Have you ever wanted to confess your crimes, bear your soul, and spill your secrets? Have you ever thought, "No, better to not. Better to suffer in silence than take the wild gamble of confiding in another fallible human being?" If so, lonely heart, there is a robot out there for you! New York-based production company Third Party Films will be traveling around NYC in the coming weeks with a "pop-up confessional booth."

From building two-seater unicycles, juggling robots to creating chess-playing machines, Claude Elwood Shannon was not just an information theorist. The gifted mathematician also used his skills to analyse the stock market with a system he designed though his methods remained unpublished. The American electrical engineer and cryptographer was the grandson of an inventor and a distant cousin of Thomas Edison and would earn money by repairing radios when he was a schoolboy. He went on to study electrical engineering and mathematics at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1936, and obtained his PhD in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1940. During the Second World War, he designed equipment to intercept V1 and V2 missiles and in Axis code-breaking and while working at Bell Labs, he is believed to have met codebreaker Alan Turing, though there is no record of their meeting.

Beth Kutscher is based in Mountain View, Calif., and covers healthcare innovation and digital health. Before joining Modern Healthcare in 2012, she was a content editor and healthcare reporter for the New York-based Mergermarket Group. She previously was news and online editor for Pharmaceutical Executive and deputy news editor and healthcare reporter for PRWeek. She has a bachelor's degree in English from Cornell University.

Forget PC doldrums and waning smartphone demand. Google thinks computers will one day cease being physical devices. "Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the'device' to fade away," Google chief executive officer Sundar Pichai wrote on Thursday in a letter to shareholders of parent Alphabet Inc. "Over time, the computer itself -- whatever its form factor -- will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day." Instead of online information and activity happening mostly on the rectangular touch screens of smartphones, Pichai sees artificial intelligence (AI) powering increasingly formless computers. "We will move from mobile-first to an AI-first world," he said.

Do they miss you when you're away on business? Can they put on a VR headset without their parents' help? That last one is pretty important. The year is zipping by, but before we launch full-force into next month, there's just about enough time for a quick roundup of the best updates and launches in April. It was recently revealed that Google was testing a new app for travelers, and now we have a better idea of what it might do.

With an ever-increasing volume of electronic data being collected by the healthcare system, researchers are exploring the use of machine learning--a subfield of artificial intelligence--to improve medical care and patient outcomes. An overview of machine learning and some of the ways it could contribute to advancements in plastic surgery are presented in a special topic article in the May issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). "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," write Dr. Jonathan Kanevsky of McGill University, Montreal, and colleagues. They highlight some key areas in which machine learning and "Big Data" could contribute to progress in plastic and reconstructive surgery. Machine Learning Shows Promise in Plastic Surgery Research and Practice Machine learning analyzes historical data to develop algorithms capable of knowledge acquisition.

It is said of the ancient Chinese game go that the number of possible positions on its board exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe. This is old news, presumably, to masters of go and master mathematicians. To the rest of us it came as something of a shock when it became common knowledge in March, the occasion being the defeat -- shocking in itself -- of a world-ranking go master by a mere (so we would have said, once upon a time) computer. Or perhaps, giving it a positive spin, we should say "victory" instead of "defeat": a computer's victory over a mere human. What is the human brain to make of such facts?

When you think of artificial intelligence, the first image that likely comes to mind is one of sentient robots that walk, talk, and emote like humans. It's known as machine learning, and it revolves around enlisting computers in the task of sorting through the massive amounts of data that modern technology has allowed us to generate (a.k.a. One of the places machine learning is turning out to be the most beneficial is in the environmental sciences, which have generated huge amounts of information from monitoring Earth's various systems -- underground aquifers, the warming climate, or animal migration, for example. A slew of projects have been popping up in this relatively new field, called computational sustainability, that combine data gathered about the environment with a computer's ability to discover trends and make predictions about the future of our planet. This is useful to scientists and policy-makers because it can help them develop plans for how to live and survive in our changing world.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently announced the company will be integrating a dose of artificial intelligence in their products, making information and knowledge available for everyone. Artificial intelligence (AI) is definitely on the rise as many innovators and entrepreneurs recently vowed to invest more time and money on AI-driven programs. In fact, Google and chip-maker Movidius are planning to make AI more accessible through their new innovations. In Google's annual letter published Thursday, 43-year-old CEO Sundar Pichai revealed its major plans for the future. According to CNET, Google will be integrating a dose of artificial intelligence and will make information and knowledge available for everyone.

One good thing about doing machine learning at present is that people actually use it! The back-ends of many systems we interact with on a daily basis are driven by machine learning. In most such systems, as users interact with the system, it is natural for the system designer to wish to optimize the models under the hood over time, in a way that improves the user experience. To ground the discussion a bit, let us consider the example of an online portal, that is trying to present interesting news stories to its user. A user comes to the portal and based on whatever information the portal has on the user, it recommends one (or more) news stories.