While several startups have experimented with virtual doctor and nurse avatars, at the Center for Body Computing (CBC) at USC, researchers are taking the idea one step further. "That's the virtual me," Saxon said on-stage at BIO 2016 in San Francisco, indicating an image of her avatar. "You see virtual characters all the time, but they're very expensive. It's 3 million to create Kevin Spacey or a football player. We have a way of prototyping me that takes 30 seconds and can animate gestures and voice recognition. Saxon showed a video in which a hypertension patient takes home an app with Saxon's animated likeness. The virtual Saxon informs the patient of exactly why the new hypertension drug Saxon prescribed is a better, safer option for patients in his demographic. "In that scenario I had recommended the patient use a new blood thinner versus the blood thinner he's on," Saxon explained. "The data we presented, he couldn't get anywhere on the open market, not on Google, not anywhere because that tells him exactly his data and risk of benefiting, his major outcomes.

The pioneering artificial intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky died Sunday. So we thought it would be appropriate to ask for an obituary from one of his virtual descendants: Wordsmith, the automated news-writing bot from the company Automated Insights. It takes structured data--stuff that fits into a spreadsheet--and fits it into templates of increasing complexity. But Minsky was always interested in the differences and similarities between human and machine cognition, and arguably Wordsmith is cogitating every bit as hard as human reporters do on deadline. "You can start with things like their name, their age, the day the died, how they died. You can imagine in a spreadsheet, 'significant accomplishments 1, 2, and 3.'" So in this case, the template is a one-off rather than fully automated, and the data was harder to scrape.

Daniel Faggella is founder of TechEmergence, a news and advice website for entrepreneurs and investors interested in the intersection of technology and the mind. Speech recognition technology has been around for more than half a decade, though the early uses of speech recognition -- like voice dialing or desktop dictation -- certainly don't seem as sexy as today's burgeoning virtual agents or smart home devices. If you've been following the speech recognition technology market for any length of time, you know that a slew of significant players emerged on the scene about six years ago, including Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft (in a brief search, I counted 26 U.S.-based companies developing speech recognition technology). Since that time, the biggest tech trend setters in the world have been picking up speed and setting new benchmarks in a growing field, with Google recently providing open access to its new enterprise-level speech recognition API. While Google certainly seems to have the current edge in the market after substantial investments in machine learning systems over the past couple of years, the tech giant may yet have a potential Achilles' heel in owning an important segment of the global market -- lack of access to China.

In 10 years, we'll see big changes in how people live their lives and how companies operate, thanks to the innovation that's now being kindled around the world. So says Alec Ross, former innovation adviser to Hillary Clinton during her term as U.S. Secretary of State, who lays out the thesis in his new book, The Industries of the Future. In Part 1 of our interview, Ross explains how the technology underlying the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, blockchain technology, will greatly reduce the friction in financial and other transactions. Here he discusses the impact of cognitive robots and the outlook for U.S. companies trying to compete on a global scale. You talked about robotics a lot in your book and you focused for the most part on physical robots.

A sequel about married paranormal investigators, "The Conjuring 2," ascended to the top of the Friday box office, outperforming runners-up "Warcraft" and "Now You See Me 2." The three debuts supplanted last week's box-office leader "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows," which landed in the fourth spot, followed by the Warner Bros. romance "Me Before You." "The Conjuring 2" earned an estimated 16.4 million overnight. The New Line/Warner Bros. film exceeded expectations while on its way to a projected 40 million opening weekend. Though hardly a disappointment, the sequel has a steep climb to reach the tally of its predecessor, which ultimately earned nearly 320 million worldwide. Audiences liked the movie, which stars Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as believers working to exorcise demons from a home in North London. Like its predecessor, the second installment earned an A- from the polling firm CinemaScore.

Terrapattern is a visual search engine that, from the first moment you use it, you wonder: Why didn't Google come up with this 10 years ago? Click on a feature on the map -- a baseball diamond, a marina, a roundabout -- and it immediately highlights everything its algorithm thinks looks like it. It's remarkably fast, simple to use and potentially very powerful. Go ahead and give it a try first to see how natural it is to search for something. And how did a handful of digital artists and developers create it -- and for under 35,000?

Lately, artificial intelligence has been very much the hot topic in Silicon Valley and the broader tech scene. To those of us involved in that scene it feels like an incredible momentum is building around the topic, with all kinds of companies building A.I. into the core of their business. There has also been a rise in A.I.-related university courses which is seeing a wave of extremely bright new talent rolling into the employment market. But this is not a simple case of confirmation bias - interest in the topic has been on the rise since mid-2014, as the graph below of Google Search frequency for the terms "Artificial Intelligence" and "Machine Learning" (more on that shortly) show: The noise around the subject is only going to increase, and for the layman it is all very confusing. Depending on what you read, it's easy to believe that we're headed for an apocalyptic Skynet-style obliteration at the hands of cold, calculating supercomputers, or that we're all going to live forever as purely digital entities in some kind of cloud-based artificial world.

In Panama, indigenous tribes are turning to a modern tool to help protect their homes: drones. Vast rainforests, which once covered more than half of Panama's land surface, are shrinking – eaten away by development, both official and unofficial. Forest land is becoming mines, hydroelectric projects, farmland, cattle habitat, and the site of illegal logging. In response, seven indigenous tribes, whose members live in autonomous zones known as comarcas, have begun sending up drones to keep an eye on their forests. Three members from each tribe received a month of training on how to use the drones, Reuters reports.

Now to put that fact in context, compare this to 2004, when DARPA sponsored the very first driverless car Grand Challenge. Of the 20 entries they received then, the winning entry went 7.2 miles; in 2007, in the Urban Challenge, the winning entries went 60 miles under city-like constraints. Things are clearly progressing rapidly when it comes to machine intelligence. But how did we get here, after not one but multiple "A.I. winters"? And why is Silicon Valley buzzing about artificial intelligence again?

London, June 10 (IANS) Understanding the hierarchical structure of biological networks like human brain -- a network of neurons -- could be useful in creating more complex, intelligent computational brains in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics, says a study. Like large businesses, many biological networks are hierarchically organised, such as gene, protein, neural, and metabolic networks. This means they have separate units that can each be repeatedly divided into smaller and smaller subunits. To understand as to why biological networks evolve to be hierarchical, researchers from the University of Wyoming and the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA) simulated the evolution of computational brain models, known as artificial neural networks, both with and without a cost for network connections. They found that hierarchy evolves not because it produces more efficient networks, but instead because hierarchically wired networks have fewer connections.