One of biology's biggest mysteries - how a sliced up flatworm can regenerate into new organisms - has been solved independently by a computer. The discovery marks the first time that a computer has come up with a new scientific theory without direct human help. Computer scientists from the University of Maryland programmed a computer to randomly predict how a worm's genes formed a regulatory network capable of regeneration, before evaluating these predictions through simulation. After three days of continuously predicting, simulating and evaluating, the computer was able to come up with a core genetic network that explained how the worm's regeneration took place. The study by Daniel Lobo and Michael Levin, Inferring Regulatory Networks from Experimental Morphological Phenotypes, was published on Thursday (4 June) in the journal PLOS. "It's not just statistics or number-crunching," Levin told Popular Mechanics.

During its GTC 2016 keynote address, Nvidia unveiled a new Formula E event dubbed Roborace. As its name implies, this new racing class will feature fully autonomous cars powered by Drive PX 2 supercomputers. If that's not crazy enough, the first race is expected to kick off this season. The FIA Formula E Championship is a class of auto racing that uses only electric-powered cars. Roborace (we'd work on that name, fellas) will see 10 teams compete with 20 driverless full-size cars powered by Drive PX 2. For the uninitiated, this is Nvidia's new self-driving platform that packs in 12 CPU cores and two Pascal GPUs for eight teraflops of computing power. Explains Nvidia: "The supercomputer-in-a-box is vital to deep learning and trains artificial intelligence to adapts to different driving conditions, including asphalt, rain and dirt."

There is no need to worry about whether robots might start taking our jobs. Three of the world's 10 largest employers are already replacing tens of thousands of their workers with robots: That is likely the tip of the iceberg. This deliberately scruffy chart from CSLA of the 10 largest global employers shows the world's biggest workforces shows the potential for axing workers in favour of machines: Of those 10, only the UK's National Health Service - with its massive army of doctors and nurses doing unrepetitive, unique tasks - looks like hostile territory for robots. The other nine are rich with rote, repetitive tasks that might be better performed by software. Foxconn's 60,000 robots are only a small fraction of its 1.3 million total workers.

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.

When you think artificial intelligence, stop thinking disastrous scenarios like i-Robot and start thinking better customer service. In the session, Practical Applications Of Artificial Intelligence In Social Customer Service, Mikhail Naumov, Chief Strategy Officer of DigitalGenius, shows how AI and humans can work together to provide better customer service. He first explained that there are multiple types of AI and that we need to be careful in both – alluding to the situation where a Microsoft AI chatbot was taught to be racist. One mode is artificial narrow intelligence, where a machine learns to surpass the level of expertise of a human in one specific thing – think an online chess game. Another mode is artificial general intelligence, which is one that can complete any function of a human being .

Swarms of journalists lined the halls of a Southern California oceanfront resort recently to see tech luminaries like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk discuss the Gawker case, rocket launches to space, and, Silicon Valley's obsession du jour, artificial intelligence. But perhaps the real action in artificial intelligence is happening at the Hilton San Francisco, where a much less flashy tech crowd gathered this week. There, hundreds of engineers (2,500 to be precise), geeked out over fireside chats on topics such as "streaming data in real time" and "building accelerators in databases." The event, called the Spark Summit, brings together the growing number of developers who are working with Spark, perhaps the hottest data-mining software today. One way to understand future of artificial intelligence and how it will transform the economy is to watch what everyone is talking about at the Spark Summit.

LifeBEAM is Infusing Wearables with Artificial Intelligence The New York-based LifeBEAM started out making biosensing wearables for NASA and the US Air Force, and now their technology is powering the likes of Under Armour and Samsung. The company is trying to evolve the wearable market beyond statistics and into more meaningful territory. The product they believe will do this is their Awareable line. The Awareable product combines highly accurate biometrics and a personal training agent, giving consumers an intelligent and interactive training experience for fitness and everyday well-being. And now, on Kickstarter, the company is looking for funding for the first artificial intelligence personal trainer they call Vi.

While companies such as Squarespace Inc. or Weebly Inc. will help you craft an attractive modern website, it's still up to the user to create the content. Wouldn't it be faster if an artificial intelligence could write it for you? Israel's Wix.com Ltd. announced Tuesday it's enabling a technology to do just that. It's baking an AI into its web development platform that trawls the open internet for person-specific information to create a unique, individual website with images, video and text. Pages can be expanded to include e-commerce elements, blogs or appointment bookings.

Alexa will put up with just about anything. She has a remarkable tolerance for annoying behavior, and she certainly doesn't care if you forget your please and thank yous. But while artificial intelligence technology can blow past such indignities, parents are still irked by their kids' poor manners when interacting with Alexa, the assistant that lives inside the Amazon Echo. "I've found my kids pushing the virtual assistant further than they would push a human," says Avi Greengart, a tech analyst and father of five who lives in Teaneck, New Jersey. "[Alexa] never says'That was rude' or'I'm tired of you asking me the same question over and over again.'"

The insurance industry has always used analytics and insights as a key competitive advantage, and there have been significant advances in growing analytics capabilities in recent years. However - analytics is set to take a huge leap forward. Machine learning and artificial intelligence has the potential to completely transform an entire insurance organization, but where and how can machine learning be practically applied by insurers? Insurance Nexus recently spoke with executive insurance leaders from AIG & Zurich Insurance to understand just that. Check out the full whitepaper, "Anything You Can Do, AI Can Do Better: Insurance Applications for Machine Learning" (1.fc-bi.com/LP