On a velvety March evening in Mandeville Canyon, high above the rest of Los Angeles, Norman Lear's living room was jammed with powerful people eager to learn the secrets of longevity. When the symposium's first speaker asked how many people there wanted to live to two hundred, if they could remain healthy, almost every hand went up. The venture capitalists were keeping slim to maintain their imposing vitality, the scientists were keeping slim because they'd read--and in some cases done--the research on caloric restriction, and the Hollywood stars were keeping slim because of course. When Liz Blackburn, who won a Nobel Prize for her work in genetics, took questions, Goldie Hawn, regal on a comfy sofa, purred, "I have a question about the mitochondria. I've been told about a molecule called glutathione that helps the health of the cell?" Glutathione is a powerful antioxidant that protects cells and their mitochondria, which provide energy; some in Hollywood call it "the God molecule." But taken in excess it can muffle a number of bodily repair mechanisms, leading to liver and kidney problems or even the rapid and potentially fatal sloughing of your skin. Blackburn gently suggested that a varied, healthy diet was best, and that no single molecule was the answer to the puzzle of aging. Yet the premise of the evening was that answers, and maybe even an encompassing solution, were just around the corner. The party was the kickoff event for the National Academy of Medicine's Grand Challenge in Healthy Longevity, which will award at least twenty-five million dollars for breakthroughs in the field. Victor Dzau, the academy's president, stood to acknowledge several of the scientists in the room. He praised their work with enzymes that help regulate aging; with teasing out genes that control life span in various dog breeds; and with a technique by which an old mouse is surgically connected to a young mouse, shares its blood, and within weeks becomes younger. Joon Yun, a doctor who runs a health-care hedge fund, announced that he and his wife had given the first two million dollars toward funding the challenge. "I have the idea that aging is plastic, that it's encoded," he said. "If something is encoded, you can crack the code." To growing applause, he went on, "If you can crack the code, you can hack the code!" It's a big ask: more than a hundred and fifty thousand people die every day, the majority of aging-related diseases. Yet Yun believes, he told me, that if we hack the code correctly, "thermodynamically, there should be no reason we can't defer entropy indefinitely. We can end aging forever." Nicole Shanahan, the founder of a patent-management business, announced that her company would oversee longevity-related patents that Yun had pledged to the cause.

Under constant pressure to slash costs and boost returns, investment banks are set to replace humans with artificial intelligence. Stamford, Connecticut-based research firm Greenwich Associates thinks investment banks will seek to deploy artificial intelligence across research, sales, trading, and compliance. Already used to detect fraud, deliver credit ratings and provide robotic financial advice in the retail sectors, artificial intelligence could be set to overhaul the way wholesale markets work. Richard Johnson, vice president of market structure and technology at Greenwich, said: "In today's environment of continued cost pressure and low margins in many businesses, investment banks are even more incentivized to reduce costs through automation." "AI and robotic process automation promise to provide just the solution they are looking for," he added in the March 7 statement.

Whether the displacement of human labour by automation is, as is often depicted, another nail in the manual coffin seems a moot assertion. But what cannot be denied is its increasing role across the financial services (FS) sector, with some players even seeing automated environments as a panacea. Universal remedy or not, what does seem clear is that the FS sector is ripe for automation. Supporting this assertion is a 2017 report by Infosys – 'Amplifying Human Potential: Towards Purposeful Artificial Intelligence' – which found that FS companies across the globe (based on a poll of 1600 senior business decision makers at some of the world's largest organisations) are looking to automation, and its subset, artificial intelligence (AI), to boost revenues and streamline structures. "Financial institutions (FIs) are looking at automation across a fairly wide spectrum of activities," says Tom Kimner, head of global risk marketing and operations at SAS. "One recent area of interest has been an investigation of current processes around governance and compliance. With many of these processes stabilising to some degree, FIs are looking at improving and streamlining them with some form of automation to not only reduce costs but to make them more robust and repeatable."

Hot on the heels of its addition to the Amazon app on the iPhone, Alexa is looking to make its presence known on Android, too. Huawei has announced that the virtual assistant is on its way to the Mate 9, making it the first Android phone to receive Amazon's AI aide. With Alexa on the Mate 9, you'll be able to do many of the things the Echo and Dot can do, including control your home automation devices while you're away. Huawei is touting its smart home capabilities as the flagship feature of Alexa on the Mate 9, but it can also handle many of the other skills Alexa has on Amazon's devices, including the ability to play games, shop at Amazon.com, get news updates, track your workouts, and play podcasts. Furthermore, you can use it to get information about people, places, and events, check your Google or Outlook calendar, find local businesses, and get weather and traffic updates.

