US consumers are getting more comfortable using mobile devices to manage their health, a new study finds. Even in the face of privacy concerns, Americans are increasingly sharing medical information, sending photos to their doctors, using fitness or activity trackers, and using AI to become active players in their healthcare. Ketchum, a global research and analytics firm, conducted an online survey of 2,000 smartphone-owning Americans earlier this year, and found close to 58 percent of this group uses their phone to communicate with a medical professional. Almost half of respondents have a fitness, health or medication-tracking app, and 83 percent of people who use fitness or workout apps do so at least once per week. Of course, not everyone loves health apps – about a quarter of survey respondents said health and fitness tracking apps have made them feel bad, with 21 percent ending use of the apps.

The new industrial revolution is a cyber-physical systems revolution. The Internet of Things (IoT) forms a foundation for this cyber-physical systems revolution. It is driving the biggest shift in business and technology since World War II. "Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are physical and engineered systems whose operations are monitored, coordinated, controlled and integrated by a computing and communication core. Just as the internet transformed how humans interact with one another, cyber-physical systems will transform how we interact with the physical world around us."1

Some reach too far, some do not reach far enough. No, humanoid robots will not achieve world domination tomorrow. Yes, it is within the realms of possibility that one day, the'machine' that stands in front of us will be a'person'. Or, as the philosopher and AI expert, Klaus Mainzer, describes it: He considers it possible that the crucial leap towards superintelligence is at a point where we are combining evolutionary and technical strategies and creating a'neuromorphic computer', which links technical efficiency with evolutionary benefits. Technical progress goes hand in hand with computer speed and an increase in memory capacity.

RLAI research program pursues an approach to artificial-intelligence and engineering problems in which they are formulated as large optimal-control problems and approximately solved using reinforcement-learning methods. Reinforcement learning is a new body of theory and techniques for optimal control that has been developed in the last twenty years primarily within the machine learning and operations research communities, and which have separately become important in psychology and neuroscience. Reinforcement learning researchers have developed novel methods to approximate solutions to optimal-control problems that are too large or too ill-defined for classical solution methods such as dynamic programming. For example, reinforcement-learning methods have obtained the best known solutions in such diverse automation applications as helicopter flying, elevator scheduling, playing backgammon, and resource-constrained scheduling. The objectives of the RLAI research program are to create new methods for reinforcement learning that remove some of the limitations on its widespread application and to develop reinforcement learning as a model of intelligence that could approach human abilities.

Josiah Renaudin: Welcome back to another TechWell interview. I'm joined by Jason Arbon, the CEO of Appdiff and a speaker at this year's STARWEST. First, could you tell us a bit about where you worked at before you started Appdiff? Jason Arbon: Hi, Josiah, nice to chat with you again. After college, I started my career at Microsoft doing testing and automation for products like Windows and Bing.

A new study published in the scientific journal PLOS One has shown that a type of computer modelling called'machine learning' can pick up areas of damage in the brain which are associated with drug-resistant epilepsy. This means that people with drug-resistant epilepsy could be diagnosed much more quickly, enabling them more timely access to appropriate treatment. The authors of the study also suggest that this new technology could potentially be used to diagnose other conditions such as multiple sclerosis and dementia. A new smartphone app called myCareCentric Epilepsy has been successfully piloted at Poole Hospital to help those with epilepsy and medical staff to monitor the condition. The app works with an existing technology, the Microsoft wristband.

Artificial neural networks were inspired by the human brain and simulate how neurons behave when they are shown a sensory input (e.g., images, sounds, etc). They are known to be excellent tools for image recognition, any many other problems beyond that - they also excel at weather predictions, breast cancer cell mitosis detection, brain image segmentation and toxicity prediction among many others. Deep learning means that we use an artificial neural network with multiple layers, making it even more powerful for more difficult tasks. This time they have been shown to be apt at reproducing the artistic style of many famous painters, such as Vincent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso among many others. All the user needs to do is provide an input photograph and a target image from which the artistic style will be learned.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is all about getting a machine to mimic a human in every way: thought, speech, movement. That's why one of the tests for AI is the Turing test: whether a robot can fool a human into thinking it is conversing with another of its own species. An integral part of accomplishing this is making the AI recognize human emotions. So one research lab is working on the next iteration of virtual assistants, those that can recognize and react to emotional cues. SRI International, the birthplace of Siri, is working on better chatbots and phone assistants that can detect agitation, confusion, and other emotional states, and respond accordingly.

British AI startup, Weave.ai, is the latest company rumoured to be snatched up by a US tech firm in Silicon Valley, according to the Financial Times. Weave.ai was founded last year and has four AI engineers working in North Greenwich. The team are developing WeaveOS, an "AI-first" operating system (OS) for mobile phones. Co-founder and CEO of Weave.ai, Rodolfo Rosini, believes artificial intelligence will dominate computing in the future.

Artificial intelligence (AI) may be the hottest topic in the UK nowadays, but not everyone is certain about its business application, ROI and the impact on society. Following a poll, it was revealed that a third (32 per cent) of respondents worry robots will replace humans, and almost a fifth (19 per cent) fear their job will be taken over by artificial intelligence more than they did a year ago. A fifth (21 per cent) does not think AI is applicable at this point in time, and another 18 per cent said it was too expensive, currently. More than a quarter (28 per cent) believe AI will prove highly beneficial, and more than a third (35 per cent) are not afraid they will lose their jobs to AI.