"Hindsait's main goal has been to develop a robust, AI platform that specifically addresses the needs of healthcare organizations," said Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Harpreet Singh Buttar. "This platform assists in reducing unnecessary health services, eliminating errors and biases in care delivery and improving overall quality of care." Hindsait's system has proven to be highly adaptable and scalable, based on unique use case requirements. Their capabilities range from natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to cognitive computing and predictive analytics that directly helps providers and payers resolve healthcare delivery issues. Hindsait boasts a wide range of services, right from analyzing unstructured data, such as clinical notes, patient charts, and prescriptions, to real-time optimization of diagnostic and treatment plans.

Once a year, when Slava Epstein was growing up in Moscow, his mother took him to the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy, a showcase for the wonders of Soviet life. The expo featured many things--from industrial harvesters to Uzbek wine--but Epstein, who began going in the nineteen-sixties, when he was eight or nine, was interested primarily in one: the Cosmos Pavilion, a building the size of a hangar, with a ceiling shaped like a giant inverted parabola. Space fever was running high in the city. Since 1961, when Yuri Gagarin orbited the globe, unmanned vessels had been launched toward Mars and Venus. Beside the expo's entrance, the towering Monument to the Conquerors of Space depicted a probe swooping up to the heavens. The Pavilion displayed futuristic technology--Vostok rockets and Soyuz orbiters--but Epstein was less interested in the glories of advanced thruster design than in the glories of space. He wanted to devote himself to astronomy. When a textbook that he found on the topic began with algebraic formulas, he prodded his older brother to explain them. During high school, he enrolled in classes in physics and math at Moscow State University. His parents disapproved of his desired career: because he is half Jewish, Epstein would face harsh Soviet quotas limiting Jews in the study of physics, a field deemed relevant to national security. But after his first lecture the professor invited him for a walk, and affirmed what they had been saying all along. "Don't do it," he warned. Soviet Russia may have been a fatalist's paradise, but from a young age Epstein felt that he was hardwired for optimism. He convinced himself that what is truly important in science is the ability to connect ideas, no matter the field, and so he took up biology. Rather than telescopes, he would use microscopes, which he began taking with him on trips to the White Sea, near the Arctic Circle, to study protozoa along the shore--research that could be conducted with minimal state interference. Over time, he grew interested in even smaller, more ancient forms of life: bacteria. Studying microbes inevitably causes a reordering of one's perceptions: for more than two billion years, they were the only life on this planet, and they remain in many ways its dominant life form. To a remarkable extent, the microbial cosmos was less explored than the actual cosmos: precisely how the organisms evolve, replicate, fight, and communicate remains unclear. Nearly all of microbiology, Epstein eventually learned, was built on the study of a tiny fraction of microbial life, perhaps less than one per cent, because most bacteria could not be grown in a laboratory culture, the primary means of analyzing them. By the time he matured as a scientist, many researchers had given up trying to cultivate new species, writing off the majority as "dark matter"--a term used in astronomy for an inscrutable substance that may make up most of the universe but cannot be seen.

The pioneering artificial intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky died Sunday. So we thought it would be appropriate to ask for an obituary from one of his virtual descendants: Wordsmith, the automated news-writing bot from the company Automated Insights. It takes structured data--stuff that fits into a spreadsheet--and fits it into templates of increasing complexity. But Minsky was always interested in the differences and similarities between human and machine cognition, and arguably Wordsmith is cogitating every bit as hard as human reporters do on deadline. "You can start with things like their name, their age, the day the died, how they died. You can imagine in a spreadsheet, 'significant accomplishments 1, 2, and 3.'" So in this case, the template is a one-off rather than fully automated, and the data was harder to scrape.

