The Food and Drug Administration has cleared a new artificial intelligence-powered X-ray device that maker GE Healthcare says reduces the time to detect a collapsed lung from eight hours to as little as 15 minutes, the company announced Thursday. The device, called the Critical Care Suite, uses AI algorithms to scan X-ray images and detect pneumothorax, a deadly condition more commonly known as a collapsed lung that affects roughly 74,000 Americans each year. "The health-care industry is producing huge amounts of data from images to digital health records," GE Healthcare CEO Kieran Murphy said in an interview with CNBC ahead of the announcement. "We strongly believe that you have to turn that data into information and insight to improve outcomes." GE Healthcare, a dominant player in hospital and lab equipment, said its goal is to integrate AI into every aspect of the health-care system to ultimately "improve patient outcomes, reduce waste and inefficiencies, and eliminate costly errors."

Artificial intelligence adoption, which has happened in fits and bursts till now, is all set to accelerate this year. That is if recent predictions of leading technology research firms like Gartner, IDC and Forrester for 2019 and beyond prove to be true. Almost every technology research company seems to agree that AI is on the horizon, across industries and geographies. IDC, for one, has predicted huge investments in AI-driven user interfaces and AI algorithms at endpoint devices on cloud-enabled networks. Gartner has forecast exponential increase in AI-enhanced virtual healthcare and sophisticated AI-facial recognition technology and Forrester expects firms to lay the foundation to meet AI's promise this year.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted 510(k) clearance to GE Healthcare's Critical Care Suite -- a collection of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms embedded on a mobile X-ray device, the healthcare business division of GE announced today. Using GE Healthcare's Edison platform, the AI aims to help reduce the turnaround time it takes radiologists to review suspected pneumothorax, a type of collapsed lung. "By integrating AI into every aspect of care, we will ultimately improve patient outcomes, reduce waste and inefficiencies and eliminate costly errors," said Kieran Murphy, president and CEO of GE Healthcare. If a patient is scanned on a device with Critical Care Suite, it will automatically analyze the images by searching for a pneumothorax, GE Healthcare claims. If suspected, an alert with the original X-ray is sent straight to the radiologist to review.

Prominent members of Europe's so-called "Skype Mafia," all co-founders or early employees of the voice-over-Internet conferencing service, are backing Pactum, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to automate business contract negotiations. Founded late last year but only emerged from stealth mode on Wednesday, Pactum uses a chatbot-like interface to conduct contract talks. The bot can offer changes to standard terms, including price, delivery conditions and days to pay, in order to reach a better deal. The company is based in Mountain View, Calif., with engineering offices in Tallinn, Estonia, where Skype's first engineering offices were also located. Among those investing in the small startup are Jaan Tallinn, a Skype co-founder who has become a prominent backer of A.I.-related startups and research groups, Taavet Hinrikus, an early Skype employee who went on to found international payments firm TransferWise, Ott Kaukver, another early Skype employee who is now the chief technology officer at Twilio, and Sten Tamkivi, a general manager at Skype who is now chief product officer at Topia.

The Ghent Altarpiece, which researchers have analyzed using a combination of X-ray imaging and machine learning. AI is the future, and it's also the past. Not just in the sense of having been developed in previous years and decades, but also in the sense of being capable of recreating human history. This power was highlighted vividly by a study published at the end of August by researchers from University College London and Duke University, who managed to use artificial intelligence to create separate representations of two images that had been painted on both sides of a single panel. More specifically, they used X-ray imaging techniques to produce a combined representation of the outer panels of the famous 15th Century Ghent Altarpiece painting.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced up to $20 million in funding to accelerate the incorporation of machine learning and artificial intelligence into energy technology and product design processes. The Design Intelligence for Formidable Energy Reduction Engendering Numerous Totally Impactful Advanced Technology Enhancements (DIFFERENTIATE) program seeks to enhance energy innovation by incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning into energy technology development. "Artificial intelligence and machine learning has the potential to literally transform every aspect of the world as we know it, and accelerating this technology is crucial to strengthening our country's economic and national security," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. "DOE-fueled artificial intelligence is being utilized across all sectors, from strengthening cybersecurity and national security, increasing energy efficiency, optimizing grid security and resiliency, and developing innovative health solutions. The DIFFERENTIATE program is the latest example of DOE paving the way towards the New American Energy Era." In order to organize these efforts, DIFFERNTIATE identifies six general mathematical optimization problems that are common to many design processes. It then conceptualizes several machine learning tools that could help engineers execute and solve these problems in a manner that dramatically accelerates the pace of energy innovation.

Governments around the world should create special visa classifications for the international AI and machine learning community, the Partnership on AI said in a newly released report. Such visa classifications should be made for working professionals, as well as students and interns in AI and ML, in order for them to more easily attend conferences and study for extended periods. The report points out that some nations permit special visa classifications for medical professionals, athletes, religious workers, and entrepreneurs. Such steps are necessary, the group asserts, to enable members of the world's AI research community to collaborate and share ideas. Allowing a diverse group of researchers to attend international AI conferences is valuable because it can introduce new ideas, combat groupthink, ensure that a wider swath of researchers enjoy the prestige of major conference presentations, and let "organizations have the opportunity to benefit from all available talent."

Lack of user engagement is a challenge that all businesses having their own app, are facing since the beginning. Almost every client outsourcing mobile app development to India or any other corner of the world raises this concern. Sadly there was hardly anything we could do about it. However, now the AI development services has completely changed the user engagement game.

HighRadius, a fintech enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company specializing in automating the order-to-cash and treasury management processes, today announced the addition of Jon Keating as Vice President and General Manager, EMEA. In this role, Jon will be responsible for leading HighRadius' growth plans across all of Europe, Middle East, and African (EMEA) Markets. This press release features multimedia. Jon comes to HighRadius with over two decades of executive leadership experience managing sales, marketing and partner development in technology companies, delivering innovative enterprise solutions. Most recently, Jon was Chief Sales Officer for Taulia, a US FinTech providing Working Capital solutions where he was responsible for setting up and building the company's business in Europe and then leading Taulia's Global Sales, Marketing and Partner teams.

You may have heard of dark matter, a mysterious form of lesser-studied matter that is thought to be composed of some as-yet undiscovered subatomic particles, but which makes up an astonishing 85% of the matter in the universe. These unexplored molecules and matter surrounding our genes make up more than half of the human genome -- but are a total conundrum in terms of what they encode and, more importantly, affect. The good folks at IBM and the Munich Leukemia Laboratory think they can help come up with some answers -- and they've used some groundbreaking A.I. algorithms to help. "Despite it making up a large portion of our genome, dark matter DNA has been ignored, as most scientists believe it plays no role," Laxmi Parida, IBM Research Fellow in Computational Genomics, told Digital Trends. "At IBM Research, we thought there might be more to dark matter DNA than we have been led to believe."