As more and more data is being collected by the country's healthcare system, researchers are exploring the option of using a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI), namely machine learning to help improve the quality of medical care and patient outcomes. An overview of some of the ways in which machine learning has the potential to contribute to advancements in plastic surgery were published in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery recently. Dr. Jonathan Kanevsky from the McGill University in Montreal and his colleagues wrote, "Machine learning has the potential to become a powerful tool in plastic surgery, allowing surgeons to harness complex clinical data to help guide key clinical decision-making." A few key areas were highlighted, all of which showed how machine learning and "Big Data" would be able to contribute to progress in the fields of reconstructive and plastic surgery. Machine learning analyzes historical data to develop algorithms that are capable of knowledge acquisition.

Vinod Iyengar is Director of Marketing at California-based developer H2O.ai. H2O.ai are the makers behind H2O, the leading open source machine learning platform for smarter applications and data products. They work across a number of mission critical applications, including predictive maintenance, operational intelligence, security, fraud, auditing, credit scoring, user based insurance, ICU monitoring and more in over 5,000 organizations. And with customers including Capital One, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Comcast, Nielsen Catalina Solutions, Macy's and Aetna – to name just a select few – they are clearly in a prominent position in this space. Vinod details some key use cases of artificial intelligence in specific industries, while also sharing H2O.ai's vision for AI and the challenges we face in adopting it… Across industries and business disciplines, businesses use artificial intelligence to increase revenue or reduce costs by performing tasks more efficiently than humans could do unaided. With more than 150 million active digital wallets than 200 billion in annual payments, PayPal leads the online payments industry.

The following interview is one of many included in the report. Benjamin Recht is an associate professor in the electrical engineering and computer sciences department as well as the statistics department at the University of California at Berkeley. His research focuses on scalable computational tools for large-scale data analysis, statistical signal processing, and machine learning -- exploring the intersections of convex optimization, mathematical statistics, and randomized algorithms. David Beyer: You're known for thinking about computational issues in machine learning, but you've recently begun to relate it to control theory. Can you talk about some of that work?

Google on Wednesday revealed new products and software that uses machine learning to help users better perform simple tasks, access information and entertainment, and communicate with others. Among the specific items unveiled at the company's 10th annual conference for developers was an updated Android system, a new Watch and a virtual-reality platform. Google plans to start selling a device called Home that will answer users' questions and complete tasks for them. At the start of the conference, Chief Executive Sundar Pichai revealed new products and services that use smarter software to make decisions rather than follow instructions, part of a major push into artificial intelligence that he said would define the tech giant over the next decade. Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc. GOOG, 2.02% GOOGL, 1.95%, said it would soon start selling a device called Home that will answer users' questions and complete tasks for them, like scheduling appointments, playing music and sending emails.

Last year Microsoft and Google both showed that their image-recognition algorithms had learned to best humans. They independently created software that could exceed the average human score on a standard test that challenges software to recognize images of a thousand different objects, from mosques to mosquitoes. But to get good enough to defeat humanity, each company's software scrutinized 1.2 million labeled images. A child can learn to recognize a new kind of object or animal using only one example. Startup Geometric Intelligence said Monday that it has developed machine-learning software that is a much quicker study.

Zebra Medical Vision, an Israeli startup that uses machine learning to teach computers to read and diagnose imaging data, raised 12 million in its latest funding round, including a re-investment from Salesforce.com Inc. co-founder Marc Benioff. Zebra has been building a database of millions of files such as CT-scans and MRIs of real patients over the past three years, offering enough data so that machines can learn to accurately detect illnesses including breast cancer, and health problems with bones, the liver and lungs, said President and co-founder Eyal Gura. Company developers are writing specific algorithms for each health issue and three have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, according to Gura. The company says its product can help the medical industry deal with a growing shortage of radiologists amid more chronic diseases, an aging population and an expanding middle class seeking more advanced health care. According to the World Bank, the middle class in low and middle income countries will jump from 5 percent in 2005 to 25 percent in 2030.

Just how worried should we be about killer robots? To go by the opinions of a highly regarded group of scholars, including Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, Franz Wilczek, and Stuart Russell, we should be wary of the prospect of artificial intelligence rebelling against its makers. "One can imagine (AI) outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand," Hawking wrote in a 2014 article for The Independent. "Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all." The fear that our irresponsible creations might bring about the end of humanity is a common one.

As fast-food workers across the country vie for 15 per hour wages, many business owners have already begun to take humans out of the picture. "I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry -- it's cheaper to buy a 35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who's inefficient making 15 an hour bagging French fries -- it's nonsense and it's very destructive and it's inflationary and it's going to cause a job loss across this country like you're not going to believe," said former McDonald's (MCD) USA CEO Ed Rensi during an interview on the FOX Business Network's Mornings with Maria. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.3 million people earned the current minimum wage of 7.25 per hour with about 1.7 million having wages below the federal minimum in 2014. These three million workers combined made up 3.9 percent of all hourly paid workers. "It's not just going to be in the fast food business. Franchising is the best business model in the United States. It's dependent on people that have low job skills that have to grow. Well if you can't get people a reasonable wage, you're going to get machines to do the work. It's going to happen whether you like it or not. And the more you push this it's going to happen faster," Rensi added.

A company claims it can identify terrorists, paedophiles and ace poker players simply by looking at their face. Faception, an Israeli start-up, says its technology can spot character traits that are undetectable to the naked eye. The company claims its software classified nine of the 11 Paris massacre jihadists as terrorists from their facial features without inputting any prior knowledge of their involvement. It appears to have been so successful, the firm says it is now working with a homeland security agency to help identify criminals. Shai Gilboa, Faception chief executive, said: 'We understand the human much better than other humans understand each other.

Getting stuck in a traffic jam can be one of the most frustrating parts of travelling around a busy city. Now engineers in China, the world's most populated country, have come up with a way to overcome the problem of getting around in traffic. Designs for a new elevated bus has been unveiled at a tech expo in China, which will apparently be able to carry 1,200 passengers over the top of cars and let traffic to pass underneath it. A model of a new elevated bus (pictured) has been unveiled at a tech expo in China, which will allegedly carry over 1,000 passengers over the top of cars, to allow traffic to pass underneath it. The scale model of the'Transit Elevated Bus' was demonstrated this week at the 19th China Beijing International High-Tech Expo.