At a time when the banking industry needs to become increasingly focused on creating better customer experiences, the importance of distributing personalized communications that provide real value has never been greater. Artificial intelligence (AI) can help make this possible -- both automatically and at scale. The banking industry is undergoing a major transformation. Evolving regulatory requirements, more demanding customers, and greater competition from new, non-traditional players are among the catalysts driving change. Collectively, these and other factors are forcing banks and credit unions to rethink their business and how they engage with consumers.

"You have to begin to lose your memory, if only bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all." -- Luis Buñuel Portolés, Filmmaker Every year, hundreds of millions of people experience the pain of a failing memory. The reasons are many: traumatic brain injury, which haunts a disturbingly high number of veterans and football players; stroke or Alzheimer's disease, which often plagues the elderly; or even normal brain aging, which inevitably touches us all. Memory loss seems to be inescapable. But one maverick neuroscientist is working hard on an electronic cure.

As if fast food couldn't get any faster, a new integration between Slack and Taco Bell is proving the impossible to be quite possible. Last week, the express joint announced a new partnership with the workplace messenger system, which allows taco fans to order menu items by way of an artificial intelligence powered customer service system named TacoBot. You'll be able to ask and even pay for your favorite menu items through Slack, all with via a "witty personality you'd expect from Taco Bell." The latest in a long list of integrations the IM system has introduced in the last several months, this one might be the most delicious, limited as it may be. While the Taco Bell menu available on Slack may not be quite as extensive as the one in the actual fast food restaurant, Lawrence Kim, Taco Bell's director of digital innovation, says this is just the beginning.

Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek. One of humanity's greatest talents is its ability to self-destruct. In Silicon Valley, it's compulsory to call it disruption. You surely know that soon the world will be presided over by robots. They will think for us.

People often ask me about the impact of 3D printing on jobs. Will the technology be a job creator or destroyer? The short answer is, it will take more jobs than it makes -- and 3D printing is not alone. Technology will eventually make work obsolete. Our big problems are going to be figuring out how to survive the transition, then figuring out what to do with all that free time. About 10 years ago, inventor, futurist and now Director of Engineering at Google Ray Kurzweil famously embraced the concept of "the singularity" -- that moment in time when machine intelligence surpasses our own. Kurzweil predicted the singularity would occur by 2045, and man and machine would become inseparable.

Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer in women worldwide excluding skin cancer and it is ranked second for deaths among cancer patients [1]. Early diagnosis of breast cancer is crucial for patient prognosis. Currently, however, clinically diagnosed breast tumors have a median size of 2 to 2.5 cm [2], which are likely to be later stage (stage III) breast tumors that have already metastasized to axillary lymph nodes. A highly accurate diagnostic test for breast cancer is currently lacking. The standard mammography test has sensitivities of merely 54 to 77 % [3].

Make room, stethoscope and otoscope. Artificial intelligence (AI) applications are increasingly among the physician's standard instruments,experts at the University of Toronto say. "With electronic records, you can use text algorithms to read a patient's history, review their genetic predispositions, and correlate the information to make predictions," says Dr. Frank Rudzicz. Rudicz is one of five experts exploring the issues of privacy, accuracy and accountability at The Robot Will See You Now – the Revolution in Artificial Intelligence and Medicine at U of T on April 5. A research scientist with the Toronto Rehab Institute and an assistant professor (status only) in the department of computer science at the University of Toronto, Rudzicz is also a project lead within a federally funded national research network in technology and aging known as AGE-WELL NCE.

According to observations from many of the human workers still employed by one such restaurant, the robots simply lacked the intelligence, artificial or otherwise, to effectively wait on guests. Of the three restaurants in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou that attempted the practice, only one remains open, and that eatery is now currently only using one of the robots it initially employed. One of the establishments employed as many as 10 robots at one time. The gimmick reportedly had some short-term benefit of driving customers through the door. However, those guests reportedly were just as quickly turned away by food that was generally considered "unpalatable" for guests, according to reports.

The team of three so-called "suit wranglers" told me to relax as they strapped me into the contraption, but the heart rate monitor attached to my finger gave away the fact that I was a little uncertain as to what I had gotten myself into last week. "Do you normally have a high heart rate?" one technician inquired. During a visit to the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City last Thursday, I had happened across a preview of a new exhibit that was opening to the public the next day, Friday, April 1. The exhibit, The Genworth R70i Aging Experience, featured the just-unveiled Genworth R70i Age Suit – an augmented reality suit that simulates the sensory impairments that come as people age. The high-tech suit I was being strapped into was created by Applied Minds co-founder and inventor Bran Ferren, who partnered with Genworth Financial to create it with the goal of sparking a conversation among young people about aging and senior care.

If you've been following IBM's Watson project and like food, you may have noticed growing excitement among chefs, gourmands and molecular gastronomists about one aspect of its development. The main Watson project is an artificial intelligence that engineers have built to answer questions in native language -- that is, questions phrased the way people normally talk, not in the stilted way a search engine like Google understands them. And so far, it's worked: Watson has been helping nurses and doctors diagnose illnesses, and it's also managed a major "Jeopardy!" Now, Chef Watson -- developed alongside Bon Appetit magazine and several of the world's finest flavor-profilers -- has been launched in beta, enabling you to mash recipes according to ingredients of your own choosing and receive taste-matching advice which, reportedly, can't fail. While some of the world's foremost tech luminaries and conspiracy theorists are a bit skeptical about the wiseness of A.I., if it's going to be used at all, allowing it to tell you what to make out of a fridge full of unloved leftovers seems like an inoffensive enough place to start. I decided to put it to the test.