GWEN IFILL: Now we continue our series about artificial intelligence, A.I., where computers are able to make intelligent decisions without human input. As computing power gets stronger and people continue to generate massive amounts of data, A.I. is making its way into the marketplace and into your doctor's examination room. Hari Sreenivasan has the latest in series on breakthroughs in invention and innovation. HARI SREENIVASAN: Advances in artificial intelligence continue to push the boundaries between science fiction and reality, like this brain-controlled device at the University of Minnesota. It enables users to fly a model helicopter with only their thoughts.

Saqib Shaikh is a software developer from London, England who is currently working for Microsoft on the firm's Bing search engine. Shaikh lost his sight when he was seven years old. Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) has strived to be a leader in the artificial intelligence arena, developing advanced AI theories and applications that permit machines to learn, evolve and make independent decisions. Microsoft's AI research team is building … Microsoft certainly hasn't been scared off doing further experiments with artificial intelligence after the whole racist bot debacle. The tech firm is back with an AI powered API that can identify (or at least try) what's in a picture.

This panel gives attendees an opportunity to see and hear how Intelligent Assistants evolve into resources – ranging from personal avatars to robots – that use natural language understanding and machine learning to improve aspects of our daily lives. Speakers: Shawn Edmunds, VP, North America, ValidSoft Alex Lebrun, Co-Founder, Wit.ai, Facebook Wally Brill, Principal Consultant, 21contact Doc Searls, Author, "The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge" From Intelligent Assistants Conference 2015 (Oct.

Favourite ... Jon Snow was killed in the season finale of Game of Thrones. SIRI is great at finding directions -- maybe even to Westeros. It turns out your Apple gadget's artificial intelligence is a Game of Thrones super fan and will happily answer all your questions about the gory fantasy series. Your iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch will even come up with different responses if you ask the same question twice. If you ask, "Is Jon Snow dead?" in a reference to the show's season cliffhanger, Siri might reply: "Well, you know what they say to Death ... But why would tomorrow be any better? Puppy love ... Jon Snow finds Ghost as a pup in Game of Thrones. Or, as Scandal actress Kerry Washington showed on Twitter, Siri might respond with a reference to Snow's canine companion. I just hope someone is setting up doggie daycare for Ghost."

Iran concluded a major, three-day military exercise Friday intended to review the readiness of its armed forces. The drills, called "Great Prophet," also field-tested new military technology, including the Iranian-made Karrar tank and the Hamasseh drone, Middle East Monitor reported. The Iranian air force, elite units and local forces were involved in the exercise. The drills covered four provinces in Iran's southeast region near the border with Pakistan. The exercises came amid growing tensions in the area over the protracted civil war in Syria and the threat posed by the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS.

The Lenny Letter This is a project from Lena Dunham and her partner, Jenni Konner, and is essentially just an email newsletter, but it has become very popular. It offers perspective on politics and society for a mostly female audience and it is attracted over 400,000 subscribers in six months. What's most important about the Lenny Letter is that it has a 65% open rate and advertisers are taking notice. In tech and growth hacking, engagement is still what matters most in marketing. You can check out the Lenny Letter at lennyletter.com.

Scientists at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA have developed a new technique for identifying cancer cells in blood samples faster and more accurately than the current standard methods. In one common approach to testing for cancer, doctors add biochemicals to blood samples. Those biochemicals attach biological "labels" to the cancer cells, and those labels enable instruments to detect and identify them. However, the biochemicals can damage the cells and render the samples unusable for future analyses. There are other current techniques that don't use labeling but can be inaccurate because they identify cancer cells based only on one physical characteristic.

A patient walks into the emergency department at Rush University Medical Center with a fever and bloodshot eyes. In days of yore, doctors would have to exhaust the obvious possibilities -- like a flu or allergic reaction -- before finally figuring a patient was suffering from Zika virus. But Rush says its predictive software, a system called Guardian, helps alert doctors to a possible diagnosis hours faster than physicians normally would. When dealing with more rare diagnoses, doctors typically think, "it's going to be everything else besides smallpox," said Dr. Dino Rumoro, who's been working on the technology for more than 20 years and is the chairman of Rush's Department of Emergency Medicine. "This gives the clinician a crutch."

In fact, some of Weizenbaum's colleagues and students exhibited very strong emotional connections to the program. As the preceding passage suggests, Weizenbaum discovered something disturbing: people approached the bot as if it were a real, intelligent entity who was genuinely interested in their condition -- even when they knew that it was a computer program. This condition is now referred to as the "Eliza Effect", and although the behaviour of its sufferers isn't always as extreme as the case above (alone time with robots is not consistently requested), it propelled Weizenbaum to become a staunch critic of AI. The Eliza Effect is a prime example of how an object, in this case a typewriter, can form a visceral connection with just a few rudimentary human elements. All it took to elevate a keyboard and screen to a human level was a basic conversational program.

Yemeni government troops newly-trained by a Saudi-led coalition battling Yemen's Shiite rebels routed al-Qaida militants on Friday from a city in the country's south, military officials said. Houta, the capital of Lahj province, is now firmly under government control, the officials said. The coalition-trained troops, which are loyal to Yemen's internationally recognized government, were based in the southern Al-Anad base from where they launched the fight to retake the provincial capital, they added. The officials said the militants fled on Friday from Houta to nearby towns and farmland. The assault came at a time the coalition helicopters and U.S. drones have waged series of airstrikes targeting al-Qaida hideouts and strongholds across Yemen's southern region.