Suzanne Dworak-Peck, an internationally recognized leader in social work and a USC alumna, has donated 60 million to the USC School of Social Work, the university announced Wednesday. The gift is the largest donation from an individual to a social work school, according to USC, and changes the school's name to the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. "Today is about recognizing and celebrating social work -- as a focus for learning and research, as a profession and as an investment in the future of humanity," said Dworak-Peck, who has served as president of the National Assn. of Social Workers and is known for forging partnerships in the field around the world. "Our school will always be a destination for learning, where future generations of students will feel that we value and are invested in empowering their goals and their creativity and their growth. This is the feeling I took from USC and internalized throughout my career, and I really want to share that exceptional experience with others."

Smart technology has made life so much easier in recent years. It's made homes safer, it's made meals tastier, and it's made watches a whole lot more complicated. Unfortunately, there is no device that can work out for you. There's no app that can motivate you to run, and there's no wearable that will give you abs. Working out is still something you need to do on your own.

A new study found that physicians have a surprisingly poor knowledge of the benefits and harms of common medical treatments. And, as Aaron Carroll pointed out, it's not just that they were off, but "it's how off they often were." Anyone out there who still don't think artificial intelligence (AI) is needed in health care? The authors noted that previous studies have found that patients often overestimate benefits as well, but tended to minimize potential harms. Not only do physicians overestimate harm, they "underestimate how often most treatments have no effects on patients -- either harmful or beneficial."

Ever imagined being able to order a burrito and have it delivered by a drone? Well, Google has you covered. The search giant, which is now under the parent company Alphabet, began testing drone food deliveries using Chipotle burritos at Virginia Tech this week. A drone was spotted Monday flying overhead before lowering a large white package to the ground, the Roanoke Times reports. Virginia Tech was approved as a test site for drones by the Federal Aviation Administration in 2013 and the school provided safety oversight for the Google tests, according to the Times.

At the recent VentureBeat MobileBeat conference on July 13, a panel of executives assembled to discuss the impact of emerging technologies on the future of commerce. Three executives from high-profile companies - Holger Luedorf, senior vice president of Business Development at Postmates; Nichele Lindstrom, director of Digital Marketing at Whole Foods Market; and Eric Moujaes, senior director of Global Digital Product at McDonald's - chimed in and gave their insights on what they believe to be the most overhyped and promising technologies that will impact commerce in the near term. Their perspectives fell on the spectrum of the slightly surprising (drones will not be the future delivery vehicle of choice) as well as in alignment with current'hot' trends (chat bots look to be in like flynn). All three executives' opinions shed light on the potential future of our role as consumers and on businesses as providers in a'brave new world'. With companies like Amazon and Google forecasting the use of drones for delivery (any day now), people may be expecting these unmanned aerial vehicles to be a serious part of the future of commerce, but McDonald's Eric Moujaes believes differently.

Imagine infusing thousands of wireless devices into your brain, and using them to both monitor its activity and directly influence its actions. It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, and for the moment it still is – but possibly not for long. Brain research is on a roll at the moment. And as it converges with advances in science and technology more broadly, it's transforming what we are likely to be able to achieve in the near future. Spurring the field on is the promise of more effective treatments for debilitating neurological and psychological disorders such as epilepsy, Parkinson's disease and depression.

AI-enabled messaging programs that respond to text-based requests -- are the latest innovation that startups and corporations are using to serve existing customers and bring in new ones. Companies across a wide variety of industries are building these tools on popular messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Slack, Kik, and Hipchat, as well as on their own websites and apps. Some are even available by text, to help users do things like fight parking tickets, respond to customer service inquiries, and order tacos. This is by no means an exhaustive list, so if you see we're missing a chatbot that's currently up and running, please share the link with us in the comments section. We'll add new, significant chatbots to the list over time.

Did robots help make your pizza? If you ordered it from Silicon Valley's Zume Pizza, the answer is yes. The startup, which began delivery in April, is using intelligent machines to grab a slice of the multibillion-dollar pizza delivery market. Zume is one of a growing number of food-tech firms seeking to disrupt the restaurant industry with software and robots. "We're going to eliminate boring, repetitive, dangerous jobs, and we're going to free up people to do things that are higher value," said co-founder Alex Garden, a former Microsoft manager and president of mobile game maker Zynga Studios.

SRI International, the Silicon Valley research lab where Apple's virtual assistant Siri was born, is working on a new generation of virtual assistants that respond to users' emotions. As artificial-intelligence systems such as those from Amazon, Google, and Facebook increasingly pervade our lives, there is an ever greater need for the machines to understand not only the words we speak, but what we mean as well--and emotional cues can be valuable here (see "AI's Language Problem"). "[Humans] change our behavior in reaction to how whoever we are talking to is feeling or what we think they're thinking," says William Mark, who leads SRI International's Information and Computing Sciences Division. "We want systems to be able to do the same thing." SRI is focused first on commercial partners for the technology, called SenSay Analytics.

Your phone doesn't know how you're feeling -- but you may want it to if that capability came with a few fringe benefits. Affectiva makes emotion-detection software, and CEO Rana el Kaliouby was full of ideas today at Disrupt SF as to how it could be deployed, from gifs to Ubers. "We're obsessed with emotional AI, we wake up thinking about it," said Rana el Kaliouby. "I imagine a future where every device has a little emotion chip and can read your emotions, just like it's touchscreen enabled or GPS enabled." If you aren't creeped out by that, you might see a few of the benefits.