Thuy Truong thought her aching back was just a pulled muscle from working out. But then came a high fever that wouldn't go away during a visit to Vietnam. When a friend insisted Truong, 30, go to an emergency room, doctors told her the last thing she expected to hear: She had lung cancer. Back in Los Angeles, Truong learned the cancer was at stage 4 and she had about eight months to live. "My whole world was flipped upside down," says Truong, who had been splitting her time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Asia for a new project after selling her startup.

It might be easy to diagnose a cold based on a patient's hoarse voice, but researchers believe subtle vocal changes undetectable to the human ear can identify or predict certain difficult-to-diagnose diseases. That's where machine learning could step in, helping physicians detect a range of illnesses that can't be diagnosed with more traditional tests, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, according to MIT Technology Review. Charles Marmar a psychiatrist at New York University's Langone Medical Center is collecting voice samples from combat veterans to determine how specific characteristics like tone and pitch could help psychiatrists diagnose PTSD, traumatic brain injury or depression. Initial studies have found vocal cues can differentiate PTSD patients from healthy ones with 77% accuracy, but an influx of new data will strengthen those results. "Medical and psychiatric diagnosis will be more accurate when we have access to large amounts of biological and psychological data, including speech features," Marmar told MIT Technology Review.

The financial services industry has been using artificial intelligence for decades in trading, and as the technology gets smarter it's being tested more often with payments as well. "There's an increasing trend around using AI around financial payments," said Sumeet Vermani, a global marketing leader working for fintech providers such as Red Box Recorders, a company that records communication, in the financial services industry for compliance. Financial institutions and payment providers are looking for ways to utilize AI in a number of areas, including customer interaction and fraud detection. The most popular application of AI in financial services -- and perhaps the most limited -- is the chatbot, a program that converses with customers through text or speech. In financial services, chatbots are usually used to make the first interaction with a customer, answering questions or directing customers to an area of the website.

Arthur Renowitzky can't help but command attention as he walks down the street on a sunny autumn morning. A driver lowers her window to flash a smile and a thumbs-up. "You got this," she says. Renowitzky has been paralyzed since 2007 after being shot in the chest for $20 and a fake gold chain. But he can stand and walk, using crutches for balance, when wearing an exoskeleton suit with motorized hips and knees powering his movements.

Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks; near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and combined. Some hit upon the trick of making copies of themselves that, in turn, made more copies. The replicating chains were caught in oily bubbles, which protected them and made replication easier; eventually, they began to venture out into the open sea. A new level of order had been achieved on Earth. The tree of life grew, its branches stretching toward complexity. Organisms developed systems, subsystems, and sub-subsystems, layered in ever-deepening regression. They used these systems to anticipate their future and to change it. When they looked within, some found that they had selves--constellations of memories, ideas, and purposes that emerged from the systems inside. They experienced being alive and had thoughts about that experience. They developed language and used it to know themselves; they began to ask how they had been made. This, to a first approximation, is the secular story of our creation. It has no single author; it's been written collaboratively by scientists over the past few centuries. If, however, it could be said to belong to any single person, that person might be Daniel Dennett, a seventy-four-year-old philosopher who teaches at Tufts. In the course of forty years, and more than a dozen books, Dennett has endeavored to explain how a soulless world could have given rise to a soulful one. His special focus is the creation of the human mind.

During the past decade, several areas of speech and language understanding have witnessed substantial breakthroughs from the use of data-driven models. In the area of dialogue systems, the trend is less obvious, and most practical systems are still built through significant engineering and expert knowledge. Nevertheless, several recent results suggest that data-driven approaches are feasible and quite promising. To facilitate research in this area, we have carried out a wide survey of publicly available datasets suitable for data-driven learning of dialogue systems. We discuss important characteristics of these datasets, how they can be used to learn diverse dialogue strategies, and their other potential uses. We also examine methods for transfer learning between datasets and the use of external knowledge. Finally, we discuss appropriate choice of evaluation metrics for the learning objective.