Montreal-based VirtualMED is partnering with HealthTap, an American healthtech company, to offer AI-powered virtual care to Canadians. VirtualMED's licensed physicians will now be available through an app, which provides personalized diagnoses and treatment plans through artificial intelligence. "HealthTap is excited to partner with VirtualMED to overcome the issues that affect Canadian healthcare." HealthTap provides access to primary healthcare through an AI-powered platform, which personalizes users' care and enables an instant connection between the members and doctors. VirtualMED said its members can also receive affordable virtual care while travelling in the US.

Artificial intelligence is often hailed as a great catalyst of medical innovation, a way to find cures to diseases that have confounded doctors and make health care more efficient, personalized, and accessible. But what if it turns out to be poison? Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor, posed that question during a conference in Boston Tuesday that examined the use of AI to accelerate the delivery of precision medicine to the masses. "I think of machine learning kind of as asbestos," he said. "It turns out that it's all over the place, even though at no point did you explicitly install it, and it has possibly some latent bad effects that you might regret later, after it's already too hard to get it all out."

TEHRAN - Iran's Revolutionary Guard shot down a U.S. surveillance drone Thursday in the Strait of Hormuz, marking the first time the Islamic Republic directly attacked the American military amid tensions over Tehran's unraveling nuclear deal with world powers. The two countries disputed the circumstances leading up to an Iranian surface-to-air missile bringing down the U.S. Navy RQ-4A Global Hawk, an unmanned aircraft with a wingspan larger than a Boeing 737 jetliner and costing over $100 million. Iran said the drone "violated" its territorial airspace, while the U.S. called the missile fire "an unprovoked attack" in international airspace over the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf and President Donald Trump tweeted that "Iran made a very big mistake!" Trump later appeared to play down the incident, telling reporters in the Oval Office that he had a feeling that "a general or somebody" being "loose and stupid" made a mistake in shooting down the drone. The incident immediately heightened the crisis already gripping the wider region, which is rooted in Trump withdrawing the U.S. a year ago from Iran's 2015 nuclear deal and imposing crippling new sanctions on Tehran.

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA - Americans prefer a space program that focuses on potential asteroid impacts, scientific research and using robots to explore the cosmos over sending humans back to the moon or on to Mars, a poll shows. The poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, released Thursday, one month before the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, lists asteroid and comet monitoring as the No. 1 desired objective for the U.S. space program. About two-thirds of Americans call that very or extremely important, and about a combined 9 in 10 say it's at least moderately important. The poll comes as the White House pushes to get astronauts back on the moon, but only about a quarter of Americans said moon or Mars exploration by astronauts should be among the space program's highest priorities. About another third called each of those moderately important.

Artificial intelligence experts have shown off their latest wares at a trade conference - including robots that can make sushi, pour beers and play chess. Robot X Manufacturing Expo 2019 attendees in Bangkok, Thailand, yesterday, were wowed by a number of two-armed robots. Swiss firm ABB's robot can hold a cup in one hand - at a 90 degree angle for the perfect pour - while tipping beer into it from the other. Thanks to its dual-armed nature, Japanese firm Kawasaki's SCARA robot can complete a number of tasks with ease. As well as combining sushi rice with fish before serving, it can also make pizzas, evenly spreading sauce before adding cheese and other toppings to be cooked.

DETROIT/PARIS - French automaker Renault SA, its partner Nissan Motor Co. and tech giant Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo have agreed to assess the feasibility of a partnership to develop and use self-driving vehicles to transport people and goods in France and Japan, the companies said on Thursday. The potential venture could also be expanded to other markets, the companies said. If the partnership is realized, it will have ramifications for other alliances and other self-driving projects, most of which have yet to hit the road. Automakers across the world are rethinking independent autonomous vehicle efforts, and are instead looking for partners to share rising investment costs and regulatory risks. A potential competitor to a Renault-Nissan-Waymo venture in Japan would be Monet Technologies, a self-driving project involving Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. backed by SoftBank Group Corp. SoftBank and Honda have also invested in General Motors Co.'s Cruise self-driving car unit. The initial agreement among Waymo, Renault and Nissan aims to "develop a framework for deployment of mobility services at scale," according to Hadi Zablit, business development chief of the Renault-Nissan alliance.

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran's state-run IRNA news agency says the country's Revolutionary Guard has shot down a U.S. drone. The U.S. military declined to immediately comment. IRNA said Thursday the drone was hit when it entered Iranian airspace near the Kouhmobarak district in southern Iran's Hormozgan province. IRNA, citing the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, identified the drone as an RQ-4 Global Hawk. Bill Urban, a U.S. Central Command spokesman, declined to comment when asked if an American drone was shot down.

Artificial intelligence can now figure out recipes based on images of pizza. New York thin-crust topped with pesto chicken. What do you think makes for the perfect pizza? A recent study suggests neural networks could create the ultimate pie. The study out of MIT, which appeared earlier this month on Arxiv.org, Generative adversarial networks (GANs) use models to make decisions.

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