I never win raffles, but I finally did last week at the MIT Xconomy in Boston. My prize was a Roomba. These robotic vacuums have been around for years for personal use, but now hotels are using similar devices to not only automate the cleaning process but also most of the hotel functionality like check-in, check-out, food delivery, and the automatic folding of clothes. There's even a completely robot-powered automated hotel in Japan. As a service, automation is invaluable when done well.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionising multiple areas of information technology and has exciting potential for applications in biomedicine. It is predicted that the use of AI in healthcare will grow tenfold in the next five years. In a clinical setting AI will be a powerful tool, using patients' data - including their genetic sequence - to empower clinicians to make informed healthcare decisions based on the latest and most effective treatment options for each patient. Computer-aided diagnosis and treatment is currently being trialled at 16 cancer institutes in partnership with IBM's Watson Health AI venture. However, not all of the medical applications of AI will be for doctors; the technology has diverse applications for healthcare.

GMA Consulting, an IT consultancy specialising in solutions for the financial services industry, and TermSet, a provider of software which automatically creates accurate and consistent metadata and taxonomies for Office documents, PDF's and emails within Microsoft SharePoint, are pleased to announce a partnership to offer advanced document-centric solutions for firms in the financial services sector. GMA Consulting has extensive experience in implementing SharePoint solutions for its financial services clients and has identified two important areas where TermSet's advanced capabilities, such as summarisation and sentiment analysis can deliver clear benefits to its customers. Ben Grey, a Director at GMA Consulting, said "The first area we identified where TermSet could benefit our clients was managing research documents. Both buy and sell side firms produce and consume large amounts of research documents. When a piece of research material is uploaded to a SharePoint library TermSet can automatically produce a headline summary, classify the sentiment and automatically tag with metadata such as asset class, industry sector, company name and region / country. This will make it far easier for users to find documents they are interested in, particularly if SharePoint's advanced search capabilities are used as well. The second area we identified is legal document management. TermSet can help extract key information such as matter reference and counterparty names and tag documents with this information. This would negate the need for legal departments to manually classify documents, which is hugely time consuming and inefficient."

Google Calendar has launched a new feature called Goals that uses machine learning to help you figure out when you have time to pencil in stuff like spending time with your family or exercise. The feature is now available for Calendar's Android and iOS apps. Goals are set up by clicking into a category (which currently include Exercise, "Build a Skill," and "Me Time," though they can also be customized) and selecting a specific activity. Then Calendar will automatically find open slots, fill them in with your goal, and send reminders. If you schedule something else during those times, Google Calendar will find another window for your goal--but, in a tool that will surely be chronically abused by procrastinators, they can also be deferred.

If the humans ain't broke, don't replace them with robots. Otherwise, your whole restaurant will itself be -- you guessed it -- broke. In a rather damning display of the limitations of technology, a fleet of useless robots meant to replace human servers have caused the demise of two restaurants in China. As it turns out, the answer to the question, "What can't robots do?" is actually, "a lot." Initially, Chinese restaurant chain Heweilai bought a whole staff's worth of automatons to wait on its patrons in three locations.

During my last interview I had a great talk with Daniel McDuff. Daniel's research is at the intersection of psychology and computer science. He is interested in designing hardware and algorithms for sensing human behavior at scale, and in building technologies that make life better. Applications of behavior sensing that he is most excited about are in: understanding mental health, improving online learning and designing new connected devices (IoT). Listen to more about why it is important to collect data from much larger scales and help computers read our emotional state. Key Learning Points: 1. Understanding the impact, intersection, and meaning of Psychology and Computer Science 2. Facial Expression Recognition 3. How to define Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and Machine Learning 4. Applications of behavior sensing with Online Learning, Health, and Connected Devices 5. Visual Wearable sensors and heart health 6. The impact of education and learning 7. How to build computers to measure phycology, our reactions, emotions, etc 8. Daniel is building and utilizing scalable computer vision and machine learning tools to enable the automated recognition and analysis of emotions and physiology. He is currently Director of Research at Affectiva, a post-doctoral research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab and a visiting scientist at Brigham and Womens Hospital. At Affectiva Daniel is building state-of-the-art facial expression recognition software and leading analysis of the world's largest database of human emotion responses. Daniel completed his PhD in the Affective Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab in 2014 and has a B.A. and Masters from Cambridge University. His work has received nominations and awards from Popular Science magazine as one of the top inventions in 2011, South-by-South-West Interactive (SXSWi), The Webby Awards, ESOMAR, the Center for Integrated Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) and several IEEE conferences. His work has been reported in many publications including The Times, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC News, New Scientist and Forbes magazine. Daniel has been named a 2015 WIRED Innovation Fellow.

A week later, she was accidentally activated during testing, and within minutes had succumbed to a "kush" induced freakout. Tay is now offline, and her account made private, much like any parent will do when their teenager gets into trouble on the internet. What went wrong with Tay? No one should find it surprising that releasing a machine learning chatbot on social media, in the guise of a teenage girl no less, would result in a wave of interactions designed to test the limits of the technology -- and anyone who has ever spoken to Siri, Cortana or any other virtual assistant knows that one of the first tests involves saying the most profane statements you can think of. Microsoft was certainly aware of this; their VA, Cortana, is often subject to sexual harassment, and so she has been designed to fight back.

Useless robot waiters are being blamed for the closure of several restaurants in China, after an investment by the owners in automated serving staff turned out to be a financial disaster. According to a translated report in the Worker's Daily -- which might have good reason to undermine robot labour, so perhaps be a bit cynical about it -- a restaurant chain has closed two branches staffed in part by 7,000 ( 4,900) robot servants, with a third surviving the cut; but replacing the underperforming automatons with rubbish old last-generation human service staff. Despite what we may have been told by the pro-robot agenda being pushed by the media, staff weren't impressed, telling the paper: "The robots weren't able to carry soup or other food steady and they would frequently break down. The boss has decided never to use them again." Which is odd, as they seem to be able to weld cars together and put windscreens into them by themselves, surely harder tasks than giving a man a cup of tea?

HealthBox retails for 400 and comes with connected wrist band, weight scale and heart rate monitor devices.

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.