A smartphone-based system for diagnosing respiratory diseases achieved an accuracy of 89 percent in a recent clinical study of 524 pediatric patients conducted by the company at Joondalup Health Campus (JHC) and Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH) in Perth, Western Australia. Perth-based ResApp essentially uses the smartphone microphone as a stethoscope to listen to a patient's breathing. But instead of relying solely on a doctor's ears to form a diagnosis from those sounds, ResApp has been developing machine-learning algorithms that will automatically determine which respiratory condition a patient might have, including pneumonia, asthma, bronchiolitis and COPD. In the future, the company hopes to integrate those algorithms into telehealth offerings as well as making them available for clinical use. ResApp released data from this trial previously in November, but that data set included fewer patients.

"It shows that people respond to robots in a primitive, social way," researcher Jamy Li said in the release. "Social conventions regarding touching someone else's private parts apply to a robot's body parts as well. This research has implications for both robot design and theory of artificial systems." As shown in the video above, the robot in the experiment also provides an anatomical definition of each body part touched. There were four female volunteers and six male volunteers in the small study, according to The Guardian.

From self-driving cars, to data driven programmes that solve complex problems in the worlds of business, healthcare and leisure, intelligent automation is already beginning to dramatically alter the workplace. Robots are becoming more common across different sectors, and their use is expanding from factories to more human-driven industries such as services. Within the next few months, diners at a leading restaurant in Singapore will experience something novel in its service - dishes will no longer be delivered by human waiters, but instead be flown to their tables. This is more than a gimmick. Once in service, restaurant employees will no longer have to rush dishes between the kitchen and the dining area – a process that is expected to boost staff productivity by 25%.

ARLINGTON: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing artificial intelligence that can help humans understand the floods of data they unleashed 50 years ago with the Internet and make better decisions, even in the heat of battle. Such "human-machine collaboration" -- informally known as the centaur model -- is the high-tech holy grail of the Defense Department's plan to counter Russian and Chinese advances, known as the Third Offset Strategy. "We've had some great conversations with the deputy," said DARPA director Arati Prabhakar, referring to the chief architect of Offset, Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work. "In many of our programs you'll see some of the technology components" of the strategy. "Fundamentally, what's behind the push of the Third Offset Strategy is this idea that the department needs to reinvigorate our ability to develop these advanced technologies," Prabhakar said.

Organizations do--companies, governments, hospitals, and political campaigns. They employ predictive analytics, technology that learns from data to render per-person predictions, one individual at a time. People have been struck by the final words in the title of my new book on this subject, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die (www.thepredictionbook.com). An old friend even sent me a photo of the book aside an onion, suggesting the material might be lightened to predict who will click, buy, lie, or cry. Or, we might consider changing it to, "The power to predict who will drink Coke, choke, or croak."

Waterloo-based messaging app Kik has launched a "bot shop" that will function a bit like Apple's App Store, only for chat bots. The Kik bot shop with exist as a special section in Kik's app. There, users can begin chatting with bot created by 16 partners, including Vine, Sephora, H&M and The Weather Channel. Prior to launching this new feature, Kik had dabbled with bots created by the likes of Vice Media and MTV, but Kik's 275 million registered users could only find the bots if Kik promoted them. So rather than switch from the Kik app, where users spend an average of 97 minutes per week, to a dedicated weather app, you ask the weather bot if it's still raining.

Facebook is using artificial intelligence (AI) to help users with visual impairment understand what their friends are sharing online. The Menlo Park-based social media company launched "automatic alternative text" on Monday, allowing people who use screen-reading software to receive summaries of what's displayed in Facebook photos. "While visual content provides a fun and expressive way for people to communicate online, consuming and creating it poses challenges for people who are blind or severely visually impaired," the company wrote in a blog post. "With more than 39 million people who are blind, and over 246 million who have a severe visual impairment, many people may feel excluded from the conversation around photos on Facebook. We want to build technology that helps the blind community experience Facebook the same way others enjoy it."

IBM is currently attempting to merge artificial intelligence and the blockchain into a single, powerful prototype. With blockchain tech's promise of near-frictionless value exchange and artificial intelligence's ability to accelerate the analysis of massive amounts of data, the joining of the two could mark the beginning of an entirely new paradigm. Over the past three months, IBM's chief architect in charge of Internet of Things security Tim Hahn has focused specifically on introducing the blockchain to his company's artificially intelligent computer named Watson. "What we're doing with blockchain and devices is enabling the information those devices supply to effect the blockchain…You begin to approach the kind of things we see in movies." Potential applications include using distributed ledgers to let devices perform tasks like running self-diagnoses at set times and more advanced services that may someday let regulators virtually go back in time to the point where a device failed and "to identify exactly what went wrong," Hahn said.

As Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jen-Hsun Huang stood gazing at the Martian surface -- a virtual reality simulation, of course -- he talked about a future for the company that investors should look forward to. At the company's annual GPU Technology Conference, which started here Tuesday, Huang in the opening keynote address told attendees that Nvidia's focus will be even more centered around its core GPU (graphics processing unit) technology. GPUs provide graphics on computers, in video games and in various other applications. Nvidia competes mostly with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in this field, but No. 1 chipmaker Intel (INTC) is among other rivals. Huang said the company's key markets will be virtual reality, autonomous cars and artificial intelligence, including chips for drones and deep learning.

In the 1950s, artificial intelligence (AI) became a hot topic of scientific conversation in science fiction novels. The prospect of attacks by intelligent machines became a trend that led the imagination down dark paths of technological domination. AI is no longer science fiction and is on a path of destruction, but not one that could have been predicted 60 years ago. It is playing no small role in the prevention of cybercrime, and leading the fight back in protecting data. Machine learning is providing teams with the capability to thwart APTs (advanced persistent threats) through zero day attacks and with the analytic prowess they need to identify both internal and external threats.