The artificial intelligence (AI) system is "based on deep learning, a machine-learning algorithm used for a range of applications including speech recognition and image recognition," explains Andrew Beck, an associate professor in pathology at Harvard Medical School, who heads the team developing the new system at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), in Boston, MA. Prof. Beck and colleagues demonstrated the new AI system in a competition held at the annual meeting of the International Symposium of Biomedical Imaging (ISBI 2016) in Prague in April. He and his colleagues are developing AI methods that train computers to interpret pathology images to improve the accuracy of diagnoses. The approach they are using teaches computers to interpret the complex patterns seen in such images by "building multi-layer artificial neural networks," says Prof. Beck. The process is thought to be similar to the way learning takes place in the layers of neurons in the neocortex of the brain, the region where thinking occurs.

Physical wellbeing has been the focus of most wearables to date. At the same time some startups are appearing which try to track mental states. But these are usually head bands which make you like an updated 21st Century Hippie. The new ZENTA wrist-wearable takes a different approach. Created by VINAYA, a London-based technology design house, the Zenta goes down this mental wellness path.

Devin Butts walked the tiled halls of the Pueblo Mall early one Friday morning in April, amazed at what he saw. The mall, the main shopping center for the city of Pueblo in southern Colorado, was larger than anything the 25-year-old was used to while living on the streets of quiet prairie towns in north central Texas. He wandered through T-shirt stores and schlocky gift shops, past American flag-adorned beer bongs and marijuana-emblazoned "Rocky Mountain High" shirts, not noticing how employees warily eyed his baggy jeans and the tattoos peeking out from the sleeves and collar of his Bob Marley T-shirt. Or maybe he'd learned from experience to ignore the looks. Butts inquired at shop after shop. Often he received an apologetic shake of the head. Sometimes he was told to fill out an application online, no easy feat for someone who didn't own a computer.

We've noticed a lot of talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) among online marketplaces, including eBay (eBay CEO Devin Wenig said AI technology will render the search box redundant), Alibaba (invested in Twiggle), and Amazon (CEO Jeff Bezos said we're at the beginning of a golden age of AI). According to Facebook's detailed post published on Wednesday, June 1, DeepText is a deep-learning artificial intelligence system that is able to understand the content of several thousand posts per second. The system will also be able to filter out malicious, hateful, or hurtful speech on the social network, along with photos that contravene Facebook's policies. Published By: Eunice Gettys on June 5, 2016 08:37 am EST Microsoft Corporation ( NASDAQ:MSFT) announced back in March that Windows 10 had exceeded 300 million active users, calculating from when the operating system was launched in mid-2015, making it the company's most successful operating system ever. Here are five things in technology that happened this past week and how they affect your business.

Dan Schutzer (photo left), a senior technology consultant at the Financial Services Roundtable's BITS technology division defined artificial intelligence as'the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.' According to Schutzer, efforts in the 1990s to build artificial intelligence-like systems for use in financial services has resulted in'disillusionment as realization set in that these systems were harder and more costly to build and maintain than first anticipated.' Fast forward to 2015 when advances in high performance computing, algorithmic theory and cloud computing are bringing us closer to true AI capabilities for commercial use by the financial industry. Patrick Tucker, author of The Naked Future: What Happens In a World That Anticipates Your Every Move?, wrote that "When the cost of collecting information on virtually every interaction falls to zero, the insights that we gain from our activity, in the context of the activity of others, will fundamentally change the way we relate to one another, to institutions, and with the future itself." "One of the first things to note about AI is its ability to process enormous amounts of data very quickly and far more data than it's ever been processed in the past by humans or computer programs. That is going to enable banks to improve the services they provide to customers, including better, more targeted advice," said Astrid Raetze (photo right), a partner at Baker & McKenzie.

You'll find the Future of Humanity Institute down a medieval backstreet in the centre of Oxford. It is beside St Ebbe's church, which has stood on this site since 1005, and above a Pure Gym, which opened in April. The institute, a research faculty of Oxford University, was established a decade ago to ask the very biggest questions on our behalf. Notably: what exactly are the "existential risks" that threaten the future of our species; how do we measure them; and what can we do to prevent them? Or to put it another way: in a world of multiple fears, what precisely should we be most terrified of? When I arrive to meet the director of the institute, Professor Nick Bostrom, a bed is being delivered to the second-floor office. Existential risk is a round-the-clock kind of operation; it sleeps fitfully, if at all. Bostrom, a 43-year-old Swedish-born philosopher, has lately acquired something of the status of prophet of doom among those currently doing most to shape our civilisation: the tech billionaires of Silicon Valley.

Is your smart phone really smart? Do you ever fear it will get too smart? Will it wake up one morning and decide to start running your life – deleting contacts it doesn't like, booking holidays online that it wants to go on with you or shifting your calendar appointments to suit its tastes? Perhaps, more realistically, you may be inclined to feel that your printer has a mind and mood swings of its own, seemingly out to get you when you are facing the most desperate deadline. But actually, the more we progress in the field of robotics, the more we are forced to recognise and appreciate that the mind is a unique wonder of the living world.

Claned Co-founder Vesa Perala believes that instead of attempting to retrofit technology to out-dated educational systems, EdTech start-ups should be helping to write a new rulebook. For the past 3 years, Claned has been in what he describes as semi-stealth mode, focusing on developing a robust artificial intelligence system that uses machine-learning algorithms to map out what factors most impact individual learning. That knowledge, he says, was already out there, because it's something universities routinely do. Over time, tutors build an understanding of how each student learns, yet that data is trapped in a system which simply isn't scalable. Claned set out to solve this by combining these tried-and-tested academic evaluation metrics with machine learning algorithms and Artificial Intelligence.

You might offer your employees gym membership. You may provide them with fresh fruit and free coffee. No doubt you give them opportunities to learn, chances to feel challenged, work that enthuses and excites them. But sometimes, a seemingly perfect package still can't satisfy. Today, we face a global crisis; one rarely discussed, but widely felt. Approximately 450 million people worldwide have a mental health problem.

James Crowder is the chief engineer at Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services. Imagine yourself a passenger in a futuristic self-driving car. Instead of programming its navigation system, the car interacts with you in a near-human way to understand your desired destination. The car has learned your preferences for music, temperature and lighting; these are adjusted without the need to twist a knob. Two distinct paths of technological evolution are advancing technology to create this future (and more): virtual intelligence (VI) is planned, controlled and predictable; in sharp contrast, artificial intelligence (AI) is none of these.