IBM Watson is known for its work in identifying cancer treatments and beating contestants on Jeopardy! But now the computing system has expertise in a new area of research: neuroscience. Watson discovered five genes linked to ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease, IBM announced on Wednesday. The tech company worked with researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. The discovery is Watson's first in any type of neuroscience, and suggests that Watson could make discoveries in research of other neurological diseases.

Evernote set off a minor fracas on Twitter Tuesday when it announced an upcoming change to its privacy policy that would enable company employees to "exercise oversight of machine learning technologies applied to account content" in order to improve the service. The changes, which will take effect January 23rd, 2017, did not sit well with some of the service's users despite the company's explanation that it was only as oversight for the machine learning process. I need a good replacement for @evernote. Preferably one that lets me import existing notes & works on desktop, iOS and Android. According to the company's policy update notice, "Only employees who are fulfilling one of the customer or business needs... will be able to access your data."

Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company's popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination. Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post. First, he compared a few sentences from two published versions of "The Great Gatsby," Takashi Nozaki's 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami's more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce. Murakami's translation is written "in very polished Japanese," Rekimoto explained to me later via email, but the prose is distinctively "Murakami-style."

American Express introduced an "Add a Card" feature to its Amex Bot in Facebook Messenger, which will enable eligible US consumers to make purchases on the social media website. These card members will be able to effortlessly make purchases in games and on shop sections of business pages and participate in Messenger commerce experiences. This added feature will help bolster Amex's chatbot offerings, which already includes giving users notifications about balances, benefits, and recent purchases. The bot will keep Amex engaged with its consumers at their convenience. Using a chatbot is aiding Amex in engaging customers.

No one likes standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), not even Uber. The ride-hailing app launched a fleet of self-driving cars in San Francisco on Tuesday but opted not to go through the vetting process put in place by the California DMV, according to a report from TechCrunch. Uber isn't the first company to test autonomous vehicles in the state, and the DMV has a process for granting permission to companies who would like to put those computer-guided cars on the road. Twenty companies, including Tesla, Google, BMW and Ford have gone through the DMV's Autonomous Vehicle Tester Program, which is administered by the department's occupational licensing branch. Uber is not one of them.

Amazon will now fly things to people's houses to deliver them. The company has completed the first ever Prime Air delivery, dropping an order off at someone's house just 13 minutes after they'd ordered it. For now, the drone deliveries are in a private – and largely mysterious – testing process. It is trying a range of different drones, it has said, flying them around different environments in the UK as part of its secretive tests. But eventually the company intends to roll out drone deliveries to everyone across the world.

At places like schools, hotels and tourist attractions, Microsoft Translator can help up to 100 people hold a live conversation in nine different languages. Imagine you're on a guided tour in Chartres cathedral in France along with tourists from Brazil, China, Russia and Germany -- but none of you speaks French. For the last few decades, you'd each need your own tour guide. A new app from Microsoft aims to flatten this multilanguage barrier, though. The Microsoft Translator app, running on your phone but relying on a network to Microsoft's servers, can translate your tour guide's words into eight other languages.

Machine learning (ML) is getting a lot of attention at the moment. This is partly because a slew of new companies are emerging which are using it in innovative ways. And partly because it can get easily subsumed into the fuss and furore about AI and the rise of evil robot intelligence. Graph technology, on the other hand, is something which takes more of a back seat and yet, in a lot of ways, also sits at the forefront of the big data and analytics movement. "We firmly believe is that it's at the intersection of machine learning and graph technology where the next evolution lies and where new disruptive companies are emerging," says Ash Damle, Founder and CEO at Lumiata which helps healthcare organisations makes predictions.

Deep learning, which is basically neural network machine learning with multiple hidden layers, is all the rage--both for problems that justify the complexity and high computational cost of deep learning, such as image recognition and natural language parsing, and for problems that might be better served by careful data preparation and simple algorithms, such as forecasting the next quarter's sales. If you actually need deep learning, there are many packages that could serve your needs: Google TensorFlow, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, Caffe, Theano, Torch, and MXNet, for starters. I confess that I had never heard of MXNet (pronounced "mix-net") before Amazon CTO Werner Vogels noted it in his blog. There he announced that in addition to supporting all of the deep learning packages I mentioned above, Amazon decided to contribute significantly to one in particular, MXNet, which it selected as its deep learning framework of choice. Vogels went on to explain why: MXNet combines the ability to scale to multiple GPUs (across multiple hosts) with good programmability and good portability.

Steadfast robots replace hotel desk clerks and retail workers, autonomous cars and drones transport robots that deliver packages more efficiently, shopping sprees take place in virtual reality – these are just a few of the innovations Gartner, Inc. predicted during a webcast entitled, "The Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017." In a fascinating presentation that encouraged companies to experiment with scenarios for these and other technologies based on targeted business value, David Cearley, Vice President and Gartner Fellow, explained how intelligence anywhere and everywhere actually puts people in charge. More and more people will use augmented reality for more personalized shopping experiences. It's about all of that together," said Cearley. "We need to…put the person at the center.