A woman from Cairns, Australia, used Siri to call an ambulance for her one-year-old daughter, Giana, when she stopped breathing. After dropping her iPhone, Stacey Gleeson shouted at the handset to activate Siri and told it to contact the emergency services as she began CPR.

Siri, which has been a part of Apple's iPhone for several years, has a voice activation function that helped a mom call for an ambulance when her daughter stopped breathing. When a mother from Cairns, Australia needed to call an ambulance for her one-year-old daughter who stopped breathing, Apple's Siri came to the rescue. Stacey Gleeson noticed her daughter Giana was turning blue, according to BBC. While running to her daughter's aid, she dropped her phone. But, the mother shouted to activate Siri and got emergency services on speakerphone.

My colleague Harold Cohen, who has died aged 87, was a computer art pioneer and developer of the popular Aaron program. He was born in London, the son of Victor and Leah Cohen, who ran a general store and expected Harold to enter the family business. His passion, however, saw him enrol at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he obtained a diploma in 1951. He then spent a year on a fellowship in Rome and came back to Britain to teach at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London and at the University of Nottingham. Harold became well known in London as an abstract painter, representing the UK at the Venice Biennale, Documenta – the German modern art show – and other international exhibitions in the 1960s.

We all need a little help sometimes. After all, what are cloud-based, artificially intelligent software agents for? By now we're all familiar with the usual suspects: Siri, Google Now, Cortana, and Alexa. They introduced most of us to the idea of talking to, rather than via, a phone, computer, or home appliance. But let's face it: These virtual assistants have become boring, banal commodities.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mount Holyoke College are teaming up to apply recent advances in machine learning, specifically biologically inspired deep learning methods, to analyze large amounts of scientific data from Mars. They are funded by a new four-year, 1.2 million National Science Foundation grant to computer scientist Sridhar Mahadevan, lead principal investigator at UMass Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences. His co-investigators are Mario Parente, an expert in analysis of hyperspectral images at UMass Amherst, and Darby Dyar of Mount Holyoke, a specialist in planetary chemistry and geology who serves on the scientific mission team for the Mars rover. As Mahadevan explains, NASA's Curiosity rover, a car-sized robot, has been exploring a crater on Mars since August 2012 and sending back a steady stream of specialized camera images and data on the chemical composition of rocks and dust for analysis. The data range from one-dimensional spectra of rock samples to three-dimensional hyperspectral images of the Martian surface.

This week we are going to take a peek into Google's future and look at what it could mean as Google advances their machine learning and deep learning capabilities. I know these sound like big, fancy, important words. They're not actually that tough of topics to understand. In fact, they're simplistic enough that even a lot of technology firms like Moz do some level of machine learning. We don't do anything with deep learning and a lot of neural networks. We might be going that direction.

Someday soon, your physician may be second-guessed by an artificial intelligence program – and you'll probably be healthier for it, according to Microsoft Research's Eric Horvitz. Horvitz, a research fellow and managing director of Microsoft Research's lab in Redmond, Wash., laid out the statistics to support second-opinion software during today's White House workshop on how AI can bring social benefits. The workshop in Washington, D.C., was the second in a series of four sessions aimed at helping the Office of Science and Technology Policy formulate future initiatives on artificial intelligence. Microsoft Research is pursuing projects in more than 60 areas of computer science, including AI, but Horvitz focused on two projects in particular that brought AI tools to bear on health care challenges. One project targets medical errors, which Horvitz said are thought to cause more than 400,000 deaths annually in the United States.

This isn't a far-fetched idea, and not just because robots have a long track-record of automating human labor. There are already algorithms that can write stories. Bots can easily be programmed to write other basic stories--things like box scores and real estate listings, even obituaries. In January, Wired had a news-writing bot produce a remembrance of Marvin Minsky, the artificial intelligence pioneer. The result was a little dry compared with the obituary for Minksy written by a human at The New York Times--but the machine version was decent.

IBM's (NYSE:IBM) famed Watson artificial intelligence platform will be put to use to help match cancer patients with clinical trials. The Armonk, N.Y.-based technology giant said Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin Network will adopt the Watson technology for this purpose in a project set to begin this fall. Froedtert/MCW Cancer Network are among the 1st cancer programs nationally to use the technology, according to IBM. Doctors typically try to match patients to genetically ideal clinical trials that are also the most relevant in the development spectrum. This can be a long process on multiple levels, involving reviews by clinical coordinators who manually sort through patient records and conditions.

A lot can change in the space of six years. At the 2010 World Cup in Germany, match results were predicted by an octopus named "Paul." As Euro 2016 prepares to kick off Friday in France, scientists are using advanced neural networks to try to figure out which team will win this summer's tournament. As fans from across the continent begin their journeys toward France this week, predictions among them will be based on passion, patriotism and hope rather than algorithms, artificial intelligence or machine learning. However, that's not stopping companies like Microsoft, Yahoo and Blue Yonder from trying to leverage their technology to predict who will win the tournament.