Blaise Agüera y Arcas, principal scientist at Google, works with deep neural networks for machine perception and distributed learning. In this captivating demo, he shows how neural nets trained to recognize images can be run in reverse, to generate them. The results: spectacular, hallucinatory collages (and poems!) that defy categorization. "Perception and creativity are very intimately connected," Agüera y Arcas says. "Any creature, any being that is able to do perceptual acts is also able to create."

For the time being, countless decisions still require human engagement. Awash in data, executives dream of a time when the Jetson utopia finally manifests -- and they find themselves sipping coffee and cashing checks while machines slave away for them, uncovering unexpected business insights and learning optimal ways to manage organizations. Despite improvements in cognitive technologies, that dream managerial scenario is still far from reality. Decisions that executives face don't necessarily fit into defined problems well suited for automation. At least for the time being, countless decisions still require human engagement.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is all around us today–and it's often invisible as we go about our daily lives.

Digital channels have become an easy way for citizens to connect with their local governments.

The most important players in this new world are the "digital assistants:" Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Facebook M, Google Assistant, and a handful of third-party players. These, say their makers, will be our computing familiars, the programs that we'll spend most of our time talking to. They'll be accessible on different platforms (phones, watches, cars, home hubs) but keep tabs on our personal data, schedules, and location, across an entire network. And thanks to machine learning, they'll understand human speech better than any computers before, able to grok context and slang, and, eventually, emotion and intent. Assistants like this will offer us ambient computing.

Unlike systemically delivered immunotherapies that can produce serious side effects, ImmunoPulse IL-12 is proving to be generally well tolerated and safe across multiple treatment cycles in clinical trials. DNA-based IL-12 is administered directly into the tumor using an applicator that delivers quick electric pulses to increase the permeability of cell membranes. This produces a localized immune response and educates fighter immune cells to recognize and attack cancer throughout the body, without attacking healthy cells.

Jean-Philip Poulin was feeling "joyful" and "excited" when I interviewed him recently in Montreal. I know this because he showed me his real-time emotion metrics during our conversation, which were being parsed by a machine-learning algorithm that uses heart-rate data transmitted from his Microsoft Band 2 fitness tracker. Poulin is the COO of Sensaura, a Montreal-based software startup that proposes to bridge the gap between consumer wearables and affective computing. If its founders are as successful as they believe they will be, their product will hasten the inevitable future of emotionally intelligent machines: video games will know when you're bored, advertisers will know when you're swayed, and mental health professionals will know when you need a check-in. So far, progress in affective computing has depended on facial recognition software, which reads people's emotions pretty much the same way that people do: by looking at their faces for cues.

This is part 2 of a 3 part series providing a gentle introduction to writing Apache Spark applications on Databricks. This post focuses on the tools and features that are helpful for data scientists to solve business problems instead of managing infrastructure. The big challenge for data scientists is to take a model from the prototyping all the way into production. This process is often littered with a variety of different environments, samples of data that do not reflect production data quality, and a litany of infrastructure challenges. These problems become even worse when multiple teams are restricted to sharing one cluster for all of their work.

Last week, the New York Times reported the first successful "limb reanimation" in a person with quadriplegia. Ian Burkhart, 24, had broken his neck as a teen in a diving accident. His spine was damaged at the fifth cervical vertebra, leaving him paralyzed from the shoulders down. Using nerve bypass technology that transmits his thoughts directly to his hand muscles, he has regained control over his right hand and fingers. This is the first time a brain-computer interface has been used to help an individual move his own hands.

To Succeed in the Digital Economy, Health Organizations Must Tap Digital Models That Place People First and Scale Expertise to Meet Demand, Accenture Report Finds Annual outlook predicts five converging digital trends that will shift how healthcare applies key innovations LAS VEGAS; June 16, 2016 – To succeed in the digital economy, health organizations will need to place people first and adopt strategies to scale expertise to meet changing demand, according to an annual report by Accenture (NYSE: ACN) released at the annual America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) Institute & Expo in Las Vegas. The industry report, Accenture Digital Health Technology Vision 2016, identified five digital forces that [Accenture predicts] will converge over the next three to five years to reshape healthcare delivery: Intelligent Automation; The Liquid Workforce; The Platform Economy; Predictable Disruption; and Digital Trust. The five digital forces Accenture identified and their likely impact on the healthcare industry are described below. The Digital Health Tech Vision 2016 from accenture Intelligent Automation According to Accenture, the health industry will increasingly embrace intelligent automation--powered by artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and augmented reality – to streamline basic tasks, such as collecting patient intake data, enabling clinicians to focus where their training and experience have the greatest value. Significant investments in intelligent automation are already underway, as Accenture's survey found that roughly seven in 10 health executives are investing more in machine learning and AI-related technologies than they were two years ago.