China's leading Internet search company, Baidu, says that data collected from its customers could be used to predict and preëmpt potentially deadly crowd gatherings in the real world. Baidu has an incredible amount of data to mine. Out of a total population of 1.35 billion in China, more than 657 million people use its services. The Baidu research also highlights how the digital trails left by Internet users can be used to understand city dynamics. Baidu's data is already being used in China to show city planners where to place transportation, facilities, or shops. However, some experts worry that such data mining might also help the government keep an eye out for social unrest.

NEW YORK, March 25, 2016 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- Today at 9:00 am EST, exClone Inc. announced the release of the Debate Guide Version 2.0 as a tool offered by the Wall Street Journal to its audience following the 2016 presidential elections. The Debate Guide brings direct quotes from what was discussed by the presidential candidates during the primetime debates, and the system is updated after each new debate. The tool allows users to compare the candidates for each issue discussed and brings quotes to particular questions through a dialogue, chatbot interface. Debate Guide 2.0 offers enhanced features that build on the success of the earlier beta versions. The Debate Guide's dialogue flow is a prime example to how advanced chatbots can handle content, knowledge, and expertise.

Artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly and poised to change the status quo in any number of industries, including healthcare. A recent report by Frost & Sullivan predicts the AI market in healthcare will reach 6 billion by 2021, up from just 600 million two years ago. With the shift to a value-based reimbursement model, ushered in with the Affordable Care Act, hospitals and providers are looking for new ways to increase efficiencies and improve patient outcomes. Cognitive solutions such as IBM's Watson system can assess huge amounts of patient data, provide guidance and decision support, and improve clinical workflow. The goal is to support the physician, not replace him or her, said Anil Jain, vice president of IBM's Watson Health and an internist and medical informatics specialist at the Cleveland Clinic.

A computer algebra system (CAS) is a software program that allows computation over mathematical expressions in a way which is similar to the traditional manual computations of mathematicians and scientists. The development of the computer algebra systems in the second half of the 20th century is part of the discipline of "computer algebra" or "symbolic computation", which has spurred work in algorithms over mathematical objects such as polynomials. Computer algebra systems may be divided in two classes: the specialized ones and the general purpose ones. The specialized ones are devoted to a specific part of mathematics, such as number theory, group theory, or teaching of elementary mathematics. General purpose computer algebra systems aim to be useful to a user working in any scientific field that requires manipulation of mathematical expressions. The library must cover not only the needs of the users, but also the needs of the simplifier.

At 1 p.m. in South Korea on March 9th, Google will attempt to make history. A program called AlphaGo, designed by Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence team, will match wits with Lee Sedol, one of the greatest Go players in the world. Sodol and AlphaGo will play a series of matches over the course of five days. If AlphaGo wins, it will be the latest in artificial intelligence's mastery of human games. Checkers fell in 1994, chess in 1997, and Jeopardy in 2011. Last October, AlphaGo became to first program to beat a professional Go player; now it's taking on one of the best players alive.

The six astronauts at the International Space Station got an early Easter treat this weekend with the arrival of a supply ship full of fresh food and experiments. Instead of the usual bunny, Saturday's delivery came via a swan -- Orbital ATK's Cygnus capsule, named after the swan constellation. The cargo carrier rocketed away from Cape Canaveral on Tuesday night. NASA astronaut Timothy Kopra used the station's big robot arm to grab the capsule, as the two craft soared 250 miles above the Indian Ocean. A Russian cargo ship will lift off in a few days, followed by a SpaceX supply run on April 8. NASA has turned to private industry to keep the space station stocked.

Microsoft Corp. Friday issued an apology after its artificial-intelligence chatbot Tay posted tweets, denying Holocaust and announcing feminists should "burn in hell" among many other racist posts. The company, however, said that the "coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability" in the chatbot that was launched Wednesday. "We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay. Tay is now offline and we'll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values," Peter Lee, Microsoft's vice president of research, said on the company's official blog. Microsoft introduced Tay as the chatbot designed to engage and entertain people through "casual and playful" conversation online.

The company launched the bot as an experiment in AI on Wednesday, and in less than a day, it began to tweet things like "Hitler was right I hate the jews" and "I f------ hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell." Tay is essentially one central program that anyone can chat with using Twitter, Kik or Groupme. As people talk to it, the bot picks up new language and learns to respond in new ways. But Tay also had a "vulnerability" that online trolls picked up on pretty quickly. By telling the bot to "repeat after me," Tay would retweet anything that someone said.

Artificial intelligence is one of the most exciting and transformative opportunities of our time. From my vantage point as a venture investor at Playfair Capital, where I focus on investing and building community around AI, I see this as a great time for investors to help build companies in this space. There are three key reasons. First, with 40 percent of the world's population now online, and more than 2 billion smartphones being used with increasing addiction every day (KPCB), we're creating data assets, the raw material for AI, that describe our behaviors, interests, knowledge, connections and activities at a level of granularity that has never existed. Second, the costs of compute and storage are both plummeting by orders of magnitude, while the computational capacity of today's processors is growing, making AI applications possible and affordable.

Just by typing the letters "A," "r-o-b," "w-r-o," "t-h-i," and "s-e-n" into the text messenger on a mobile phone, the predictive text function helped write that first sentence. What will do so is software such as StatsMonkey, which can automate sports reporting. The software analyzes statistics from a baseball game and "generates natural language text" to come up with phrases such as "Things looked bleak for the Angels when they trailed by two runs in the ninth inning" and even includes quotes from players. This is just one of the many well-researched examples presented by Martin Ford in his scarily intriguing new book, "Rise of the Robots." Ford is not some Luddite scared of technology, though.