Celebrities, politicians, models were the original ones; then came strictly digital ones like YouTubers, bloggers, Instagram models, and even internet-famous pets. Now, we're in a place to, again, redefine who belongs within the term. We'll look at deepfakes, CGI models, digital actresses, robotic streamers, and Sophia the robot, which all seem to point towards a not-so-far future where our digital influencers could be made up by artificial intelligence.

WASHINGTON – A research group says a growing number of countries are following China's lead in deploying artificial intelligence to track citizens. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says at least 75 countries are actively using AI tools such as facial recognition for surveillance. The list of countries where some form of AI surveillance is used includes liberal democracies such as the United States and France as well as more autocratic regimes. Tuesday's report from the group says Chinese tech companies led by Huawei are supplying much of the AI surveillance to countries around the world. Other companies such as Japan's NEC Corporation and U.S.-based IBM, Palantir and Cisco are also major international providers of AI surveillance tools.

ADDISON, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Digital Matrix Systems (DMS), an international risk management firm specializing in support of the entire data management life cycle, including secure access to credit bureaus and data providers, data storage, and analytics, announced a partnership today with ZestFinance, the leader in artificial intelligence (AI) software for credit. The two companies are integrating Zest Automated Machine Learning (ZAML) software with Data Access Point, a DMS platform that makes it easy to create and deploy credit attributes and scorecards for automated decisions, risk assessment, and probability calculations. ML credit models improve on traditional methods by using 100 times more data signals and sophisticated math to make more good loans and fewer bad ones. ZAML customers see an average 15% increase in approval rates with no added risk, as well as increases in booked loan rates due to more competitive pricing. Getting these results from ML requires secure, consistent access to clean data, which is where DMS excels.

An artificial-intelligence art project has been criticised for using racist and sexist tags to classify its users. When they share a selfie with ImageNet Roulette, the web app matches it to the ones it most closely resembles from an enormous library of profile photos. It then reveals the most popular tag, assigned to the matching pictures by human workers using data set WordNet. These include racial slurs, "first offender", "rape suspect", "spree killer", "newsreader", and "Batman". Those responsible for assigning the tags to the library pictures were recruited via a service offered by Amazon, called Mechanical Turk, which pays workers around the world pennies to perform small, monotonous tasks.

Increasingly sophisticated killer AI robots and machines could accidentally start a war and lead to mass atrocities, an ex-Google worker has told The Guardian. Laura Nolan resigned from Google last year in protest at being assigned to Project Maven, which was aimed at enhancing U.S. military drone technology. She has called for all unmanned autonomous weapons to be banned. AI killer robots have the potential to do "calamitous things that they were not originally programmed for," Nolan explained to the Guardian. She is part of a growing group of experts that are showing concern over the development of artificial intelligence programmed into war machines.

Never play games with a bot – it will find a way to cheat if they can. A team from OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab in San Francisco co-founded by Elon Musk, has developed artificially intelligent bots that taught themselves to cooperate by playing hide-and-seek. The bots also learned how to use basic tools and that defying the laws of physics can help you win. In April, a team of bots known as the OpenAI Five beat the human world champions at the team-based video game DOTA 2. The hide-and-seek bots use similar principles to learn but the simpler game allows for more inventive play. Bowen Baker at OpenAI and his colleagues wanted to see if the team-based dynamics of the OpenAI Five could be used to generate skills that could one day be useful to humans.

Peer review is integral to the publication process of scholarly articles, and performs a vital quality control function over the work undertaken by the article's authors. This is a crucial step given the far-reaching implications for society that scientific discoveries often have. Albeit necessary, the peer-review process is far from perfect and suffers quite some criticism within the scientific community. In an effort to address some of this criticism, eLife operates a more transparent form of peer review in which the assessments are published together with the work. This practice has met generally positive feedback from authors and reviewers alike. In their current state, however, published peer reviews are in essence a page-long technical report for the benefit of the paper's authors.