Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, and the art of using computers to understand human intelligence. When it comes to healthcare, AI can bring about radical changes to the way doctors and physicians access, communicate, and interact with patient data. Crucially, this can result in improved patient outcomes and even the possibility of using an individual patient's history - such as previous illnesses, allergies or even genetic makeup - to predict their exact treatment requirements. Associate Medical Copywriter Kulveer Singh explains how the introduction of AI can change the landscape of healthcare, why it's an exciting time for the development of new technologies, and the challenges that implementing new AI may pose. In 2011, IBM's supercomputer WATSON competed against and obliterated a long-term game show champion. All this, despite the general thought that computer programmes were unable to understand natural language, puns, red herrings, and to simply unpack the meaning behind game show questions.

A team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and Cornell Tech have trained a software program to uncloak digitally-blurred or distorted images using deep learning, essentially teaching a computer to interpret a set of example data. Using this process, the team's software identified encrypted photographs with a 71% success rate. For context, the human success rate was 0.2%. The team purposely used an open source deep learning library to train their software, and their research exposes more weaknesses in the concept of online privacy. "The techniques we're using in this paper are very standard in image recognition, which is a disturbing thought," said Cornell Tech's Vitaly Shmatikov, pointing out that theirs was an "off-the-shelf, poor man's approach" to encrypted image recognition, and that a person or entity with bad intentions could do a lot of damage with this technology.

Major technology firms are racing to infuse smartphones and other internet-linked devices with software smarts that help them think like people. The effort is seen as an evolution in computing that allows users to interact with machines in natural conversation style, telling devices to tend to tasks such as ordering goods, checking traffic, making restaurant reservations or searching for information. The artificial intelligence (AI) component in these programmes aims to create a world in which everyone can have a virtual aide that get to know them better with each interaction. Google is making a high-profile push into AI, with the internet titan's chief referring to it as a force for change as powerful as smartphones. Google Assistant software is being built into the new Pixel handsets - aiming to outdo Apple's Siri - enabling users to organise and use information on the devices and in the cloud - to check emails, stay up to date on calendar appointments, news or ask for traffic and weather data.

Roughly 170,000 people descended on San Francisco this week to attend Dreamforce, an annual conference hosted by cloud computing company Salesforce. We round up the themes that dominated the on-site conversations. The biggest theme of the week was artificial intelligence (AI), not least because Salesforce unveiled its new'Einstein' product during the event, which has predictive capabilities and looks to bring AI technology to brand campaigns. But the technology also dominated conversations held away from the keynote sessions. Bob Stutz, chief analytics officer of'data visualisation engine' Wave Analytics, certainly seems convinced of its uses.

Jay Baer, a digital marketing consultant in Bloomington, Ind., spends half his time traveling on business. That means he also has to spend hours each week coordinating that travel. Help has arrived with the Pana app, which employs artificial intelligence to aid customers. Virtual travel assistant services -- some from established companies like Facebook, IBM and Expedia, and others from new entrants like Pana and HelloGbye -- are now popping up worldwide, just as major hotel chains like Starwood and Hilton are incorporating robots into their everyday operations. Many of the virtual assistant services use artificial intelligence, a branch of computer science that simulates intelligent human behavior.

Last week, Microsoft took the unusual step of placing its Cortana and Bing product teams inside the same organization as Microsoft Research. The new Microsoft AI and Research Group will be led by computer vision pioneer and executive vice president Harry Shum, whose 20-year Microsoft career involves leading Bing's search efforts from 2007 through 2013 and helping launch Microsoft Research China. We asked Shum how this new organization will benefit Microsoft's digital assistant in the following interview, which has been edited for length and clarity. The language of the blog post announcing the formation of Microsoft's new AI division, together with how Satya Nadella has characterized it, suggests that Microsoft thinks it's in a space race of sorts when it comes to artificial intelligence. I just feel that the timing's right to go big on AI.

IBM (NYSE:IBM) has launched a new Watson initiative, called "Project DataWorks." For growing revenues and profitability, modern businesses depend on extracting insights from data, which is an extremely complex job. Project DataWorks is a comprehensive solution aiming to eliminate the complexities. Project DataWorks is available on IBM's cloud platform Bluemix. I believe this new offering will help IBM significantly grow its business analytics revenue, which was 17.9 billion in 2015.

The WHERE clause in SAS is a powerful mechanism for selecting observations as you read or write a data set. The WHERE clause supports many operators, including the IN operator, which enables you to compactly specify multiple conditions for a categorical variable. A common use of the IN operator is to specify a list of US states and territories that should be included or excluded in an analysis. For example, the following DATA step reads the Sashelp.Zipcode data, but excludes zip codes for the states of Alaska ("AK"), Hawaii ("HI"), and US territories such as Puerto Rico ("PR"), Guam ("GU"), and so on: In my previous article about how to use the WHERE clause in SAS/IML, my examples used scalar comparisons such as where(sex "F") to select only females in the data. The SAS/IML language does not support the IN operator, but there is another compact way to include or exclude multiple values. Because SAS/IML is a matrix-vector language, many operations support vector arguments.

The startup-within-a-big-company is a narrative that's becoming increasingly popular, but Sohel I S, CEO of the property portal HDFC RED, feels that six years on, the mindset genuinely applies to his organisation, where the average age of the team is still 28. "We're able to make decisions quickly and don't have to go through so much hierarchy and we've had to be very fiscally responsible," Sohel tells Gadgets 360. This also helped the company have a relatively narrow focus from the beginning, something he says helped a lot. While many of the best known companies in the property space in India got their start in the rental market, HDFC RED stayed out of that segment, focused instead on the buying and selling of private homes from the beginning. Last year, Housing.com announced layoffs and shut down its rentals; visit most of the other popular sites and the first option you now see is "Buy".

The focus here is on data: from R tips to desktop tools to taking a hard look at data claims. R users can now use the popular dplyr package to tap into Apache Spark big data. The new sparklyr package is a native dplyr interface to Spark, according to RStudio. After installing the package, users can "interactively manipulate Spark data using both dplyr and SQL (via DBI), according to an RStudio blog post, as well as "filter and aggregate Spark data sets then bring them into R for analysis and visualization." There is also access to Spark distributed machine-learning algorithms.