For most people who talk to our technology -- whether it's Amazon's Alexa, Apple Siri or the Google Assistant -- the voice that talks back sounds female. Some people do choose to hear a male voice. Now, researchers have unveiled a new gender-neutral option: Q. "One of our big goals with Q was to contribute to a global conversation about gender, and about gender and technology and ethics, and how to be inclusive for people that identify in all sorts of different ways," says Julie Carpenter, an expert in human behavior and emerging technologies who worked on developing Project Q. The voice of Q was developed by a team of researchers, sound designers and linguists in conjunction with the organizers of Copenhagen Pride week, technology leaders in an initiative called Equal AI and others. They first recorded dozens of voices of people -- those who identify as male, female, transgender or nonbinary.

Fei-Fei Li heard the crackle of a cat's brain cells a couple of decades ago and has never forgotten it. Researchers had inserted electrodes into the animal's brain and connected them to a loudspeaker, filling a lab at Princeton with the eerie sound of firing neurons. "They played the symphony of a mammalian visual system," she told an audience Monday at Stanford, where she is now a professor. The music of the brain helped convince Li to dedicate herself to studying intelligence--a path that led the physics undergraduate to specializing in artificial intelligence, and helping catalyze the recent flourishing of AI technology and use cases like self-driving cars. These days, though, Li is concerned that the technology she helped bring to prominence may not always make the world better.

Techno-optimist prognosticators will tell you that driverless trucks are just around the corner. They will also gently tell you--always gently--that yes, truck driving, a job that nearly 3.7 million Americans perform today, is perhaps on the brink of extinction. A startup called Peloton Technology sees the future a bit differently. Based in Mountain View, California, the eight-year-old company has a plan to broadly commercialize a partially automated truck technology called platooning. It would still depend on drivers sitting in front of a steering wheel, but it would be more fuel efficient and, hopefully, safer than truck-based transportation today.

Folded and sealed with a dollop of red wax, the will of Catharuçia Savonario Rivoalti lay in Venice's State Archives, unread, for more than six and a half centuries. Scholars don't know why the document, written in 1351, was never opened. But to physicist Fauzia Albertin, the three-page document--six pages, folded--was the perfect thickness for an experiment. Albertin, who now works at the Enrico Fermi Research Center in Italy, wanted to read the will without unsealing it. In a 2017 demonstration, Albertin and her team beamed X-rays at the document to photograph the text inside.

Kaia Health caught our attention last year with an app that tracks your motion using your phone's camera in a bid to help you achieve perfect squat form, though we found it didn't quite hit the mark. Still, Kaia is elevating the concept with an updated version called Kaia Personal Trainer. It says the app will track your exercises and reps, create workout plans tailored to you and offer audio feedback in real time. It doesn't need any equipment other than an iPhone or iPad running iOS 12 (an Android version will arrive in the next few months), though you might still opt to use a fitness tracker. Once you get into position around seven feet away from your device, the app's AI uses a 16-point system to compare the way you move to optimal movement, looking at factors including the positions and angles of your limbs and joints. The app will tweak the difficulty level and exercises based on your feedback.

Facebook rushed to pull down footage of the New Zealand mass shooter's video from its platform, but it didn't start doing so until after the live broadcast was done. In a new post, Facebook VP of Integrity Guy Rosen discussed the company's successes and shortcomings in addressing the situation, as well as its plans to prevent videos like that from spreading on the social network in the future. He explained that while the platform's AI can quickly detect videos containing suicidal or harmful acts, the shooter's stream didn't trigger it. To be able to train the matching AI to detect that specific type of content, the platform needs big volumes of training data. As Facebook explains, something like that is difficult to obtain as "these events are thankfully rare."

Tesla filed a lawsuit this week against four former employees for allegedly stealing trade secrets and providing them to a rival company. According to the complaint filed with the US district court for Northern California, the ex-Tesla workers gave confidential information to autonomous vehicle start-up Zoox. The documents allegedly allowed the company to accelerate the development of its technology by cribbing off of Tesla's proprietary work. According to Tesla, the four former employees violated the terms of their contracts by forwarding documents and other information from work email addresses to personal accounts. The files included inventory documents, company schematics and other proprietary pieces of information.

The age of artificial intelligence (AI) has arrived, and is transforming everything from healthcare to transportation to manufacturing. America has long been the global leader in this new era of AI, and is poised to maintain this leadership going forward. Realizing the full potential of AI for the Nation requires the combined efforts of industry, academia, and government. The Administration has been active in developing policies and implementing strategies that accelerate AI innovation in the U.S. for the benefit of the American people. These activities align with four main pillars of emphasis: AI for American Innovation, AI for American Industry, AI for the American Worker, and AI with American Values.

India has two contrast images when it comes to the healthcare sector. While one faction is able to avail the advancement of technologies in the healthcare space, another faction can at the most only avail the basic healthcare treatments. But this spectrum is altering now. Starting from making the basic healthcare services available to the needy, several innovative technologies are disrupting the space and taking them to an altogether different standard. The private healthcare sector in close association with startups has been seeing the innovation that has amazed everyone and spend the industry up. The feather in the hat that the sector could earn from its tech innovation is the implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to treat patients suffering from Cancer.

Antoine Bruel, head of growth at Braincities and Céline Pluijm, key account manager at Wiidii share their thoughts on why France is fast-becoming a leader in establishing'AI for humanity', fresh from Hello Tomorrow… Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere. Across industry verticals, it's being used to enable businesses and organisations to work smarter and faster than ever before. From automating repetitive transactions and manual tasks to powering customer support platforms, AI is transforming the way we work, live and interact with the world. According to PwC research, AI is estimated to provide $15.7 trillion in economic growth by 2030, creating opportunities for innovation on a global scale. AI, however, is as much a source of fascination as it is a cause for concern.