Staff at Alder Hey children's hospital in Liverpool are teaming up with IBM Watson to develop an app to help patients and doctors work better together. The app will answer any questions which parents and children may have about their hospital stay. It will also allow children to create a profile so that clinicians know things such as their favourite colour. Later, it may be used to offer insights into treatments. Watson is an AI platform that is already advising doctors on treatments in a dozen cancer hospitals in the US, trawling through data - it can read 40 million documents in 15 seconds - to offer insights into possible treatments.

That represents a strategic error. The U.S. can and should sell more drones as a way of complementing its foreign policy objectives. After all, some of the top threats to U.S. national security are the very nonstate actors that countries in the Middle East and Africa are buying drones in order to fight. The question is a quasi-legal one. In accordance with the Missile Technology Control Regime, a voluntary arrangement established in the late 1980s and now followed by 34 countries, the United States subjects the sale of military drones and other Category 1 items to "a strong presumption of denial" when determining whether to export to a particular country.

A SpaceX capsule is headed back to Earth with precious science samples from NASA's one-year spaceman. The Dragon left the International Space Station on Wednesday morning, bound for an afternoon splashdown in the Pacific. The station's big robot arm set the Dragon free over Australia. The capsule had been at the station since April 10, dropping off supplies as well as an experimental, inflatable room that will pop open in two weeks. Nearly 4,000 pounds of items are packed into the Dragon, including blood and urine samples from astronaut Scott Kelly's one-year mission.

THE French Riviera is lovely at this time of year. The steering wheel spins to take the car round a bend – but my hands stay in my lap. And since there's no need to keep my eyes on the road, I'm free to enjoy the beachfront view. An oddly pixelated man with a two-dimensional windsurfer under his arm gives me the eye. Sadly, my Riviera is being projected on a large wrap-around screen in a room-sized simulator in Wokingham, UK.

I'll introduce the Hierarchical Risk Parity (HRP) approach. HRP portfolios address three major concerns of quadratic optimizers in general and Markowitz's CLA in particular: instability, concentration and under-performance. HRP applies modern mathematics (graph theory and machine learning techniques) to build a diversified portfolio based on the information contained in the covariance matrix. However, unlike quadratic optimizers, HRP does not require the invertibility of the covariance matrix. In fact, HRP can compute a portfolio on an ill-degenerated or even a singular covariance matrix, an impossible feat for quadratic optimizers.

STAR performs in vivo bowel surgery on a pig, supervised by postdoctoral fellow Azad Shademan and senior engineer Ryan Decker. We're not saying that one day your surgeon might look like Johnny Five, but it's looking more and more possible that the fingers getting all up in your guts will be metal, rather than flesh and bone. A team of scientists with the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC has created a robot capable of performing surgery on soft tissue. Designed and programmed by Azad Shademan, Peter Kim and their team, the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot proved even more adept at soft-tissue surgery than experienced human surgeons, at least in this particular test surgery, according to a paper published today in Science Translational Medicine. To improve on current technology to a point where this was possible, the team worked on improving the robot's vision.

Two weeks back, my IBM team helped organize "Take Your Child To Work Day", a day for encouraging children to learn more about the respective careers and companies of their parents. At IBM, we had a unique challenge: explaining the world of IBM Watson. Watson, IBM's prolific computer system that uses natural language, hypothesis generation, and evidence-based learning capabilities to strengthen decision support, remains one of the technology industry's most exciting and complicated applications. With its own business group within IBM as of 2014 and an announced 10 billion in revenue over the next ten years, Watson has powered IBM's brand forward as a force to compete with in the cognitive era. From healthcare to education, Watson is looking to catalyze the way we make decisions everyday.

How did you become interested in artificial intelligence (AI)? I am a documentary filmmaker, writer and speaker. I was making a film around 15 years ago about AI and got to speak to some of the major players in the field, including Ray Kurzweil, the Director of Engineering at Google who started the singularity industry, and Rodney Brookes, the premier roboticist of our time who founded iRobot (a company that created the Roomba vaccum cleaner and robots for military use) and then established a company called Rethink Robotics. Both Kurzweil and Brookes were optimistic about the time when we will share the planet with smarter-than-human machines – and I was too. I was, and still am, a gigantic proponent of AI, despite my book's title Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era.

"The Nervana team is developing a full-stack deep learning platform to enable organizations to use deep learning to tackle previously unsolvable problems. We believe our inclusion in the Cool Vendor report by Gartner validates our mission to make scalable artificial intelligence widely accessible and to enable disruptive new applications across a range of industries," said Naveen Rao, co-founder and CEO of Nervana. In February, Nervana launched Nervana Cloud, a full-stack hosted platform for deep learning. Based on neon, Nervana's open source deep learning framework, Nervana Cloud helps businesses develop and deploy high-accuracy deep learning solutions at a fraction of the cost of building their own infrastructure and data science teams. Utilizing the Nervana Engine, an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that is custom-designed and optimized for deep learning, Nervana Cloud has been optimized down to the silicon to handle the most complex machine learning training at scale.

LOS ALTOS, CA--(Marketwired - May 11, 2016) - Today, xiQ, a leader in real-time personalized market intelligence, announced that GE-spinoff Genpact (NYSE: G), a global leader in digitally powered business process management and services and architect of the Lean Digital enterprise, has deployed xiQ's Marketing Intelligence Platform, powered by IBM Watson. The platform is enterprise-wide and is applied to its global leadership, sales, marketing and industry business unit executives. By implementing the cognitive computing-powered xiQ platform, Genpact is now able to identify real-time market intelligence that further strengthens its ability to support client growth, efficiency and business agility. "Thought leadership is a key driver of Genpact's'Lean Digital Transformation' vision," said Gianni Giacomelli, Chief Marketing Officer and SVP of Product Innovation, at Genpact. "xiQ delivers real-time market intelligence to our leadership team, reducing the time to process critical information while improving decision making. With xiQ, we have digitalized the process of keeping our teams on the cutting edge, winning customer confidence and driving business growth."