When I was a scrawny little chap, shortest in my high school class, I always wanted a super power. Wanted doesn't capture the feeling. I would have given a limb for a super power. I read a lot of books back then (and now) and landed on a super power that had something to do with the brain. I eventually landed on Prof. Xavier of the X-Men.

IBM Watson is known for its work in identifying cancer treatments and beating contestants on Jeopardy! But now the computing system has expertise in a new area of research: neuroscience. Watson discovered five genes linked to ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease, IBM announced on Wednesday. The tech company worked with researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. The discovery is Watson's first in any type of neuroscience, and suggests that Watson could make discoveries in research of other neurological diseases.

Connected hospitals with intelligent messaging In today's hospitals, pacemakers, defibrillators and oximeters are all connected to the internet and share vitals immediately with doctors, in turn speeding response times. Hospitals have technicians, nurses, staff, billing departments, insurance providers, patients and patients' families as stakeholders, each with different requirements of information about the care given to patient. Unified Inbox offers an AI-based unified cloud IoT messaging platform for internet of things devices to connect various stakeholders, giving them the freedom to receive different messages at different frequency, with different senses of urgency in different mediums of their choice. Unified Inbox launched this at Nanyang Polytechnic in Singapore as "CUBE," the IoT-secured messaging gateway for healthcare. The artificial intelligence makes the hospitals connected, giving peace of mind to patients and their loved ones while improving efficiency in the overall hospital management and interaction with all stakeholders.

Could internet searches identify dodgy drugs? A Microsoft researcher has trained an algorithm to predict whether a drug will be recalled, using queries made through Microsoft's Bing search engine. "We know that every once in a while there will be a batch of a pharmaceutical drug that will have something wrong about it," says Elad Yom-Tov at Microsoft Research in Israel. "People will start asking about that drug more often or more than they usually do." Pharmaceutical companies and regulators such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) monitor drugs on the market to keep tabs on adverse effects and potential faulty batches.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. In July, the Food and Drug Administration issued guidance on three topics important to the future of medical innovation. These welcome guidelines demonstrate the FDA is doing the best it can to ensure it does not interfere inappropriately with advances in medical technology that rely on processing information.

Google, as a search engine as well as a company, has come a tremendously long way since the days of a simple web page and a list of links. Nowadays, there's little that we don't think Google is possible of, and with their recent approach to Artificial Intelligence, the company's historic motto of "don't be evil" could be helping the whole human race in the near future. Google's AI research has focused on training these algorithms to make decisions for themselves, and speed up the process exponentially. The firm has already been training their AI to improve the quality of smaller images when enlarged, but the Google Research Blog is sharing something much more important with us this week, the idea of using AI to catch Diabetic Blindness sooner, rather than later. Diabetes is a serious condition, and while many will know about the dangers surrounding the need to amputate a foot because of the disease, few will be familiar with Diabetic retinopathy (DR), a disease which puts as many as 415 Million diabetic patients at risk of blindness all over the world.

Diabetes is no joke, regardless of what Wilford Brimley memes you've seen. The disease's associated foot ulcers can lead to amputation of the limb while diabetic retinopathy (DR) can rob people of their sight. Some 415 million diabetics worldwide are at risk of this visual affliction and many of those living with it in the developing world lack sufficient health care access to treat it. That's why Google is training its deep learning AI to spot DR before it becomes a problem -- and without the help of an on-site doctor. Since the disease is most readily diagnosed by examining a picture of the back of the eye, the Google team has spent the past few years developing a dataset of 128,000 individual images, each examined by 3-7 ophthalmologists from a panel of 54.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, forget the scary movies about rebellious robots or the dire warnings of a dystopian world of disconnected humanity imagined by some popular writers. AI promises, rather, to change our lives in profound ways we are just beginning to experience, according to a ground-breaking survey produced by Stanford University. Stanford is taking the long view of AI, with a project called One Hundred Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100). The study, written by a panel of AI experts from multiple fields including healthcare, will continue as an ongoing activity, with periodic reports examining how AI will touch different aspects of daily life. The first of those reports, "Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030," looks into the effects that AI advancements will have on a typical North American city a little more than a decade from now.

They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but I keep telling everyone I know about the remarkable innovations I saw at IBM World of Watson 2016 conference, held from Oct. 24 to 27 at beautiful Mandalay Bay, where I was among the 17,000 attendees. As I was "welcomed to the World of Watson," I learned that Watson (yes, the computer that was on Jeopardy) is IBM's researchers' vision "to design an intelligent system that brings man and machine together to create a better world." If that sounds like a utopian fantasy, prepare to be amazed at how real that vision has become: Watson is changing how doctors cure disease, how companies analyze their social media footprints, and how financial services firms adapt to ever-changing regulations. I could write an entire book on all that Watson has to offer, but my focus here is on Watson's ability to help financial services firms meet compliance demands more efficiently and with less cost – a much needed innovation as firms spend $99 billion on addressing compliance, thus limiting their ability to invest in growth, according to Marc Andrews, VP of Industry Analytics Solutions for IBM. If you're scratching your head at why regulatory compliance costs are so high, picture this: Linda, a trader at a high-profile brokerage firm, receives a bad performance review from her supervisor.

London-based BenevolentAI believes it has built the kind of artificial intelligence tech that will allow it to identify and develop drugs faster and better than any group of mere scientific mortals can hope for. And now J&J is handing over some experimental molecules it needs to prove it's right. The upstart joins a long line scrambling to apply vast amounts of computational power towards drug development. Their goal is to usher in the long-awaited "pharma 2.0" and finally bend the expensive curve of late-stage trial failure. It's unclear how BenevolentAI's algorithms are any better at evaluating the potential of any small-molecule than other computationally-taxing approaches developed by other groups -- and it's all driven by the data.