The belief that there is a link between talent and left-handedness has a long history. Leonardo da Vinci was left-handed. So were Mark Twain, Mozart, Marie Curie, Nicola Tesla and Aristotle. It's no different today – former US president Barack Obama is a left-hander, as is business leader Bill Gates and footballer Lionel Messi. But is it really true that left-handers are more likely to be geniuses?

When scholars explore new ideas, it seems instinctive to share their thinking. Last year computer science professors Joseph Halpern and Bart Selman became co-principal investigators for a nationwide project to ensure that robots and artificial intelligences (AIs) will act in ways beneficial to humans. "We thought we should get undergrads involved in thinking about these ideas," Selman said. Thus was born a new course, CS 4732, Ethical and Social Issues in AI, about how robots and artificial intelligences may change our world, and what we ought to be doing about it. "These undergrads may be directly involved in developing the software behind these systems," Selman added, noting that many may go on to jobs with Google, Tesla and other major players.

Marketers are increasingly using more channels to reach customers, pondering their strategy for artificial intelligence and augmenting email, which delivers solid returns, with new technologies. Those takeaways were among the highlights of a survey conducted by Salesforce. Executives walked through the findings with a customer at Salesforce's New York office. Salesforce's State of Marketing Report is based on a survey of 3,500 marketing pros in the US, Canada, Brazil, Ireland, the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The survey was based on Salesforce customers, but likely applies to a broader set of marketing professionals.

You may think you're good at reading other people's faces and moods. But when it comes to telling the difference between a person who is suicidal and one who is merely depressed, the signs are much more subtle. To tease out the differences, the researchers looked at a handful of facial gestures displayed by three groups of people – those with suicidal ideation, depressed patients, and a medical control group. During interviews with these groups, they recorded gestures that included smiling, frowning, eye brow raising, and head motioning. The data was then fed into a machine-learning algorithm that looked for correlations between different gestures, alone or in combination, and patient groups.

Artificial intelligence is ascendant in medicine--from AI eye doctors to chatbot therapists. As medical databases balloon in size and complexity, researchers are teaching computers to sift through and identify patterns, hinting at a future in which machine learning algorithms diagnose disease all on their own. Sometimes, algorithms pick up on early signs of disease that humans wouldn't even know to look for. Last week, researchers at the University of North Carolina and Washington University reported an AI that can identify autistic infants long before they present behavioral symptoms. It's a thrilling opportunity: Early detection gives autism neuroscience a big leg up, as researchers try to understand what goes wrong during development.

BEIJING, June 16, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Gridsum Holding Inc. ("Gridsum" or the "Company") (NASDAQ:GSUM), a leading provider of cloud-based big-data analytics, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence solutions in China, today announced the debut of the Intelligent Voice Recognition System jointly developed with Tencent Cloud to help improve the efficiency of the legal system across China. The advanced AI-enabled Intelligent Voice Recognition System converts voice into text in real time during court proceedings. Gridsum adapted the Tencent speech recognition technology to create a high-accuracy and high-reliability speech-to-text and text-to-speech application for the highly specialized legal space. This technology was surrounded and integrated with/into a comprehensive Software as a Service (SaaS) suite of solutions for the juridical system including judges, courts, law firms and corporates. Gridsum is working in collaboration with the Supreme Court Press to disseminate these solutions throughout the Chinese juridical system.

Philip, who was underweight when he arrived, says to Adam, who is overweight: "I'm worried that you're not eating healthily. I noticed you've been skipping dinner." Adam is meant to repeat back to Philip what he heard him say the problem is. He mumbles, barely audible, and can't seem to remember what he's just been told. He's unable to focus, and the air is thick with reluctance and embarrassment.

India should encourage research and innovation in establishing a legal infrastructure on the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI), says an Assocham-PwC study report titled'Leveraging artificial intelligence and robotics for sustainable growth.' The report highlighted the areas of application for AI techniques in large-scale public endeavours such as Make in India, Skill India and other crop insurance schemes, tax fraud schemes, detecting subsidy leakage and defence and security strategy. "The Make in India initiative focussing on twin goals of strengthening the country's in-house innovation and production capabilities with added creation of employment opportunities may not end up creating as many jobs as it is poised to at this point in time," the report said. Also, information technology (IT), manufacturing, agriculture and forestry are certain sectors that are expected to experience shrinkage of employment demand as robotic systems and machine learning algorithms take up several tasks, it noted.

Machine learning, the field that's driving a revolution in artificial intelligence, has cemented its role in modern technology. Its tools and techniques have led to rapid improvements in everything from self-driving cars and speech recognition to the digital mastery of an ancient board game. Now, physicists are beginning to use machine learning tools to tackle a different kind of problem, one at the heart of quantum physics. In a paper published recently in Physical Review X, researchers from JQI and the Condensed Matter Theory Center (CMTC) at the University of Maryland showed that certain neural networks--abstract webs that pass information from node to node like neurons in the brain--can succinctly describe wide swathes of quantum systems . Dongling Deng, a JQI Postdoctoral Fellow who is a member of CMTC and the paper's first author, says that researchers who use computers to study quantum systems might benefit from the simple descriptions that neural networks provide.

Apple just had its annual developer's conference or WWDC on June 5, and as usual, CEO Tim Cook gave a keynote where he announced the tech giant's latest improvements in its MacOS and iOS systems. But perhaps the greatest of these software developments wasn't revealed on the WWDC stage. Instead, in an interview with Bloomberg Television, Cook discussed one of Apple's most intriguing work -- the so-called Project Titan, its secret car project. Well, it isn't exactly going to be a car just yet -- or maybe never? What we do know is that Apple is working on its own autonomous driving software, which Cook revealed in the interview with Bloomberg.