Ever-increasing workload combined with dramatic reimbursement changes are driving development of methods that help clinicians gain value from medical images more efficiently. The brightest hope is artificial intelligence, fueled by advances in deep learning / convolutional neural networks. While the big vendors have made significant investments (Watson Health, GE Healthcare, Siemens etc.) and the usual academic groups are well represented, there is considerable activity at the smaller end of the scale. In preparation for the SIIM Conference on Machine Intelligence in Medical Imaging event in Alexandria, 12th -13th September we pulled together a list of the various start-ups working on machine learning solutions for medical imaging. It was surprising to see how many more have come out of stealth mode since RSNA last year – how many more are waiting in the wings?

Many consider artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, manifesting in the form of chatbots, the next great evolution of digital business (and pretty much all business for that matter). While the prospects can be both exciting and frightening for many (particularly those in the customer service realm), and the technology itself is still somewhat rudimentary/basic (dumb) in most cases, the potential is most certainly there and the savviest enterprises recognize it and are doing all they can to get involved in the development of their own bot offerings. It is unlikely of course that most enterprises will have the resources available to staff a team of AI experts and invest in the appropriate machine learning technologies to capitalize on the trend, but fortunately, there are numerous solutions available to make the release of a chatbot an actual reality. Let's take a closer look at some of the solutions Web professionals will discover as they research the opportunity. Before heading in to the world of bots, let's take a a moment to explore what we're dealing with.

LONDON The entrepreneur behind British software company Autonomy has invested in a start-up called Luminance that uses artificial intelligence to read documents and speed up the legal process around deals, potentially cutting out some lawyers. Mike Lynch, who founded technology investment fund Invoke Capital after leaving Autonomy, said on Wednesday he saw great potential in Luminance, which was set up by Cambridge University students and has worked with lawyers at Slaughter and May to develop software to analyze documents. "You can see the excitement around things like driverless cars, so this being all about contracts doesn't sound quite as riveting, but I actually think it's going to have a very big impact" Lynch told Reuters. "Lawyers will be able to do the things that matter rather than the grunt work, they can add better value by doing better analysis of what is found, rather than trying to plough through 50,000 documents." Founded by a combination of lawyers, experts in deals and mathematicians, Luminance has created software that it says can read and understand hundreds of pages of documents every minute, with clients charged according to usage.

The fitness class at the Do Life Shinagawa nursing home begins at 10:30 a.m., drawing about two dozen eager participants -- many of them pushing 70, 80 and even 90 years of age. At the front of the room is a human instructor, but it is the 16 inch tall robot standing on a table to his right that the crowd is paying attention to. The sleek, white humanoid robot is turned on and with fluid motion, stands up and spreads out its arms. "Why are you waking me up?" the robot asks in Japanese in an almost child-like voice. "Oh, you want to exercise?"

Dear Everyone, This is part two of Robots, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future. Part two is going to delve into why a highly automated society has all sorts of benefits--even if it creates high unemployment. Technology is the greatest destroyer of jobs since the industrial revolution. With automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence moving into society at an exponential rate, unemployment could hit close to 50%--and that's just in America. Numbers in China could reach an estimated 77%, and 69% in India.

Google has been offering public cloud services for several years now, but the company has continued to lag behind Amazon and Microsoft in customer growth. Under the leadership of VMware co-founder Diane Greene, who serves as the executive vice president of Google Cloud Enterprise, the tech titan has focused harder on forging partnerships and developing products to appeal to large customers. It has added a number of key customers under Greene's tenure, including Spotify. One such win is Evernote, which announced Tuesday it would be migrating its service away from its private data centers and to Google's public cloud. When Evernote was looking for a public cloud provider, the company was interested in not only the base level infrastructure available, but also high-level machine learning services and services for building machine learning-driven systems, said Anirban Kundu, Evernote's CTO.

One of the biggest concerns surrounding artificial intelligence is that the technology will eliminate jobs as it becomes increasingly more sophisticated. According to a new report from Forrester Research, "intelligent agents and related robots" will eliminate 6 percent of U.S. jobs by 2021, wiping out, as The New York Post points out, 8.6 million jobs, or the equivalent of Florida's entire workforce, in just five years. And that's only the beginning of a "disruptive tidal wave" that will swallow up millions more jobs in the coming decades. "By 2021, AI within intelligent agents will evolve significantly beyond today's relatively simple machine learning and natural language processing (NLP)," reads the report. "Emerging applications will feature improved self-learning and more complex scenarios. As basic agents gain consumer adoption, next-generation AI will not power intelligent agents until 2020 or beyond."

A growing number of U.S. workers are covered by health insurance that sticks them with a bigger share of the medical bill but also softens that blow by providing a special account to help with the expense. Companies are turning more to these so-called consumer-directed health plans, which push patients to shop around for the best prices for care, because they can cost less than other types of coverage and help hold down future increases. Nearly 3 in 10 employees have this kind of coverage, up from 2 in 10 in 2014, according to an annual study of private insurance trends from the Kaiser Family Foundation released Wednesday. A decade ago, these plans were almost unheard of. Patients and employers generally pay less toward the premium, or cost of the coverage itself.

By combining the art of selling with predictive analytics you can contact leads when they're ready to buy – with excellent results. Here's what you need to know. Predictive selling combines your data and powerful analytics. It uses artificial intelligence to find patterns in data, creating forecasts about the future and helping to increase productivity. Consider B2B sales, where a large amount of data that gets generated through everyday interactions and transactions, which further generates a trail of insights which if decoded correctly can help identify hidden buying signals and focus the efforts of a sales person effectively.

Imagine wanting a cup of coffee and suddenly finding it before you, freshly prepared to your exacting standards. In the not-so-distant future, this will be reality for Muggles, too. In fact, thanks to a surge in consumer data, brands and marketers can already make better inferences about consumer wants and needs, but as AI and machine learning are more deftly integrated, insights will only get better, as will the ability to anticipate consumer needs – and to even make decisions on behalf of consumers without any input from them whatsoever. Like, say, ordering a cup of coffee. As it stands, digital enables brands to customize offers for specific users rather than provide generic solutions.