Apple CEO Tim Cook was the subject of an in-depth interview published over the weekend in The Washington Post in which he talked about a wide range of issues, including augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI), the future of the iPhone, and the company's North Star. In the interview, Cook dismissed the idea of the iPhone accounting for two-thirds of Apple's revenues being problematic, calling the smartphone's dominance a privilege and expressing his belief that one day, every person on earth will own a smartphone. Cook also defended the company's progress in AI technology, pointing to the expanding capabilities of Siri, the digital assistant that Apple launched in 2011. Apple is opening up Siri to third-party developers so the technology can be used by other applications -- such as Uber or Lyft, as Cook pointed out -- to help users complete tasks faster and more efficiently. Earlier this month, the company reportedly bought Turi, a Seattle-based startup company and the latest purchase in a string of acquisitions aimed at bolstering its machine learning and AI capabilities.

Today, The Washington Post posted a new in-depth interview with Tim Cook, where he discusses his first five years as Apple CEO, the company's future, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, and much more. The interview, which includes not only text but also video of Cook talking over a variety of topics, is lengthy and covers a lot of content. Cook talked about services and how important they are to Apple's present and future: "Its services business, which includes things like iTunes, iCloud and a mobile payments service, is projected to be the size of a Fortune 100 business next year -- all on its own." Cook also discussed some of the mistakes that Apple has made in the past, including the hire of John Browett, who ran Apple Retail stores for a short period of time. Today we have a product we're proud of.

The dream of one day having an entity with artificial intelligence diagnose your condition and recommend the best treatment may still be years away, but at IBM Watson Health and elsewhere, the technology and capability is evolving at such a rapid pace that such a function could well be part of regular healthcare practices. About a month ago I interviewed Deborah DiSanzo, who is IBM's General Manager for Watson Health. She was previously the CEO of Phillips Healthcare but now spearheads the development of Watson Health into a multi-billion-dollar business unit for IBM. "I was at one of our larger partners who is actually using our application from IBM called Clinical Trial Matching, which enables oncologists to, from the hundreds of thousands of clinical trials that are going on, match the appropriate clinical trial to the patient. And the breast oncologist that I was speaking to said it is fantastic because it "enables me to speak to my patients better, I turn the screen around and I show her what the particular type of breast cancer she has, how that matches with the top three clinical trials that she could go on.""

Seymour Papert with LEGO Mindstorms robotics kits, which were named in recognition of Papert's seminal book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. Seymour Papert with LEGO Mindstorms robotics kits, which were named in recognition of Papert's seminal book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. The field of educational technology is mourning a visionary whose work was considered 50 years ahead of its time. Seymour Papert, who died July 31 at age 88, was a mathematician and computer scientist who spent decades at MIT. "Seymour was one of the very first people to recognize that new computer technologies could be used by kids to create things in new ways and express themselves," Mitchel Resnick, a professor of learning research at MIT and a longtime colleague and friend, told NPR Ed. "It's amazing that Seymour was thinking these ideas in the 1960s," Resnick adds, "when computers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but he foresaw the day that every child would have access to a computer." The great theme of Papert's work and life was the nature of intelligence, or what he called thinking about thinking.

Jana Eggers will be speaking on "How to Scope an AI Project" at the upcoming O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data and data science. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. In this episode of the O'Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Jana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics. Most recently she has been helping companies across many industries adopt AI technologies as a way to enable a range of intelligent data applications.

British actor Kenny Baker, who starred as R2-D2 in six Star Wars films, has died aged 81 after a long illness, his niece has confirmed. Baker made his name as the robot in the first Star Wars film in 1977 alongside Anthony Daniels's C-3PO character. Star Wars creator George Lucas paid tribute to a "real gentleman" and Mark Hamill - Luke Skywalker in the films - said he had lost "a lifelong friend". Born in Birmingham, Baker's other films include Time Bandits and Flash Gordon. After starring in the original Star Wars film he went on to appear in the sequels, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and the three prequels between 1999 and 2005.

Airships, which are distinct from blimps by being much more rigid and sounding much less silly, are one of those unusual technologies that has been undergoing a resurgence recently after falling out of favor half a century ago. Airships have potential to be a very practical and cost effective way to move massive amounts of stuff from one place to another place, especially if the another place is low on infrastructure and has a reasonable amount of patience. Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works has been developing a particular kind of airship called a hybrid airship, which uses a combination of aerodynamics and lifting gas to get airborne, for the last decade or so. The P-791 technology demonstrator first flew in 2006, and a company called Hybrid Enterprises is taking Lockheed's airship technology to commercialization. Their LMH-1 will be able to carry over 20,000 kilograms of whatever you want, along with 19 passengers, up to 2,500 kilometers, and it's going to be a real thing: Hybrid Airships recently closed a US 480 million contract to built 12 of them for cargo delivery.

Laura Hatfield and Sherri Rose are Assistant Professors specializing in biostatistics at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Health Care Policy. Laura received her PhD in Biostatistics from the University of Minnesota and Sherri completed her PhD in Biostatistics at UC Berkeley. They are developing novel statistical methods for health policy problems. Rose: I'd definitely say a statistician. Even when I'm working on things that fall into the categories of data science or machine learning, there's underlying statistical theory guiding that process, be it for methods development or applications.

Among the innovations pioneered by John White during his years as CEO of ACM was a new relationship with the Klaus Tschira Foundation that sponsors the Heidelberg Laureate Foruma [HLF] in the third quarter of each year. The attendees include about 200 math or computer science students and recipients of the mathematics Fields Medal, the Nevanlinna Prize, the Abel Prize, and ACM's A.M. Turing award for computer science. I have had the pleasure of attending the first three meetings of the HLF. Since 1951, however, there has been an annual meeting of Nobel laureatesb with support from several organizations including the aforementioned Klaus Tschira Foundation. The HLF is patterned after the Nobel meeting: students meet with a collection of participating laureates. It was decided last year to link these two events by having a Nobel laureate address the participants of the HLF and to have an HLF laureate address the participants of the Nobel annual meeting.

The invention of religion is a big bang in human history. Gods and spirits helped explain the unexplainable, and religious belief gave meaning and purpose to people struggling to survive. But what if everything we thought we knew about religion was wrong? What if belief in the supernatural is window dressing on what really matters--elaborate rituals that foster group cohesion, creating personal bonds that people are willing to die for. Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse thinks too much talk about religion is based on loose conjecture and simplistic explanations. Whitehouse directs the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. For years he's been collaborating with scholars around the world to build a massive body of data that grounds the study of religion in science. Whitehouse draws on an array of disciplines--archeology, ethnography, history, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science--to construct a profile of religious practices. Whitehouse's fascination with religion goes back to his own groundbreaking field study of traditional beliefs in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s.