At first glance, the black and white Robomart vehicle, with its minimalist design and rounded body, looks like a vision of the future. But if you ignore the lack of a steering wheel and human driver, the electric, grocery-filled machine -- about the size of a minivan -- is actually something of a throwback. For much of U.S. history, perishable kitchen items such as produce, milk, eggs and ice arrived outside people's homes on a daily basis, first by horse-drawn wagon and later by truck. This curbside service would eventually fall victim to refrigeration, automobiles and the rise of the supermarket, making weekly shopping trips the modern American norm, according to Boston Hospitality Review. Now Robomart -- a Santa Clara, Calif.-based start-up -- seeks to merge the old with the new.

An Alaska company that makes a parachute system for drones came to Rome to conduct federal validation tests for its product. Indemnis sent a team to the New York Unmanned Aerial Systems Test Site at Griffiss International Airport in Rome in December to demonstrate its Nexus parachute system, according to a news release issued Wednesday by DJI, the Shenzhen, China-based maker of a line of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, and NUAIR. DJI has lines of drones for use in photography, film making, law enforcement, construction, agriculture and consumers. The companies began working together two years ago to develop a system that can deploy instantly if a drone gets into trouble. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration prohibits most drone operations over people, but operators can get a waiver if they show they have safety measures.

The College of American Pathologists (CAP) today published the first-ever evidence-based clinical practice guideline to help laboratories use quantitative image analysis (QIA) in HER2 immunohistochemistry (IHC) testing for breast cancer. The guideline was published in an early online edition of the Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine. QIA is the computer algorithm-assisted detection of specific features in an image following the digitalization of a glass slide image. Advancements in genomics, computing, and imaging technology are spurring new opportunities to use QIA for diagnostic testing. And while it has been shown to improve consistency and accuracy of interpretation compared to manual scoring by pathologists, the lack of a clinical guideline has been a barrier to wider QIA adoption.

At first glance, the black and white Robomart, with its minimalist design and rounded body, looks like a vision of the future. But if you ignore the lack of steering wheels and human drivers, the electric vehicle -- about the size of a minivan -- is actually something of a throwback. For much of American history, perishable kitchen items like produce, milk, eggs and ice arrived outside people's homes on a daily basis, first by horse-drawn wagon and later by truck. This curbside service would eventually fall victim to refrigeration, automobiles and the rise of the supermarket, making weekly shopping trips the modern American norm, according to Boston Hospitality Review. Now Robomart -- a Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup -- seeks to merge the old with the new.

Deep learning is a buzzword that has been hyped by the business and technical press for years, often with relatively meager results that failed to live up to expectations. But over the past 18 months, according to a new report from Tractica, the true power of deep learning has been realized, thanks to advances in hardware and algorithms that use pattern recognition applied in a continuous learning loop, enabling them to train themselves to perform tasks without requiring explicit programming code. The sheer power of deep learning, however, is likely to lead to the development of more powerful and disruptive applications of tomorrow, such as driverless cars, personalized education, and preventative healthcare. Tractica forecasts that, with this expanding set of applications, the worldwide deep learning software market will grow from $3 billion in 2017 to $67.2 billion by 2025. "Deep learning has been a key point of focus for many companies, given its potential to transform entire industries," says principal analyst Keith Kirkpatrick.

Spell recently announced a new, end-to-end deep learning and artificial intelligence platform that is designed to help teams and businesses across various industries to build with artificial intelligence. Besides unveiling the new product offerings, the company also announced that it has closed a $15 million funding round that was led by Two Sigma Ventures and Eclipse Ventures. The company said it will utilizing this investment to integrate more advancements and drive even bigger organizations, while still bringing artificial intelligence and deep learning to more and more members of the global workforce. Serkan Piantino, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Spell, said, "AI may seem so advanced, but behind the scenes, 90 percent of the work is often spent on the basic mechanics of getting data, software and computation in the right place. Rather than having to start from scratch to build dozens of machines or physically move data from place to place, teams and businesses can run real experiments from a laptop at a coffee shop. The level of access and collaboration offered by Spell invites both greater productivity and adoption, as far more people will be able to harness the power of machine learning. It'll no longer be reserved for the biggest of companies."

A live demonstration uses artificial intelligence and facial recognition in dense crowd spatial-temporal technology at the Horizon Robotics exhibit at the Las Vegas Convention Center during CES 2019 in Las Vegas on January 10, 2019. Venture capitalists are warning the Trump administration not to overly restrict the export of new technology such as artificial intelligence -- insisting that could make it much harder for American start-ups to sell their products abroad. The Commerce Department is considering whether to slap tighter export controls on a long list of new technologies, including AI and quantum computers, to prevent U.S. technology from falling into the hands of foreign adversaries. But the National Venture Capital Association, in public comments on the potential rule last week, voiced concerns that the list of technology the government defines as critical to national security is far too broad. The venture capitalists only want to see the department limit the export of technology specific to defense -- not a whole category of technology so broad it could include consumer products such as self-driving cars and voice assistants.

A research team led by investigators from the National Institutes of Health and Global Good has developed a computer algorithm that can analyze digital images of a woman's cervix and accurately identify precancerous changes that require medical attention. This artificial intelligence (AI) approach, called automated visual evaluation, has the potential to revolutionize cervical cancer screening, particularly in low-resource settings. To develop the method, researchers used comprehensive datasets to "train" a deep, or machine, learning algorithm to recognize patterns in complex visual inputs, such as medical images. The approach was created collaboratively by investigators at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and Global Good, a fund at Intellectual Ventures, and the findings were confirmed independently by experts at the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The results appeared in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute on January 10, 2019.

After more than a century on the road, the automobile is ready for a major redesign. Instead, it was the production-ready technologies that will infuse AI into the next generation of cars for safer, more efficient driving in the near term. And, making these compute-intensive products a mass-market reality is the high-performance, energy-efficient NVIDIA DRIVE platform. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Mercedes-Benz Executive VP Sajjad Khan announce new partnership at CES 2019.NVIDIA These new vehicles are being redesigned from the inside out. To handle the compute requirements of autonomous driving and an intelligent cockpit, Mercedes-Benz is working with NVIDIA to develop a new centralized vehicle computing architecture.

The CSIRO has today launched a new artificial intelligence-powered platform that brings together a trove of land-use data for agribusiness to better predict performance. The Rural Intelligence Platform combines a variety of technology developed by CSIRO over the years, including the Digital Soil Map and satellite imagery analysis, to comprehensively assess and monitor rural land anywhere across the country. To do so, RIP takes into account elements like access to water, crop types, rainfall, drought impact, yield and historical productivity. Climate information is also interpreted to show how drought, frost, and heat stress for livestock are likely to impact on farmers. The platform combines all of these features using machines learning, and incorporates an AI-initiated Automation Valuation Model - the same technology used by real estate agencies to gain a quick, relatively accurate estimate of a residential property's value - that the CSIRO said has can instantly value rural properties with up 90 percent accuracy.