Here's what you need to know today: Siri, Cortana, and Alexa could soon have to move over in the office, following the release of Cisco's AI assistant for business. Yesterday saw the first live demo of Cisco's Spark virtual assistant, first announced back in November 2017, at a Cisco Live event in Melbourne, Australia. Cisco senior VP and general manager of applications Rowan Trollope told the event that "existing voice assistants that have traction – none of them were built for business. They were built for the consumer domain. That is a totally different domain space to the one we are interested in."

Russian laws should not impede the development of big data, e-commerce and a distributed register in the country, President Vladimir Putin believes. He said this, speaking with a message to the Federal Assembly, the broadcast was conducted on the website of the First Channel. "We need to create our own digital platforms that are naturally compatible with the global information space. This will allow to organize production processes and financial and biological services in a new way. Including using distributed registry technology, which is very important for financial transactions" "In the near future, we need to create an advanced legislative framework, remove all barriers from the development and widespread use of robotics, artificial intelligence, and unmanned transport," the head of state said.

Angelina Jolie and Senator John McCain recently penned a joint op-ed piece for the New York Times. In their lengthy article, Jolie and McCain asked Americans, as well as the U.S. government, to help save the Rohingya Muslims. "Around the world, there is profound concern that America is giving up the mantle of global leadership. Our steady retreat over the past decade has contributed to a wide array of complex global challenges – a dangerous erosion of the rule of law, gross human rights violations and the decline of the rules-based international order that was designed in the aftermath of two world wars to prevent conflict and deter mass atrocities," they wrote. Jolie and McCain also cited a lack of diplomacy in Myanmar, which has led to the fleeing of approximately 680,000 Rohingya Muslims.

NASA released a 360-degree video showcasing a replica of its InSight Mars Lander being tested in simulated Martian conditions. The two-year-long InSight mission is targeted at penetrating deep into Mars and understanding the red planet's interior. The launch of the lander is still a few months away, but in order to test its ability to work in uncertain Martian conditions, the agency is looking at the replica of the robot on its own version of Mars created at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. NASA scientists used crushed garnet as Martian sand and gravel and specialized light to see how the lander would settle on the uneven surface of the planet and adjust to the color and brightness of sunlight on it while doing all kinds of experiments. As garnet does not produce dust, the agency used piles of the material to check the deployment of lander's critical instruments – a high-precision seismometer for detecting quakes and measuring the planet's internal temperature, a shield isolating the seismometer from wind and temperature changes, and a heat-flow probe that digs up to 5 meters underground to measure the amount of heat escaping from the planet's interior.

There isn't much space between your ears, but what's in there can do many things that a computer of the same size never could. Your brain is also vastly more energy efficient at interpreting the world visually or understanding speech than any computer system. That's why academic and corporate labs have been experimenting with "neuromorphic" chips modeled on features seen in brains. These chips have networks of "neurons" that communicate in spikes of electricity (see "Thinking in Silicon"). They can be significantly more energy-efficient than conventional chips, and some can even automatically reprogram themselves to learn new skills.

Lawmakers worry declining federal research and development dollars could stunt the development of new artificial intelligence tools and set the country back in the race for global dominance in the emerging technology. "The future of U.S. innovation is at stake--this should be a cause of concern for everyone," said Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill. "This administration's science, immigration and education policies are all working together to reduce the U.S. lead in AI technologies." Kelly and other lawmakers voiced their concerns about shrinking government R&D funds Wednesday in the second of three House Oversight IT subcommittee hearings on government's role in developing and implementing artificial intelligence. In addition to supporting basic R&D, the government must also work to strengthen America's STEM workforce and demystify the public perception of artificial intelligence, federal technology experts told the panel.

WHEN cities begin to struggle with overpopulation, vehicular traffic, and pollution or face a resource crunch such as difficulties managing its power or water, it needs to evolve and transform into a smart city. And although several cities around the world have either crossed or are about to cross the threshold where they have no choice but to evolve, there's a lack of momentum in the transformation efforts. But governments and municipal boards can't just pick up the baton and make choices for citizens about what needs to happen and what their collective future will look like – it's got to be a collaborative effort. And citizens must be involved. According to Gartner, smart city initiatives are no longer about optimized traffic patterns, parking management, efficient lighting and improvements to public works; It's all about citizen engagement.

In the wake of the Florida school shooting, President Donald Trump is reviving an old debate over whether violent video games can trigger violent behavior. But Dr. Louis Kraus, a child psychiatrist, calls that approach a "red herring." Gaming fans wearing VR goggles play "Echo Arena" from Oculus at the E3 conference in Los Angeles. In the wake of the Florida school shooting, politicians have raised concern over the influence of violent video games and films on young people, with President Trump claiming they're "shaping young people's thoughts." Scientists still debate the issue, but the majority of studies show that extensive exposure to media violence is a risk factor for aggressive thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

Joseph Sirosh currently leads Microsoft's AI platform strategy and products such as Azure Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Search and Bot Framework. Prior to this role, he was the CVP for Microsoft's Data Platform. Joseph joined Microsoft in the fall of 2013 from Amazon.com, Inc. Before joining Amazon, he worked for Fair Isaac Corp. as vice president of research and development, where he led R&D projects for DARPA, homeland security and several government organizations. He is passionate about machine learning and its applications and has been active in the field since 1990.

From a public-health perspective, the occurrence of drug-drug-interactions (DDI) from multiple drug prescriptions is a serious problem, especially in the elderly population. This is true both for individuals and the system itself since patients with complications due to DDI will likely re-enter the system at a costlier level. We conducted an 18-month study of DDI occurrence in Blumenau (Brazil; pop. 340,000) using city-wide drug dispensing data from both primary and secondary-care level. Our goal is also to identify possible risk factors in a large population, ultimately characterizing the burden of DDI for patients, doctors and the public system itself. We found 181 distinct DDI being prescribed concomitantly to almost 5% of the city population. We also discovered that women are at a 60% risk increase of DDI when compared to men, while only having a 6% co-administration risk increase. Analysis of the DDI co-occurrence network reveals which DDI pairs are most associated with the observed greater DDI risk for females, demonstrating that contraception and hormone therapy are not the main culprits of the gender disparity, which is maximized after the reproductive years. Furthermore, DDI risk increases dramatically with age, with patients age 70-79 having a 50-fold risk increase in comparison to patients aged 0-19. Interestingly, several null models demonstrate that this risk increase is not due to increased polypharmacy with age. Finally, we demonstrate that while the number of drugs and co-administrations help predict a patient's number of DDI ($R^2=.413$), they are not sufficient to flag these patients accurately, which we achieve by training classifiers with additional data (MCC=.83,F1=.72). These results demonstrate that accurate warning systems for known DDI can be devised for public and private systems alike, resulting in substantial prevention of DDI-related ADR and savings.