One afternoon in the summer of 2018, Bob Gramling dropped by the small suite that serves as his lab in the basement of the University of Vermont's medical school. There, in a grey lounge chair, an undergrad research assistant named Brigitte Durieux was doing her summer job, earphones plugged into a laptop. Then he saw her tears. Bob doesn't balk at tears. As a palliative care doctor, he has been at thousands of bedsides and had thousands of conversations, often wrenchingly difficult ones, about dying. But in 2007, when his father was dying of Alzheimer's, Bob was struck by his own sensitivity to every word choice of the doctors and nurses, even though he was medically trained. "If we [doctors] are feeling that vulnerable, and we theoretically have access to all the information we would want, it was a reminder to me of how vulnerable people without those types of resources are," he says. He began to do research into how dying patients, family members, and doctors talk in these moments about end of treatment, pain management, and imminent death. Six years later, he received over $1 million from the American Cancer Society to undertake what became the most extensive study of palliative care conversations in the US.

"According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the U.S. They affect 40 million adults, or 18.1% of the population, every year. Furthermore, anxiety disorders affect 25.1% of children between 13 and 18 years old, putting them at a much higher risk to perform poorly in school, engage in substance abuse, and miss out on important social experiences. Even though this disorder is highly treatable, only 36.9% of those suffering receive treatment, most likely due to a perceived societal stigma, with men far less likely to seek treatment." One of the best decisions I made in my life was deciding to see a mental health professional in my senior year of college. It was a stressful time and a moment of big transition in my life.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is thrown into conversations about the future of business tech with increasing frequency. Many enterprises now have programmers beavering away on bespoke algorithms to automate tasks or services, which they hope will give them a competitive advantage. These algorithms are trained on vast data sets and eventually learn how to correctly identify common patterns without human intervention. They take time to design, and they don't come cheap. But that doesn't mean AI is purely for the big beasts of the business world.

The system helps significantly reduce the time consumed in post-production. In addition, based on an AI-powered celebrity database of more than 2 million characters, iQIYI has also established an intelligent index which helps improve the production efficiency and quality of large-scale variety shows. This technology has become an industrial standard that is widely adopted to produce new-gen variety shows. Aside from professional content production, iQIYI also uses AI technology to assist UGC content creators with their productions by offering them massive creative content libraries and supplementary creative functions through an intelligent recreation system. Held under the theme of "Artificial Intelligence-New Momentum for High Quality Development", this year's WAIC aims at building the world's top AI cooperation and exchange platform, as well as showing that AI is leading the transformation of the modern life in Shanghai.

BEIJING: No cash, no cards, no wallet, and no smartphones: China's shoppers are increasingly purchasing goods with just a turn of their heads as the country embraces facial payment technology. China's mobile payment infrastructure is one of the most advanced in the world, but the new systems -- which require only face recognition -- being rolled out nationwide could make even QR codes seem old-fashioned. Customers simply make a purchase by posing in front of point-of-sale (POS) machines equipped with cameras, after linking an image of their face to a digital payment system or bank account. "I don't even have to bring a mobile phone with me, I can go out and do shopping without taking anything," says Bo Hu, chief information officer of Wedome bakery, which uses facial payment machines across hundreds of stores. "This was not possible either at the earliest stage of mobile payment -- only after the birth of facial recognition technology can we complete the payment without anything else," he explains.

Insilico Medicine aims to bring deep learning to the drug discovery process. Hong Kong-based Insilico Medicine published research Monday showing that its deep learning system could identify potential treatments for fibrosis. That system, called generative tensorial reinforcement learning, or GENTRL for short, was able to find six promising treatments in just 21 days, one of which showed promising results in an experiment involving mice. The research has been published in Nature Biotechnology, and the code for the model has been made available on Github. "We've got AI strategy combined with AI imagination," says Insilico CEO Alex Zhavoronkov, who compares the operation of GENTRL to the AlphaGo machine learning system that Google's Deepmind developed to challenge champion Go players.

Among them is that systems of governance are not immortal and that democracies can devolve into autocracy. As institutions decay and social norms fray, democratic processes and practices are prone to apathy, demagoguery and disintegration. One scholar ringing the loudest alarm bell--or perhaps death knell--is David Runciman. He is a professor of politics at Cambridge University and the author of "How Democracy Ends". His replies are followed by an excerpt from the book. Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.

In today's multifaceted energy world, a growing number of prosumer assets are increasing the complexity of power grids. This is even more important in an ever-changing climate that more and more generates huge storms such as the Typhoon Lekima which caused 9.3 Billion in damage (5th Costliest known Pacific typhoons) and more than 90 deaths in the Philippines, Taiwan and China earlier this year, or the recent monstrous Category 5 Hurricane Dorian in the Atlantic Ocean. The director-general of the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism and Aviation, Joy Jibrilu, details the damage left in the aftermath from Hurricane Dorian and what the Bahamas will need to move forward especially on the infrastructures. This looks too similar to what we've seen in Porto Rico two years ago which suffered severe damage from the category 5 hurricane Maria. The blackout as a result of Maria has been identified as the largest in US history and the second-largest in world history.

The Indian AI startups space is booming and now encompasses various avenues such as computer vision, self-driving, retail, audio production and innovating e-commerce platforms, among others. This year we have come with a list of yet another 10 awesome startups that are revolutionising the field of artificial intelligence with their impressive technologies. These startups are about two to three years old and are already beginning to show some remarkable developments in the field of AI. Please note that this is not a ranking and the startups are listed in alphabetical order. Here is our last year's list.

Researchers have designed a machine learning algorithm that predicts the outcome of chemical reactions with much higher accuracy than trained chemists and suggests ways to make complex molecules, removing a significant hurdle in drug discovery. University of Cambridge researchers have shown that an algorithm can predict the outcomes of complex chemical reactions with over 90% accuracy, outperforming trained chemists. The algorithm also shows chemists how to make target compounds, providing the chemical "map" to the desired destination. The results are reported in two studies in the journals ACS Central Science and Chemical Communications. A central challenge in drug discovery and materials science is finding ways to make complicated organic molecules by chemically joining together simpler building blocks.