It's that time of year again when Apple gives folks a sneak peek at new features for the iPhone and iPad. The company does it every June at the Worldwide Developer's Conference (WWDC) a forum to hype up app makers on new tools they could use in their apps. We'll be in attendance Monday morning in San Jose, as usual, to keep you up on the latest on what's expected to be called iOS 13, the software that runs the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The event starts at 10 a.m. PT and will be live-streamed at Apple.com.

If you think you've got a bad case of the travel bug, get this: Dr. John Halamka travels 400,000 miles a year. Halamka is chief information officer at Harvard's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and a practicing emergency physician. In a talk at Singularity University's Exponential Medicine last week, Halamka shared what he sees as the biggest healthcare problems the world is facing, and the most promising technological solutions from a systems perspective. "In traveling 400,000 miles you get to see lots of different cultures and lots of different people," he said. "And the problems are really the same all over the world. Maybe the cultural context is different or the infrastructure is different, but the problems are very similar."

Caris Life Sciences, a leading innovator in molecular science focused on fulfilling the promise of precision medicine, today presented a poster demonstrating how its advanced machine learning approach, Caris Next Generation Profiling, enables a proprietary algorithm to molecularly classify tumor samples into cancer types. These results, presented at the 2019 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, showcase how analysis of large combined molecular and clinical datasets can improve diagnosis of challenging cases, which is expected to inform increasingly personalized and precise cancer treatments. The poster, "Machine Learning Algorithm Analysis using a Commercial 592-gene NGS Panel to Accurately Predict Tumor Lineage for Carcinoma of Unknown Primary (CUP)," was presented at this morning's Developmental Therapeutics and Tumor Biology (Nonimmuno) Poster Session. Caris scientists detailed how Caris Next Generation Profiling identified molecular classifications for tumor samples with over 95% accuracy using next generation sequencing (NGS) data from 55,780 tumor patients. It generated an unequivocal result in the vast majority of cases of carcinoma of unknown primary (CUP), when there was ambiguity about tissue of origin.

Timely and accurate agricultural impact assessments for droughts are critical for designing appropriate interventions and policy. These assessments are often ad hoc, late, or spatially imprecise, with reporting at the zonal or regional level. This is problematic as we find substantial variability in losses at the village-level, which is missing when reporting at the zonal level. In this paper, we propose a new data fusion method--combining remotely sensed data with agricultural survey data--that might address these limitations. We apply the method to Ethiopia, which is regularly hit by droughts and is a substantial recipient of ad hoc imported food aid.

I recently covered Voice Summit the largest voice tech conference that brings the conversational design ecosystem together in one place. The conference was hosted at New Jersey Institute of Technology. I was amazed about the impact voice technology will have on our lives. Voice search will account for 50 % of all search results by 2020. Voice technology is already in use in many home devices such as Amazon Alexa and Google home.

BENGALURU: The market size in India for the MNC tech centre -- also known as global capability centre (GCC) -- touched $28.3 billion in 2018-19, compared to $19.5 billion in 2014-15, says a study by Nasscom and consulting firm Zinnov. That's a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 10% -- faster than that of the IT services sector during this period. India has by far the biggest presence of GCCs in the world (the segment's size has been estimated by multiplying the number of employees with the average cost of the employee). GCCs now employ more than 1 million people -- up from 7.5 lakh in 2014-15. They account for a quarter of the total workforce in the country's tech sector.

As artificial intelligence becomes more commonplace in the enterprise, more IT leaders are becoming concerned about the ethical implications of AI. In fact, a 2019 Vanson Bourne report sponsored by SnapLogic found that 94% of the 1,000 U.S. and UK IT decision makers surveyed believe that people should be paying more attention to corporate responsibility and ethics in AI development. You don't have to look hard to find some reasons for their concern. Several prominent tech companies have become embroiled in scandals after AIs they created failed to behave as desired. For example, in 2015, Google drew criticism after users complained when its image recognition software was tagging black human faces as "gorillas."

Artificial intelligence is transforming business and offering significant strategic and practical opportunities, from natural language processing and smart speech to IoT and edge computing. While the technology has become increasingly democratized, allowing businesses of any size to reap the benefits, some companies and innovators are leading the charge -- and they'll be at this year's Transform event in San Francisco on July 10 and 11. Join us to get in the room with them and look over their shoulders at how it's done. They'll offer inspiring and practical takeaways that are crucial to your business. Here's a look at a few of those thought leaders: In an increasingly competitive cloud market, Google is positioning itself as the go-to for everyone from startups to enterprises, with dozens of new AI-powered products and services that are easy to access even for non data scientists.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has the capability to be one of, if not the, most impactful technologies ever and at the moment, like almost every other government on the planet, the US government has no idea how to properly regulate it. But what the US does know is that it doesn't want other countries using its own AI technology against it, especially in the event of war as we continue to see the emergence of autonomous AI powered weapons systems, from Chinese "fire and forget" cruise missiles to fully autonomous Russian nuclear submarines. As a result a new proposal published recently by the Department of Commerce lists a wide range of AI technologies that could potentially require a license to sell to certain countries, and the categories of restricted "exports" are as diverse as Machine Vision and Natural Language Processing tech. As you'd expect though it also lists military specific products like adaptive camouflage and surveillance technology. The small number of countries these regulations would target includes one of the biggest names in AI – China, who last year announced that they want to be world leaders in AI by 2030.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered the best insight yet at what shape the country's AI strategy will take. Putin ordered his government apparatus on February 27th to formulate a national artificial intelligence strategy by June 25th. With that date quickly approaching, the world is waiting to see Russia's AI plans. Back in September 2017, Putin famously said the nation which leads in AI "will become the ruler of the world." Understandably, Putin's comments generated fear of a cold war-like rush to militarise AI technology.