Scientists from Insilico Medicine, Inc. have trained deep neural networks (DNNs) to predict the potential therapeutic uses of 678 drugs, using gene-expression data obtained from high-throughput experiments on human cell lines from Broad Institute's LINCS databases and NIH MeSH databases. The supervised deep-learning drug-discovery engine used the properties of small molecules, transcriptional data, and literature to predict efficacy, toxicity, tissue-specificity, and heterogeneity of response. "We used LINCS data from Broad Institute to determine the effects on cell lines before and after incubation with compounds, co-author and research scientist Polina Mamoshina explained to KurzweilIAI. "We used gene expression data of total mRNA from cell lines extracted and measured before incubation with compound X and after incubation with compound X to identify the response on a molecular level. The goal is to understand how gene expression (the transcriptome) will change after drug uptake.

An Oxford University professor said computers will soon be eligible to the same civil rights humans currently have. The statement was made in observation to advancements in computing, with artificial intelligence already having a semblance to the human consciousness. Marcus du Sautoy, a professor at Oxford and author of "What We Cannot Know, "asserts that it is now possible to measure consciousness. In a Telegraph report, he also said the future of "living" technology is within sight. The advancements could lead to devices developing their own consciousness; this qualifies technology to have "human rights."

Taiwan's Asus has unveiled what it says is the first "affordable" household robot.

Hope Reese recently wrote in TechRepublic, "It's no longer up for debate that AI is set to have a major impact on most businesses, if it isn't already--and any company that wants to stay ahead must figure out how to integrate the new technology into its structure. But how is a successful AI platform built? On Wednesday, at the Applied Artificial Intelligence Conference in San Francisco, hosted by BootstrapLabs, Hussein Mehanna, the director of core machine learning at Facebook, tackled this question. In Mehanna's session, he explained how Facebook developed its own machine learning platform, and how Facebook employees are using it. In 2012, Mehanna said, Facebook's AI platform was'a snowball of complexity'--a system that slowed progress down significantly. 'We had to do something,' he said."

Armed with this knowledge, it learns trading behaviors such as buying dips or selling high over time, based on what it has gleaned about the market from past and present data. Man AHL s algorithms work off vast data sets that include 1.5 trillion price ticks as well as options information and index feeds. Billions of new price ticks can be added to the system in a single day. The firm has invested in high-powered hardware to process this information. But traders and scientists must know how the algorithms work and how to avoid overfitting data to a trading hypothesis, warns Anthony Ledford, chief scientist at OMI.

Asus has just unveiled what's likely to be the most talked about product at this week's Computex trade show in Taipei, a cute talking robot for the home priced at US 599. Called Zenbo, Asus pitched it as a personal assistant that can help look after elderly relatives or read stories to the kids, but that might be selling it a bit short. The robot is about two feet high and rolls around on wheels, with a display that can show its animated face or be used for other things like making video calls and streaming movies. Asus Chairman Jonney Shih demonstrated Zenbo at a press conference in Taipei Monday, giving it voice commands and asking it questions is it rolled around the stage. "Hey Zenbo, is it true you can take pictures"?

Could secretive augmented reality startup Magic Leap be working on artificial intelligence for robotics, too? A brief mention in a lawsuit the company filed this week against two former employees indicates as much. In the suit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Magic Leap alleges that Gary Bradski--who had been Magic Leap's senior vice president of advanced perception and intelligence and has long worked in robotics and AI--worked on proprietary technologies for the company and "was aware of and involved in projects and plans that involved deep-learning techniques for robotics." Magic Leap has raised over a billion dollars thus far for its technology, which mixes sharp-looking digital imagery with the real world around you, and has said it will be building this technology into a headset (it hasn't yet released any details about when this might be available or how much it will cost, but Wired recently got to try out such a headset--see "Magic Leap Has a Headset but Its Technology Is Still Mysterious"). The company has said it's creating a new optical chip that relies on silicon photonics in order to make its augmented-reality images work, so the idea that it's also poking around in robotics, or at least robotics-related AI, would fit in with its efforts to explore a range of technologies.

Ian McVey is UK director at Qualtrics, an employee engagement firm. In this article, he explores the state of artificial intelligence. Last week, the Institute of Directors (IoD) warned that 15 million jobs are at risk from the rise of automation, a figure echoed by the Bank of England. The IoD wants schools to place less emphasis on pupils' ability to recall facts and apply standardised methods, which machine learning and artificial intelligence do faster and with more precision, and focus instead on how to apply knowledge in a market that no longer rewards workers primarily for what they know, but for what they can do with what they know. Modern reflections on an educational system rooted in an old fashioned calendar are well timed.

Five man-machine Weiqi battles have let ordinary people knowing the fashionable phrase "artificial intelligence". Along with this boom, all kinds of innovative applications based on artificial intelligence technology are also emerging in domestic Internet companies. Recently, a number of new applications and new services closely linked to artificial intelligence technology such as intelligent customer service, investment guidance and face recognition have opened out one after another. In fact, the fervency on artificial intelligence technology has been maintaining for a long time. An incomplete statistics show that in 2015, the number of agencies in China investing in artificial intelligence has been as high as 48 with the amount of investment reaching RMB 1.42 billion yuan, up 71.4 percent and 75.7 percent respectively year-on-year.

Toyota Motor Corp. is in talks to buy Boston Dynamics, a robotics unit of Google Inc., news website Tech Insider has reported. Terms for the deal are not known, but Tech Insider quoted a source familiar with the matter as saying that the ink "is nearly dry." Boston Dynamics was established in 1992 and acquired by Google in 2013. It mainly develops biped and quadruped robots. In January, the nation's leading automaker established the Toyota Research Institute in California for research and development on artificial intelligence to be used in self-driving cars and robots.