Particularly in hospitals with limited local resources and/or limited access to neurologic expertise, telestroke is an important tool to aid in the evaluation and treatment of potential stroke,

Steven Pinker is the author of the new book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. He sits down with Isaac Chotiner to discuss why he thinks life is improving despite the worldwide rise of demagogues, what Trump tells us about America's relationship to enlightenment ideals, and whether climate change and nuclear weapons should call into question our notion of progress.

The health ministry on Friday approved an outline for raising the optional age for tapping public pensions to 71 or older to address the national labor shortage stemming from Japan's falling birthrate and rapidly graying population. The ministry will consider revising the related laws in fiscal 2020 to encourage people in their 60s or older to continue working. The ministry's outline notes that older adults are physically healthier than previous generations and are highly motivated to continue working or participate in community activities. In addition, the outline says the government will review the "standardization of life stages according to age categories." "Depopulation in rural areas is expected as the pace of aging picks up. It is important to realize a society where people of all generations can widely and actively participate," Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said during a meeting on the issue Friday.

During lunch at yesterday's day-long New Work Summit – where leaders from industry, academia and government addressed the growing impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on our world – I was asked an intriguing question by a fellow attendee: What is the one thing you would like AI to solve in your daily life? I have worked for years to find new ways in which data, AI and advanced technologies can make our world a better, easier place to live. So, it's a topic I've thought about a lot. The answer for me is clear: I want AI to help free me from my routine or administrative tasks at work and at home, giving me more time for meaningful engagements – both in the office, and at home with my children. The notion that AI can provide us the opportunity for more meaningful human interaction is one of my key takeaways from the conference, which reinforced the dramatic growth in real-world applications for AI and related, innovative technologies.

Two years ago, Gal Salomon's mother developed sepsis during a stay in the hospital. "It was a big hospital with a lot of patients and no one saw or understood it was happening," Salomon recalls bitterly. "We lost her after two days." So when Salomon, then a partner at Israeli venture capital firm Pitango, was introduced to Clew Medical, he knew immediately that he had to get involved. Clew develops software that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to predict which patients in a hospital's intensive care unit (ICU) are at the highest risk of imminent deterioration, and it alerts staff so they can intervene early.

While studying artificial intelligence during the 1990s for his Ph.D. at MIT, Charles Isbell broke the software some of his friends were working on. "I was breaking all of their facial recognition software because apparently all the pictures they were taking were of people with significantly less melanin than I have," Isbell, now executive associate dean at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told a hearing of Congressional Subcommittee of Information Technology today. "And so they had to come up with ways around the problem--of me." While the facial recognition algorithm worked for his lighter-skinned peers, it couldn't recognize his darker complexion. It's not a unique problem; in 2015, a Google algorithm classified faces of black people as gorillas.

The European Commission needs to boost investment in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity research if it wants to compete in a new technology race with the US and China. This is the view of Jürgen Rüttgers, former science and technology minister in Germany, who heads an advisory group reporting to the Commission. Their work, developed by Rüttgers with 13 other figures drawn across research, industry and finance and to be published 23 February, looks at expanding industrial research in Framework Programme 9, the EU's next research and innovation programme, set to start in 2021. In an interview, Rüttgers argues that artificial intelligence should get extra EU attention. "We are very strong in [the AI] field, and we don't always see that we are strong," he said. But the global balance of power in technology is shifting.

SpaceX is now a step closer to launching broadband-powering satellites into orbit. Editor's Remarks: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that the agency would approve SpaceX's application to leverage satellite technology to provide broadband to the US and wider world. FCC chairman Ajit Pai said that the opportunity would help remove the US' digital divide and bring online rural parts of the country that are still without reliable internet. SpaceX declined to give an immediate statement regarding the progress but previous releases show that the company wants to launch 4,425 satellites that will form a constellation 800 miles above the Earth. Apple's latest offering costs $216 to build, giving it a lower margin than the company's other goods.

As data becomes the new oil driving the world economy, hackers will go after it more than ever before, spurring demand for professionals to skillfully thwart their efforts aimed at licking away all the digital grease. Cybersecurity analyst John Mason sees 3.5 million new, unfilled cybersecurity jobs being created by 2021 as compared to the one million openings seen in 2016 – a whopping increase of 350% over five years. Last year, Mason saw $86.4 billion being poured in cybersecurity. What will be the top cybersecurity trends for 2018? The year 2018, Mason believes, will see the evolution of ransomware.

Say you're training an image recognition system to identify U.S. presidents. The historical data reveals a pattern of males, so the algorithm concludes that only men are presidents. It won't recognize a female in that role, even though it's a probable outcome in future elections. This latent bias is one of the many types of biases that challenge data scientists today. If the machine learning data set they use in an AI project isn't neutral -- and it's safe to say almost no data is -- the outcomes can actually amplify bias and discrimination that's present in the machine learning data set.