Google's open source mobile app development framework Flutter welcomes a new stable release. Version 1.9.1 was introduced at Google Developer Days China in a keynote on September 10, 2019. Chris Sells, PM for the Flutter developer experience calls it "the biggest update yet with more than 1,500 PRs from more than 100 contributors". Check out what's new for mobile developers and catch up with what went down at Google Developers Days in Shanghai. Version 1.9 introduces plenty of new goodies and improvements.

Oracle's digital assistant is now available in Microsoft Teams, the cloud hosting and services provider announced today. Oracle's AI assistant got several other updates today, including the ability to interact via voice commands, enterprise-grade security for voice recordings, and the ability to respond to more complex voice commands. The news was announced today at Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. As part of the Microsoft Teams integration, Microsoft Teams and Office 365 users will be able to access Oracle enterprise bots from the Microsoft Teams App Store. "For enterprise customers, what we're enabling to do now is [that] they can easily try to use Microsoft Teams to collaborate with their employees and colleagues and so forth with Microsoft Teams," Oracle VP of AI and digital assistant Suhas Uliyar told VentureBeat in a phone interview.

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.

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. An algorithm that can predict whether a given blood test will come back "normal" could help cut needless medical tests, researchers report. Being thorough in medicine is a must--but doctors concerned about over-testing are raising a new question: Is it possible to be too thorough? Jonathan Chen, assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University, says the answer is yes, particularly in the context of diagnostic blood testing. Blood testing is a cornerstone of diagnostic medicine, but there's an increasing recognition that too much blood testing--such as repeated tests--yields diminishing results.

Neural networks have given researchers a powerful tool for looking into the future and making predictions. But one drawback is their insatiable need for data and computing power ("compute") to process all that information. At MIT, demand for compute is estimated to be five times greater than what the Institute can offer. To help ease the crunch, industry has stepped in. An $11.6 million supercomputer recently donated by IBM comes online this fall, and in the past year, both IBM and Google have provided cloud credits to MIT Quest for Intelligence for distribution across campus.

A team of researchers lead by Brittany Dugger of UC Davis Health has been awarded a $3.8 million grant from the National Institute for Aging (NIA) to help define the neuropathology of Alzheimer's disease in Hispanic cohorts. The five-year grant will fund the first large-scale initiative to present a detailed description of brain manifestations of the Alzheimer's disease in individuals of Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican descent. Hispanics, one of the fastest growing demographic groups in the U.S., have a higher risk of dementia than Non-Hispanic Whites (NHWs). The demographic, genetic and environmental differences between individuals of Hispanic descent and NHWs can lead to different levels of disease risk and presentation. "There is little information on the pathology of dementia affecting people from minority groups, especially for individuals of Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican descent," said Brittany Dugger, assistant professor at the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UC Davis School of Medicine in Sacramento.

A team of researchers lead by Brittany Dugger of UC Davis Health has been awarded a $3.8 million grant from the National Institute for Aging (NIA) to help define the neuropathology of Alzheimer's disease in Hispanic cohorts. The five-year grant will fund the first large-scale initiative to present a detailed description of brain manifestations of the Alzheimer's disease in individuals of Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican descent. Hispanics, one of the fastest growing demographic groups in the U.S., have a higher risk of dementia than Non-Hispanic Whites (NHWs). The demographic, genetic and environmental differences between individuals of Hispanic descent and NHWs can lead to different levels of disease risk and presentation. "There is little information on the pathology of dementia affecting people from minority groups, especially for individuals of Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican descent," said Brittany Dugger, assistant professor at the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UC Davis School of Medicine in Sacramento.

ORACLE OPENWORLD -- Oracle Exadata Database Machine X8M, available today, sets a new bar and changes the dynamics of the database infrastructure market. Exadata X8M combines Intel Optane DC persistent memory and 100 gigabit remote direct memory access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) to remove storage bottlenecks and dramatically increase performance for the most demanding workloads such as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), analytics, IoT, fraud detection, and high frequency trading. "With Exadata X8M, we deliver in-memory performance with all the benefits of shared storage for both OLTP and analytics," said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president, mission-critical database technologies, Oracle. "Reducing response times by an order of magnitude using direct database access to shared persistent memory accelerates every OLTP application, and is a game changer for applications that need real-time access to large amounts of data such as fraud detection and personalized shopping." Exadata X8M helps customers perform existing tasks faster and accelerates time-to-insight, while also enabling deeper and more frequent analyses.

According to the latest World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report (2018), only 22 percent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) professionals globally are female compared to 78 percent who are male. This accounts for the general gender gap of 72 percent yet to close. This finding is not only alarming in itself, but a stunning reminder of the urgent action needed by all stakeholders to mitigate the threat posed by gender bias outcomes in future AI applications. Speaking during a session on Design by diversity at the recently concluded ITU Telecom World event in Budapest, Hungary, the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO) outlined the potential of AI as one of the key technologies that will enable the digital transformation for many countries both within the Commonwealth and beyond. Emerging technologies, such as AI, are considered as digital technology equalisers rather than being used to create further digital divide.

Switzerland-based solution provider Kistler's measurement technology experts will welcome visitors to K 2019 where they can learn how artificial intelligence will smooth the path to the smart factories of the future. The new, ultra-compact 9239A sensor from Kistler allows contact-free measurement of cavity pressure during the injection moulding process – developed to meet the highest surface quality standards. ComoNeoPREDICT from Kistler adds artificial intelligence to the injection moulding process. The quality model generated by intelligent software is based on neural networks. This is the starting point for extremely accurate and efficient injection moulding processes that must meet the very high standards required in the automotive and medtech sectors.