SAN FRANCISCO, June 9 (Reuters) - Apple Inc announced a series of long-awaited enhancements to its App Store on Wednesday, but the new features may not ease concerns of developers and analysts who say that the App Store model - and the very idea of the single-purpose app - has seen its best days. The revamped App Store will let developers advertise their wares in search results and give developers a bigger cut of revenues on subscription apps, while Apple said it has already dramatically sped up its app-approval process. The goal is to sustain the virtuous cycle at the heart of the hugely lucrative iPhone business. Software developers make apps for the iPhone because its customers are willing to pay, and those customers, in turn, pay a premium for the device because it has the best apps. The store is now more strategically important than ever for Apple as sales of the iPhone begin to level off and the company looks to software and services to fill the gap.

Nuance Communications, Inc. announced today that Providence Health & Services is deploying Dragon Medical 360 Network Edition across its healthcare enterprise, making medical voice recognition available at 27 hospitals and 250 clinics for approximately 8,000 clinicians. According to a news release, Providence Health & Services is ranked by Thomson Reuters as among the top 20 percent of best-performing health systems in the country. The organization-wide use of Dragon Medical will help Providence roll out the Epic electronic health record (EHR) system by letting clinical staff document and navigate the EHR simply by speaking, saving time and allowing them to be more efficient and effective. Over the next year, Dragon Medical will be integrated with Epic and once fully deployed, clinicians will be able to use the just by using their voice, leading to faster EHR system adoption and improved physician satisfaction with EHR use, the press release claims. "Dragon Medical builds upon our current Nuance-driven background speech workflow through eScription and will give physicians more documentation options," said Laureen O'Brien, chief information officer, Providence Health & Services.

Data Analytics Skytree, Inc. just announced the launch of both their company and their primary product, Skytree Server. Skytree is a machine learning program intended to serve as a replacement for SQL databases, and has the ability to take even unstructured sets of data and crunch it faster than traditional methods. The company claims that its learning algorithms can be used to process data for a wide variety of applications, from predicting the effectiveness of sales promotions to fraud detection to molecular modeling to astronomy. Which is no surprise, as algorithms to predict certain types of data are often easily portable to other types of data. The trick is just in setting the data up properly.

Tay wasn't meant to be racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive. But as an artificial intelligence program that Microsoft designed to chat like a teenage girl, it was quick to learn from whatever it was told. So it came as little surprise when Tay started to make sympathetic references to Hitler – and created a firestorm on social media – soon after its release on Wednesday. The uproar led Microsoft to suspend the chatbot in just a few hours. "Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways," the company said in a statement.

Can Donald Trump make artificial intelligence "great again?" A new Twitterbot is analyzing the way Mr. Trump speaks and using the data to generate tweets. The end result is intended to be an autonomous program capable of crafting tweets that sound like Mr. Trump and it has already garnered thousands of fans. "Much of my actual robotics research deals with these types of modeling techniques," Mr. Hayes said in a MIT article about the project. "I thought this would be a good way to learn more about some of the concepts, and have a little bit of fun in the process."

Last October, Google CEO Sundar Pichai spoke about what machine learning means for Google. He called it "transformative," and said that Google was "rethinking everything we're doing" in the context of machine learning. A subset of artificial intelligence, machine learning is an approach in which "neural network" computers use algorithms to sort through large sets of data, discovering patterns and relationships on their own rather than following predefined rules to solve problems. Google already uses machine learning to fight spam in Gmail and to allow its services to better understand spoken words. And this week the company announced it's working to bring machine learning to the device people spend the most time interacting with: the smartphone.

On Sunday, Mark Zuckerberg set his goal for 2016 via a Facebook post: build an artificial intelligence to run his home and assist his work, "like Jarvis in Iron Man." The lofty ambition fits a growing trend of "smart" home technology, which links smartphones, tablets, and other computers with household appliances and other home items. High-powered commercial drones, self-driving cars, and virtual reality dominated the presentations at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, with Microsoft announcing its intention to become the "ultimate platform for all intelligent cars" and Intel showing how its new drone can dodge falling trees. But Samsung aimed closer to home. During its CES press conference, the South Korean company focused on new its new "SmartThings" appliances, which range from televisions to washing machines.

Cars could soon feature the ultimate backseat driver, an artificial intelligence technology that aims to make roadways safer by telling you when your mind is wandering. In doing so, the Japanese manufacturer Mitsubishi is taking autonomous vehicles in an entirely new direction, one that aims to improve the driver, Business Wire reports. "Not only does this smart automation offer more safety and the possibility of an enhanced experience for the de-stressed driver, but it can also reduce road congestion and benefit the environment," Matthew Beecham, an analyst for the automotive research agency QUBE, said of car automation generally in a news release. Mitsubishi calls the technology "deep learning," and it monitors the driver's behavior over time. The technology watches for patterns of normal, alert driving by gathering real-time data about the driver's steering, facial position, and even heart rate.

Brandeis has a program in autonomous agents, focusing on multi--agent and multi--robot systems and machine learning, headed by Maja Mataric For details on research directions and a photo of the available robot herd see: http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/dept/faculty/mataric To get more information about the Volen Center for Complex Systems, about the Computer Science Department, and about other faculty, see: http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/dept. For more information about the cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience programs at Brandeis see: http://fechner.ccs.brandeis.edu/cogsci.html The Robotics Institute also offers a Robotics PhD and students from other programs (e.g. Research includes many aspects of mobile robots, computer integrated manufacturing, rapid prototyping, sensors, vision, navigation, learning and architectures.

Cars that can talk to each other and almost drive themselves at freeway speeds are just two years away from the showroom, according to General Motors executives. The company announced Sunday that the semi-autonomous system for freeways will be an option on an unidentified new 2017 Cadillac model that goes on sale in the summer of 2016. In addition, the 2017 Cadillac CTS will be equipped with radio transmitters and receivers that will let it communicate with other cars, sharing data such as location, speed and whether the driver is applying the brakes. The announcements were made Sunday at the opening of the Intelligent Transportation Society World Congress being held in Detroit this week. They are part of a barrage of similar declarations that are expected from other companies throughout the week as the industry shows off progress toward self-driving and safer cars.