IBM Corp.'s Watson is heading to space, specifically the International Space Station, in the form of an 11-pound, artificially intelligent smiling orb. The orb, dubbed CIMON, short for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, will be taken to the ISS in June by German astronaut and scientist Alexander Gerst. It has been designed as an experimental assistance system to support astronauts in performing routine work. Complete with an "expressive digital face," CIMON will initially assist Gerst in running a series of tests, including an experiment with crystals, solving a Rubik magic cube based on videos, and a complex medical experiment. "CIMON's digital face, voice and use of artificial intelligence make it a'colleague' to the crew members," IBM said in a blog post Monday.

For IBM Watson CTO Rob High, the biggest technological challenge in machine learning right now is figuring out how to train models with less data. "It's a challenge, it's a goal and there's certainly reason to believe that it's possible," High told me during an interview at the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Google's AI chief John Giannandrea, for example, also recently listed this as one of the main challenges the search giant's machine learning groups are trying to tackle. Typically, machine learning models need to be trained on large amounts of data to ensure that they are accurate, but for many problems, that large data set simply doesn't exist. High, however, believes this is a solvable problem.

IBM yesterday announced it would be providing the AI brain for a robot being built by Airbus to accompany astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS). When only the best of the best will do, it looks like Watson has the right stuff. The robot, which looks like a flying volleyball with a low-resolution face, is being deployed with German astronaut Alexander Gerst in June for a six month mission. It's called CIMON, an acronym for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, and it's headed to space to do science stuff. It'll help crew members conduct medical experiments, study crystals, and play with a Rubix cube.

Sky has revealed a whole range of new updates to its Q boxes. The range of new features and tweaks will be arriving on viewers' TVs over the coming months. They include features like Spotify on the TV box, a doubling of the amount of the 4K content that will be available, improved voice functionality, and greater personalisation. The company will also change the design of the menus that are used to get around, including a new widescreen interface and a special mode for kids. Spotify is perhaps the most significant update, marking a major upgrade in the way that people can listen to music on their Sky box.

IBM and Unity are launching the IBM Watson Unity SDK on the Unity Asset Store, enabling developers to easily integrate Watson cloud services into their Unity applications such as visual recognition, speech to text, and language classification. The SDK makes it easy for developers to take advantage of modern AI techniques through a set of cloud-based services. Today we are thrilled to announce a partnership with IBM to launch the IBM Watson Unity SDK on the Unity Asset Store. This SDK is the first asset of its kind to bring scalable AI services to Unity, enabling developers to easily integrate Watson services into their Unity applications. Millions of Unity developers globally will now have access to the powerful cloud-based AI services of Watson directly within the Unity environment.

Some say that artificial intelligence (AI) will radically change healthcare in the future. But that prediction overlooks an important detail: AI is already significantly changing healthcare. IBM (NYSE:IBM) Watson Health general manager Deborah DiSanzo spoke at the annual J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference on Wednesday. She provided an update on the progress that IBM Watson, the AI system famous for beating Jeopardy! DiSanzo highlighted four areas where AI is making a big difference today.

This weekend's 60th Annual Grammy Awards will feature big names like Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Watson. The latter is IBM's famous artificial intelligence platform, which the Grammys are enlisting to curate the videos and photos being released to music fans following along with this year's awards show on social media in real time. IBM is partnering with Grammys organizer the Recording Academy to provide Watson's AI services to populate the event's social media feeds with automatically-generated content during the Grammy Awards ceremony, which airs this Sunday, Jan. 28, on CBS. IBM's Watson will get to work before the ceremony even starts, analyzing and sorting "hours of video and close to 125,000 photographs" taken during the Grammys' hours-long red carpet show ahead of Sunday's event, IBM said in its announcement. The platform will use features such as facial recognition, even analyzing stars' "facial emotion," to pick out the best images and videos to post for fans online.

Traditional analysis methods rely on structured data to provide intelligence - Watson is a breakthrough computing system, reading and analysing unstructured natural human language, to provide answers to complex questions. IBM developed the Watson AI supercomputer to intelligently simplify the rising flood of data and transform how computers and devices help people accomplish tasks in business, communities and their personal lives. Watson first made headlines in 2001 when it won the US quiz show Jeopardy! This was the first time that AI really came into the public consciousness when Watson beat humans in a head-to-head competition on the TV quiz show! Traditional analysis methods rely on structured data to provide intelligence - Watson is a breakthrough computing system, reading and analysing unstructured natural human language, to provide answers to complex questions.

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Cancer is responsible for one in six deaths around the world, and each year there are more than 14 million new cancer cases worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. As healthcare providers seek to enable data-driven, evidence-based cancer care, an explosion of medical information has created both challenges and opportunities to help improve quality of care. Some 50,000 oncology research papers are published each year, according to PubMed, and by 2020 medical information is projected to double every 73 days – outpacing the ability of human beings to keep up with the proliferation of medical knowledge. In this environment, Swedish oncology IT vendor Elekta is collaborating with artificial intelligence kingpin IBM Watson Health to offer Watson for Oncology as part of Elekta's cancer care systems. Elekta will market Watson for Oncology as an AI-based clinical decision support system paired within Elekta's digital cancer care systems, including its MOSAIQ Oncology Information System.