On a recent Tuesday evening, the video-game creator Jason Rohrer was visiting Manhattan from Davis, California. His work is the subject of "The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer," the first full-scale museum show devoted to the video games of a single artist, at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College; his game Passage, from 2007, is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art. That night, he was the star of an event at NeueHouse, the vast private-membership work space "for the ambitious and the curious" on Twenty-fifth Street, in which he discussed video games and art in front of an eager crowd. NeueHouse has the atmosphere of a tech incubator crossed with a popular restaurant--five stories of elegant young professionals drinking wine and espresso, sitting in front of laptops instead of plates, patrons and servers alike zipping around in a mood of anxious exhilaration. Before the event, Rohrer showed me his games on his laptop. "When I first walked in, I thought it was a club," Rohrer told me.

Samsung Medison's new ultrasound system quickly screens for abnormalities. Artificial intelligence may be the new face of medical diagnostics. For the first time, a flavor of A.I. called deep learning is being implemented in new ultrasound imaging equipment to aid in breast exams and help patients avoid unnecessary biopsies. A new feature in Samsung Medison's ultrasound system uses a deep-learning algorithm to make recommendations about whether a breast abnormality is benign or cancerous. The "S-Detect for Breast" feature is now included in an upgrade to the company's RS80A ultrasound system and is commercially available in parts of Europe, the Middle East and Korea and is pending FDA approval in the U.S., according to PR manager Doug Kim.

Computers could soon be helping to diagnose cancer in patients with the help of artificial intelligence that has been trained to spots the early signs of the disease. An AI machine capable of accurately diagnosing breast cancer 92 per cent of the time has been developed by researchers. While it is still not quite as good as human specialists – who are correct 96 per cent of the time – it suggests that AI could soon be used to speed up and improve cancer screening. Scientists have used machine learning to create an artificial intelligence system capable of diagnosing breast cancer from lymph node biopsies with 92 per cent accuracy (cancer cells in a lymph node pictured). When combined with a human pathologist this accuracy increased to 99.5 per cent The system was developed by computer scientists at Harvard Medical School gave a machine learning algorithm slides of lymph nodes from breast cancer patients.

Columbus, Ohio – The area of the brain responsible for recognizing facial expressions appears to be on the right side, just behind the ear. A study published Tuesday in the Journal of Neuroscience found that nerve patterns within this area, which is known as the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), seem to be programmed to identify movement in certain areas of the face. While one neural pattern detects a furrowed brow, another recognizes the upturned lips of a smile, according to the paper. "That suggests that our brains decode facial expressions by adding up sets of key muscle movements in the face of the person we are looking at," study author Aleix Martinez said in a university press release, as reported by CBS News. Martinez, a cognitive scientist who teaches electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State, added that humans use a significant number of facial movements to express emotion, as well as other non-verbal communications signals and language.

Computer vision systems typically learn how to recognize an object by analyzing images of thousands of examples. But scientists at Disney Research have shown that computers also can learn to recognize objects they have never seen before, based in part on studying vocabulary. People, after all, can get an idea of what things might look like based on reading a book. Similarly, a computer that already has been taught to recognize certain objects - apples, for instance - can analyze word use to get hints about the existence of fruits such as pears and peaches, and how they might differ from apples, said Leonid Sigal, senior research scientist at Disney Research. The knowledge that other fruits exist also is helpful in teaching the computer about important characteristics of apples themselves, he added.

We explore new hobbies, new passions, new adventures and new experiences. We crave knowledge, information and insight with the goal of improving our own condition. We do all of this with the ability to reason, understand and learn so that we can push ourselves to be better than we were yesterday. It's time, then, that we apply this same drive to how we embrace cognitive computing. Cognitive computing, like IBM's world-famous Watson, illuminates aspects of our world that were previously invisible, like patterns and insights in unstructured data.

Remember when the world first really discovered who Katherine Webb was? It was during the national title game in 2013 between the Alabama Crimson Tide and Notre Dame Irish, with longtime commentator Brent Musberger basically drooling over h...

VentureBeat's Bots Channel tracks all the important and interesting news related to the exploding field of bots and messaging. And each week we select the top stories and present them in in our free weekly newsletter, BotBeat. We include news stories by VentureBeat staff, guest articles from leading figures in the bots community and a good number of posts from a wide variety of outlets. You can subscribe to our BotBeat newsletter to receive all this information in your inbox every Thursday. The story most likely to be seen in your social media stream this week may have been this one about a bot that lets you ghost undesirable dates.

Today on In Case You Missed It: The Burner chatbot would let a machine ghost on acquaintances you'd rather not text with anymore. But this Dutch inventor should more than switch that around with a small prototype of the ocean fence that is designed to collect ocean trash passively, allowing currents to push plastic and other stuff that doesn't belong in the water into a collection fence. If it all works out, a huge, 60-mile long version of his invention will grace the Pacific Ocean within a few years and hopefully be a solution to solving the Great Pacific garbage patch. If you're into Nerf guns, you must watch this video. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

The reports focuses on three areas in need of convergence between disciplines: Brain disorders, infectious diseases and cancer research. Researchers in those fields need to collaborate with scientists and engineers who work on imaging, nanotechnology, regenerative engineering (prosthetics and organ transplants), and information technology. For instance, building artificial organs for transplants requires 3D printing expertise (below) that medical researchers don't have. Similarly, optogenetics allows neurologists to change an animal's behavior merely with light, but leans heavily on genetics and other fields. Such collaboration, which the authors refer to as the "third revolution" in science, is already commonplace, of course. Doctors are working with geneticists to stamp out viruses and immune disorders via "synthetic biology," and cancer researchers are using AI to improve patient diagnoses.