A park ranger treads carefully through the trees, stopping to listen for signs of the poacher he's tailing. Killed for skins, medicine and trophy hunting, the worldwide population of tigers has been reduced to near-extinction at about 3,200. The scale of destruction is increasing, and it will take a three-pronged approach to battle the corruption and financial incentives driving the illegal trade: tackling the source, transmission and demand for wild animal products. Supply could be dealt with by park rangers catching the poachers before they attack, but finding a single poacher in thousands of square kilometers can be almost impossible, and in the poorest areas, resources are so constrained that poachers are not being intercepted at all. Artificial intelligence and game theory are the surprising elements in the arsenal of weapons used to combat this problem.

Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that allows computer programs to learn when exposed to new data without being programmed. Now, researchers in The Netherlands have coupled machine learning methods with a special MRI technique that measures the perfusion, or tissue absorption rate, of blood throughout the brain to detect early forms of dementia, such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI), according to a new study published online in the journal Radiology. "MRI can help with the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease," said principal investigator Alle Meije Wink, Ph.D., from the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam. "However, the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease is problematic." Scientists have long known that Alzheimer's disease is a gradual process and that the brain undergoes functional changes before the structural changes associated with the disease show up on imaging results.

Tesla's Autopilot feature might be a bigger problem than the company realizes. A Detroit art gallery owner informed police that he had his 2016 Tesla Model X in Autopilot mode when it crashed and rolled over on the Pennsylvania Turnpike last Friday, as reported by the Detroit Free Press on Wednesday morning. Although the Model X driver, Albert Scaglione, and his son-in-law, Tim Yanke, both survived Friday's crash, which occurred just over 100 miles east of Pittsburgh, the scope of scrutiny on Tesla's Autopilot mode is likely to only grow. Thus far, Tesla released a statement to Electrek, saying that it currently has "no data to suggest that Autopilot was engaged at the time of the incident" and that "until the customer responds, we are unable to further investigate." According to the Free Press, a Pennsylvania State Police report from Friday's scene noted that the Model X hit a guard rail "off the right side of the roadway" and "it then crossed over the eastbound lanes and hit the concrete median," tumbling onto its roof in the middle eastbound lane.

If they come bearing hot French fries and gooey pizza, I, for one, will welcome our new robot overlords with open arms. The artificial intelligence revolution is one step closer to that reality in Europe, where a food delivery service, a package delivery company, and a retail chain are testing out autonomous robot couriers. Food delivery companies Just Eat and Pronto will be trying out the self-driving robots in London, while Germain retail chain Metro AG and German parcel delivery company Hermes will test them out in Dusseldorf, Germany, and Bern, Switzlerland, as well as another undisclosed German city, says the robot's maker, Starship Technologies. Starship Technologies, a London-based company started by two Skype co-founders, has been testing the so-called "ground drones" in Europe over the last nine months, but these trials will mark the first time businesses will be using the technology to deliver real orders to paying customers, Allan Martinson, Starship's chief operating officer tells Bloomberg. Each company's trial will involve anywhere between five and 10 robots in one or two areas of each city.

Across the world there is an estimated 285 million visually impaired people, and 39 million of these are blind. Conditions like age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy can be picked up is using digital screenings, which are highly complex and take a lot of time to analyse. Now Google's DeepMind Health is teaming up with a London eye hospital to investigate how machine learning could help analyse these scans efficiently and effectively. Moorfields Eue Hospital in London has announced a new medical research partnership with Google's DeepMind Health that could revolutionise the way professionals carry out eye tests and lead to earlier detection of common eye diseases Diabetes is on the rise. It's estimated that 1 in 11 of the world's adult population are affected.

Studying micro-organisms usually requires a petri dish, but a group of researchers in Norway decided to make things a little more exciting, in a three dimensional throwback to the 1980s. The team recreated the maze from the Japanese arcade classic Pac-Man, on a tiny scale, and set two kinds of microorganisms loose. They then monitored the creatures' behaviour, to learn more about the dynamics between predator and prey microorganisms. The researchers recreated the legendary labyrinth from the game Pac-Man (shown left) on a tiny scale less than 0.04 inches (one millimetre) in diameter, shown right The three dimensional labyrinth was filled with microscopic prey and predators swimming around in a fluid filled with nutrients. Single celled organisms, the prey, along with multi-cellular'rotifers', the predators, were released into the nutrient-laden fluid maze.

Factory workers are about to get super-human strength thanks to Nasa's'Robo-Glove'. The glove helped scientists control Robonaut 2, a humanoid that provided engineering and technical assistance on space mission just like Star Wars' R2-D2. But now it has been given power-boosting technologies thanks to a partnership between General Motors and medical technology company Bioservo, who hope that it will help workers on factory floors. The Robo-Glove wraps around a worker's hand essentially, takes on the hard work for them. An assembly operator in a factory may use 15- to 20 pounds of force to hold a tool during an operation.

Between the Terminator movies, Ava from'Ex Machina', Google's AlphaGo beating the world's best human Go players, machines mimicking Rembrandt's style to paint portraits, debates about morality and privacy, and Stephen Hawking's warnings about the consequences of intelligent machines manned by idiot humans; it's no wonder that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already made people a little uncomfortable. In the marketing world, it's caused the customary outbreak of confusion. Thus resulting in a series of obtuse declarations like "AI will change everything. EVERYTHING!" that are typical of the industry. Any time anything new threatens to upset business as usual, comrades in the marketing and advertising industry especially lunge headlong into an existential crisis. For instance, "Will AI make the creative kind obsolete?"

The way business applications are built today is flawed. This email address is already registered. By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent. By submitting your email address, you agree to receive emails regarding relevant topic offers from TechTarget and its partners. You can withdraw your consent at any time.

As computers around the world get smarter and more powerful, internet heavyweight Google is determined to stay ahead of the game. The company said on Wednesday that it is buying a French artificial intelligence company called Moodstocks that specializes in image recognition. Moodstocks focuses on building image-recognition capabilities into phones, and first introduced software that could do this back in 2012. Over the past two and a half years it has extended its reach into physical object recognition, the company says on its website. Joining forces with Google, Moodstocks said, will allow the company "to deploy our work at scale" and "build great image recognition tools within Google."