What happens when two human political journalists compete against a computer over which can do the best job predicting the issues that will dominate the news in the presidential election? Well, you are about to find out. The two humans and the computers each got to predict five issues per presidential candidate that would get the most coverage in the news and on the blogs between Sept. 12 and Oct. 12. (The time frame covers only a few days of the release of the Donald Trump's lewd comments about women. So the final list isn't dominated by that controversy.) The two humans are Simon Maloy of Salon.com and Jonah Goldberg of the National Review.

We surround ourselves with technology that is able to help us in our daily lives. The success of autonomous cars, advancements in clinical research and personal digital assistants has shown the incredible potential of technology and how far it has come in recent decades. Despite the progress that many other industries have made, healthcare is likely to be the one market where artificial intelligence can truly have an impact that goes beyond convenience and positively affects human lives. Is the information collected by Fitbits and Apple Watches covered by HIPAA regulations? Find out more about what's covered – and what isn't – when it comes to wearable devices and data so you can avoid the risks.

Mount Sinai Health System announced that it has tapped CloudMedx to help pinpoint people at risk of congestive heart failure as part of its emerging program dubbed HealthPromise. The plan is to harness CloudMedx predictive insights for evidence-based care interventions to reduce readmissions and, ultimately, improve patient outcomes. "We are passionate about bringing advanced analytics to the forefront of managing our chronic patients and improving our patient well-being," Ashish Atreja, MD, chief technology innovation and engagement officer in medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said in a statement. "As an industry, we do not have a sufficiently sophisticated tool to predict certain things such as disease progression and resulting readmissions in hospitals," Atreja added. "We are working with CloudMedx to use new guidelines and algorithms, using clinical data to determine these risks and predictors." Atreja explained that the CloudMedx AI platform can ingest and process large amounts of data and compute big data analytics.

Artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced algorithms are at the heart of an emerging digital world. That was one of the chiefs components of Gartner's Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president and global head of Research opening remarks at today's Gartner Symposium/ITxpo show in Orlando. More on Network World: Will future developments in the realm of Artificial Intelligence be like the wild west or a more controlled situation? "CIOs will participate in the building of a new digital platform with intelligence at the center," Sondergaard said told a crowd of more than 8,000 CIOs and IT leaders. "The new competitive differentiator is understanding the customer's intent through advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence. Creating new experiences that solve problems customers didn't realize they had."

Jason Lim for Forbes: Every year there is a new hot topic in tech. The difference between now and the past is that everything is becoming interconnected at a faster rate. We are entering an extremely critical time in history where society will change dramatically – how we work, live and play. Science fiction is morphing into reality. Flying cars exist, cars that drive themselves are on the road, and artificial intelligence that automates our lives is here.

You can always count on Google to have data -- tons of it, generated by the users who interact with and upload content to its services. Google uses that data to build intelligence for the company, but it's offered data for others to experiment with as well. These three data sets are abundantly large, have plenty of practical applications, and are guaranteed to be well-assembled, thanks to Google's imprimatur. The Open Images Dataset, unveiled at the end of last month, is a collection of 9 million URLs to images "that have been annotated with labels spanning over 6,000 categories," according to Google. All have a Creative Common Attributation license, so they can be reused readily, and the label assignments to the images have been verified by human eyes to ensure validity. Plus, plans are underway to "improve the quality of the annotations in Open Images the coming months."

This post was authored by Rimma Nehme, Technical Assistant, Data Group at Microsoft. Today, the business potential of Machine Learning and AI is real. Businesses can apply ML and AI to transform, optimize and automate their businesses having previously relied only on human intelligence. You may wonder, 'how can I apply AI to my business?' This blog post describes some of the ways you can do that using the resources in the Cortana Intelligence Gallery, without a PhD in Machine Learning or AI or even a deep expertise in these subjects.

Chinese search engine giant Baidu is launching a "conversational" medical chatbot designed to make diagnosing illnesses easier. The bot is named Melody and comes built into the company's iOS and Android Baidu Doctor app, which launched in China in 2015. Baidu Doctor allows users to contact local doctors, book appointments, and ask questions, with the chatbot intended to speed up this process. Melody builds on the Baidu Doctor app, which launched in China in 2015. Patients can open the app and ask a question, and Melody will respond with context-relevant questions to clarify information such as symptom frequency or duration.

The White House sees artificial intelligence as an increasingly critical technology that can fight cyberattacks, upgrade weapons of war, improve health care and even unclog traffic for the commute home. However, the Obama administration also expects that A.I. will reduce low-level jobs and create security and ethical issues. With critical pros and cons looming, the federal government wants to work with the private sector and academia to guide A.I. in a positive direction, according to a recently released report, Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence. The report was prepared by the National Science and Technology Council's subcommittee on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. "A.I. can be a major driver of economic growth and social progress, if industry, civil society, government, and the public work together to support development of the technology, with thoughtful attention to its potential and to managing its risks," the report states.

Every big company in Silicon Valley is chasing artificial intelligence, the increasingly powerful computer software that can learn from big sets of data almost like a human does. And Apple just hired one of the big guns of AI research, as the company continues to try to prove that it is not falling behind Google and its other rivals in the hot field. Ruslan Salakhutdinov announced on Twitter on Monday that he's joining Apple as a director of AI research. Salakhutdinov will continue to do work at Carnegie Mellon University, where he advises and does research on deep learning, a key AI technique. His hiring raises the question of whether Apple's growing AI team will take a more academic approach to AI research going forward.