From autonomous cars to conversations with robots, artificial intelligence has the potential to transform the lives of disabled people. AbilityNet's senior accessibility and usability consultant Joe Chidzik explores some of the ways AI will make the internet more accessible for disabled people. Microsoft offers a free service through the Microsoft Translator app where audio is translated into other languages, and into text (for captions). People who have English as a second language benefit, as do people who are deaf or who have hearing loss. Read more about Microsoft Translator app helping people who are deaf.

IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, California 95136 Abstract We report development of a data infrastructure for drug repurposing that takes advantage of two currently available chemical ontologies. The data infrastructure includes a database of compoundtarget associations augmented with molecular ontological labels. It also contains two computational tools for prediction of new associations. We describe two drug-repurposing systems: one, Nascent Ontological Information Retrieval for Drug Repurposing (NOIR-DR), based on an information retrieval strategy, and another, based on nonnegative matrix factorization together with compound similarity, that was inspired by recommender systems. We report the performance of both tools on a drug-repurposing task. 1 Introduction Drug repurposing is an efficient strategy for drug discovery, where new targets or activities are found for known drugs [1-5]. Drug repurposing requires the efficient representation of existing information about the activity of chemical compounds as drugs, and the development of algorithms that leverage such information and propose new indications.

Apple has combined its various artificial intelligence divisions into a new structure led by recent hire John Giannandrea, formerly Google's head of search and AI. TechCrunch first reported the restructuring earlier today, and Apple confirmed the change with an update to its executive leadership page. Giannandrea will now be in charge of Apple's machine learning division, its Siri team, and the Core ML team. Core ML is the machine learning API Apple launched last year to help native AI tasks and AI-focused apps and services from third-party developers run more efficiently on iOS devices. Giannandrea's official title will be chief of machine learning and AI strategy, and it's clear Apple leadership is putting its faith in the executive to help beef up its AI efforts.

As our society's technological progress marches forward, we've become ever more fascinated with the concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI). From IBM's Jeopardy-playing computer, Watson to television programs like Westworld, we've collectively begun exploring and philosophizing about the potential of AGI. Of course, most discussions about AGI in our popular culture are focused on the future, and not the current realities of the present when it comes to artificial general intelligence. Below, we'll discuss the current realities of AGI and what breakthroughs we're on the cusp of in 2018. How Close Are We To True Artificial General Intelligence? Software programs built into your iPhones and other hardware like Siri or Amazon's Alexa may lead you to believe that we're very close to true artificial intelligence.

In its early days, the television was a wood-enclosed box that blended in with your existing living room furniture. Its screen was small; plastics and composites weren't yet commonplace. Over time, manufacturing abilities, design trends, and television usage changed. The TV became the focal point of the living room--and it didn't need to blend in anymore. The device lost its homely trappings and evolved into the giant, black, personality-less screen we know today.

AirPlay 2 has arrived on Sonos. From today, any app on your iOS devices can be streamed directly to Sonos speakers including Sonos Beam, Sonos One, Playbase and the second generation Play:5. Plus, Siri is on board with an extensive set of voice controls. Not only can you ask Siri to play songs on Apple Music, you can also specify which room or devices you want them to play on. The roll out comes a week ahead of the new Beam living room smart speaker, which ships with AirPlay 2 support as standard.

Wolfe Herd's app has expanded beyond dating, with features promoting female friendship and career networking.Jamel Toppin/Forbes Some users of Bumble, Whitney Wolfe Herd's dating app, are lucky enough to swipe right and find love, a new friend or a job opportunity. Wolfe Herd, though, may be the luckiest of all: The app, which Forbes values at $1 billion, has brought its 29-year-old founder a $230 million fortune. While Wolfe Herd missed the cut for this year's Forbes list of America's Richest Self-Made Women, Forbes predicts it won't be too long before she joins the ranks, assuming Bumble keeps growing at the rate it has. Bumble's biggest competitor is Tinder, founded in 2012 as one of the first "swiping" dating apps,using a customer's location to find matches. Wolfe Herd actually helped build what is now her adversary.

There is a pending boom of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, and organizations will capitalize on them as AI continues to scale, evolve and mature. Over time, AI adoption at the enterprise level will cause an incremental upending of the traditionally known roles, skills and talent composition within every single business function. According to the 2018 Human Capital Trends Report, "The transition to digital business tools is at the top of the strategic agenda for many businesses today." If mobile, social and cloud computing were some of the biggest platform shifts and technological investments that dominated the beginning of the 21st century, AI investments will be considered the next wave of major technological shifts. Forrester predicts that most (if not all) technology functions will be augmented or replaced by AI.

Amazon's Alexa two-way voice technology has been embedded in clock radios, thermostats, televisions, and even lamps. With the Ecobee Switch, it now comes to the humble light switch. There are dozens of those. This is a switch with a legit Alexa hub built into it, blue light and everything. Speak into the embedded microphone, and your light switch can do just about anything that your standalone Echo device can do.

Being a child of the 1960s, I was enamored of Star Trek. Among the many future wonders to behold? Computers that could conduct an informed conversation with humans. Fast forward to the present day, and we're getting accustomed to intelligent assistants in our homes and on our phones. Better yet, intelligent assistants are now poised to show their value in the workplace.