Picture a virtual assistant that helps find directions, schedules appointments or plays music, and the soothing yet robotic sound of a female voice likely comes to mind. From Apple's Siri to Amazon's Alexa, a majority of the world's most popular virtual assistants have female personas. But that's starting to change as a growing number of consumers -- and companies -- turn to digital assistants. Some developers are going against the grain, creating chatbots and messaging apps that no longer conform to one gender and challenging a tradition of female digital assistants that some say display submissive personalities. Making virtual assistants female by default can be bad for business and perpetuate stereotypes, these chatbot developers say, so they're offering more options to consumers.

BY PATRICK WATSON: The news headlines after last week's jobs report proved it again: Life is hard (and getting harder) for low-skilled workers. Illegal immigrants take their service industry jobs. Robots take their manufacturing industry jobs. According to the media, many low-skilled workers have simply given up. Their lives are terrible, and everyone wants to help.

Australia's international airports are in the process of automating 90 percent of air traveler processing by 2020 by implementing facial recognition technology that involves biometric recognition of faces, irises and/or fingerprints, hence eliminating the need to carry essential traveling documents such as passports. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection, while building on the Seamless Traveller initiative announced in 2015, said Sunday that it will make a transition toward a "contactless" system for arrivals this year, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Under the new system, manned counters will be replaced by automatic electronic booths and the existing SmartGate that scan passports electronically will also be overhauled. Before introducing it to a major airport (scheduled for November), the program is to be piloted in July at Canberra Airport where international flight operations are limited to New Zealand and Singapore. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection is scheduled to implement the technology in all major airports by March 2019.

Artificial intelligence (AI) on its own isn t enough to compete -- companies need industry-specific solutions to business problems. So said Martin Schroeter, IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) s company senior vice president and chief financial officer, on the company s quarterly earnings call Thursday afternoon. Cognitive computing technology (IBM s term for AI) is just "table stakes," said Schroeter, claiming that his company is going the extra mile. IBM is building datasets for Watson to serve specific industries, including healthcare and finance. "You need more than public data or algorithms to solve real-world problems," Schroeter said.

It's been an interesting day. The 45th President of the United States of America took office just two hours ago, and he is clearly unlike any other President that has gone before him. So just for fun, I thought I might feed his inauguration speech into Watson in real-time, in order to see what the smartest computer in the world had to say about it. Would he notice any anomalies, or insights that the professional political commentators might have missed? Might we some people respect Trump a little more if they looked at his speech more analytically than emotionally?

F-35s, F-22s and other fighter jets will soon use improved artificial intelligence to control nearby drone wingmen that will be able to carry weapons, test enemy air defenses or perform intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions in high risk areas, senior Air Force officials said. "This involves an attempt to have another platform fly alongside a human, perhaps serving as a weapons truck carrying a bunch of missiles," Zacharias said in an interview with Defense Systems. An F-35 computer system, Autonomic Logistics Information System, uses early applications of artificial intelligence that help computers make assessments, go through checklists, organize information and make some decisions by themselves – without needing human intervention. "We are working on making platforms more autonomous with multi-infusion systems and data from across different intel streams," Zacharias explained. ALIS serves as the information infrastructure for the F-35, transmitting aircraft health and maintenance action information to the appropriate users on a globally-distributed network to technicians worldwide, said Lockheed Martin, the contractor that built the system. However, despite the promise of advancing computer technology and increasingly levels of autonomy, Zacharias emphasized that dynamic human cognition is, in many respects, far more capable than computers.

So the UK, it seems, is headed out of the European Union's single market, perhaps also out of the customs union. Prime Minister Theresa May has said she wants to preserve barrier-free trade between the UK and the EU as far as possible. One option that has been floated, if the two sides can't agree a comprehensive free trade agreement, is sectoral deals. They might cover cars, for example, or perhaps financial services. But there is a problem with this approach: World Trade Organization rules.

What will be the impact of machine learning on economics? NEW YORK, NY - MAY 05: Susan Athey speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2014 - Day 1 on May 5, 2014 in New York City. The short answer is that I think it will have an enormous impact; in the early days, as used "off the shelf," but in the longer run econometricians will modify the methods and tailor them so that they meet the needs of social scientists primarily interested in conducting inference about causal effects and estimating the impact of counterfactual policies (that is, things that haven't been tried yet, or what would have happened if a different policy had been used). Examples of questions economists often study are things like the effects of changing prices, or introducing price discrimination, or changing the minimum wage, or evaluating advertising effectiveness. We want to estimate what would happen in the event of a change, or what would have happened if the change hadn't taken place.

The future of cybersecurity is a preventative approach -- identifying and thwarting threats before they are perpetrated. And to achieve preventative cyber protection, AI will be critical. "Imagine you wake up to find a burglar in your daughter's room. Would you rather know immediately that the burglar is there and then go stop him, or would you rather know that he is going to break in before he does it, and prevent the attack from happening in the first place?" That was the question asked by Stuart McClure, CEO of cybersecurity company Cylance, speaking at CB Insights' Innovation Summit.

Massimiliano "Max" Versace traces the birth date of his startup to when NASA came knocking in 2010. The U.S. space agency had caught wind of his military-funded Boston University research on making software for a brain-inspired microprocessor through an IEEE Spectrum article, and wanted to see if Versace and his colleagues could help develop a software controller for robotic rovers that could autonomously explore Mars. NASA's vision proved no easy challenge. Mars rovers have limited computing, communications, and power resources. NASA engineers wanted artificial intelligence that could rely solely on images from a low-end camera to navigate different environments.