Whether robots will replace doctors in the future is just one of the questions Professor Lilford will be addressing in a panel discussion titled The Picture of Health: Exploring the Future of Medicine, as part of the University of Warwick's Festival of the Imagination. Running from October 16-17, the festival marks the university's 50th anniversary, showcasing its work and expertise with a series of talks, live shows and interaction exhibitions on the theme of "Imagining the future". This particular event will take the form of a Q&A with the audience, focusing on what the world of medicine will look like 50 years from now. Thanks to Professor Lilford's 40 year career, in which he's done everything from practising as a doctor specialising in obstetrics and gynaecology to working for the Department of Health, he's well placed to tackle any questions that come up. It promises to be a fascinating peek into the wards and surgeries of the future.

A University of Surrey professor was'overwhelmed' after being appointed a CBE in the Queen's Birthday honours for his career and work in sociology and engineering. Professor Nigel Gilbert founded the Social and Computer Sciences research group in 1984 which focuses on applying social science to the design of artificial intelligence systems. He established the Centre for Research in Social Simulation in 1997 and it is still based at the Guildford university campus. Prof Gilbert said of being appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire: "It was very overwhelming. I received the letter about three weeks ago, a brown envelope from the cabinet office. "At first I thought it was a tax bill.

We met up with Régis Vincent, Head of Software at SRI Robotics, a unit of SRI International, which is a non-profit, independent research centre serving government and industry. Located in Menlo Park at the heart of Silicon Valley, SRI International runs projects for government agencies, notably the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) – the US Ministry of Defence agency which develops technologies for military use – as well as private sector players, both large firms and startups – intended to develop disruptive innovations. The stated aim of SRI International is to move R&D from the laboratory to the marketplace. SRI is hardly a household name, but the organisation has nevertheless been behind a large number of the devices which we now use in our daily lives. Since the research centre was founded 65 years ago, its engineers have been closely involved in the development of such innovations as colour television then colour photographic film in the 1950s, ultrasound for medical diagnostics in the 1980s, computers as we know them today, Arpanet, a 1960s precursor to the Internet, and more recently Siri – the first-ever virtual personal assistant, later acquired by Apple.

Knowing that an AI wrote Sunspring makes the movie more fun to watch, especially once you know how the cast and crew put it together. Director Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that includes the 48-Hour Film Challenge, where contestants are given a set of prompts (mostly props and lines) that have to appear in a movie they make over the next two days. Sharp's longtime collaborator, Ross Goodwin, is an AI researcher at New York University, and he supplied the movie's AI writer, initially called Jetson. As the cast gathered around a tiny printer, Benjamin spat out the screenplay, complete with almost impossible stage directions like "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor." Then Sharp randomly assigned roles to the actors in the room.

Knowing that an AI wrote Sunspring makes the movie more fun to watch, especially once you know how the cast and crew put it together. Director Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that includes the 48-Hour Film Challenge, where contestants are given a set of prompts (mostly props and lines) that have to appear in a movie they make over the next two days. Sharp's longtime collaborator, Ross Goodwin, is an AI researcher at New York University, and he supplied the movie's AI writer, initially called Jetson. As the cast gathered around a tiny printer, Benjamin spat out the screenplay, complete with almost impossible stage directions like "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor." Then Sharp randomly assigned roles to the actors in the room.

This film is brought to you by the World Technology Network. Job displacement due to automation of ever increasing range of professions - from truck drivers and lawyers, to writers and financial analysts - is likely to be one of the greatest challenges of the next couple of decades. A 2013 Oxford study predicts that up to 47% of jobs could be lost in the United States - nearly twice the unemployment rate of the Great Depression. Why wait till it's too late? Let's talk about this elephant in the room now.

Knowing that an AI wrote Sunspring makes the movie more fun to watch, especially once you know how the cast and crew put it together. Director Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that includes the 48-Hour Film Challenge, where contestants are given a set of prompts (mostly props and lines) that have to appear in a movie they make over the next two days. Sharp's longtime collaborator, Ross Goodwin, is an AI researcher at New York University, and he supplied the movie's AI writer, initially called Jetson. As the cast gathered around a tiny printer, Benjamin spat out the screenplay, complete with almost impossible stage directions like "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor." Then Sharp randomly assigned roles to the actors in the room.