Deals and dollars to startups using AI algorithms reached record levels in 2016. The trend is revolutionizing several industries including healthcare, business intelligence, and advertising. Particularly, startups using machine learning and natural language processing to solve problems in the financial sector have piqued investors' interest in recent years. As we mentioned in our AI heatmap, deals to AI in the financial services area have seen an uptick since 2014. The competition in the space is heating up as several companies focused on core AI technologies, like Sentient Technologies and Ayasdi, are bringing their products to fintech, for applications ranging from quantitative trading and sentiment analysis to threat detection and risk analytics.

The concept is also known as Universal Basic Income, and it really is just that. The government would cut every citizen a check -- around 1,000 to 2,000 a month -- with no strings attached. You can spend it on groceries, stash it in a savings account or splurge it all on a trip to Hawaii. It doesn't matter what you do with it; the government will send you that money every month regardless. That check might not matter so much if you already have a decent salary, but if you're poor or unemployed, that extra 1,000 could be the difference between a roof over your head and living on the streets.

If you follow retail trends, you know that department stores are in trouble. As shoppers have headed online and to discount stores, traditional mall department stores are struggling to define their niche and halt falling profits. Many are now focused on creating a better in-store experience in hopes of motivating customers to shop in person. One of the most interesting customer experience initiatives is coming from Macy's, which also announced last week that it is closing 100 of its stores. In 10 of its U.S. locations, Macy's shoppers can now use artificial intelligence through their mobile devices to help them navigate the shopping experience.

Researchers at IBM Australia will play a role in building a "cognitive assistant" the IT giant hopes will help ophthalmologists diagnose eye conditions from medical image data. "IBM research is building the next generation cognitive assistant with advanced multi-media capability for early detection and management of diseases that can affect both the eyes and overall health of a person," the firm said in a now closed advertisement. Participating full and part-time interns would apply their clinical knowledge to analyse retinal image data and come up with "novel ideas and insights for cognition on this type of data". Back in June, IBM Australia revealed agreements with organisations including Melanoma Institute Australia to "apply cognitive computing to dermatology images" in the hope of earlier detection and identification of skin cancer.

Researchers at IBM Australia will play a role in building a "cognitive assistant" the IT giant hopes will help ophthalmologists diagnose eye conditions from medical image data. The company recruited a batch of research interns to lend their expertise to the project via the IBM Australia research lab in Melbourne. The interns were slated to begin work last month. "IBM research is building the next generation cognitive assistant with advanced multi-media capability for early detection and management of diseases that can affect both the eyes and overall health of a person," the firm said in a now closed advertisement. "We are building the image-guided informatics system that acts as a filter to extract the essential clinical information ophthalmologists need to know about a patient for diagnosis and treatment planning. "This filtering employs sophisticated medical image processing, pattern recognition and machine learning techniques guided by advanced clinical knowledge.

In the year 1820, a person could expect to live less than 35 years, 94% of the global population lived in extreme poverty, and less that 20% of the population was literate. Today, human life expectancy is over 70 years, less that 10% of the global population lives in extreme poverty, and over 80% of people are literate. These improvements are due mainly to advances in technology, beginning in the industrial age and continuing today in the information age. There are many exciting new technologies that will continue to transform the world and improve human welfare. Here are eleven of them.

Sleep is a naturally recurring state of mind characterized by altered consciousness, relatively inhibited sensory activity, inhibition of nearly all voluntary muscles, and reduced interactions with surroundings.[1] It is distinguished from wakefulness by a decreased ability to react to stimuli, but is more easily reversed than the state of hibernation or of being comatose. Mammalian sleep occurs in repeating periods, in which the body alternates between two highly distinct modes known as non-REM and REM sleep. REM stands for "rapid eye movement" but involves many other aspects including virtual paralysis of the body. During sleep, most systems in an animal are in an anabolic state, building up the immune, nervous, skeletal, and muscular systems. Sleep in non-human animals is observed in mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and some fish, and, in some form, in insects and even in simpler animals such as nematodes. The internal circadian clock promotes sleep daily at night in diurnal species (such as humans) and in the day in nocturnal organisms (such as rodents). However, sleep patterns vary widely among animals and among different individual humans. Industrialization and artificial light have substantially altered human sleep habits in the last 100 years. The diverse purposes and mechanisms of sleep are the subject of substantial ongoing research.[2] Sleep seems to assist animals with improvements in the body and mind. A well-known feature of sleep in humans is the dream, an experience typically recounted in narrative form, which resembles waking life while in progress, but which usually can later be distinguished as fantasy. Sleep is sometimes confused with unconsciousness, but is quite different in terms of thought process. Humans may suffer from a number of sleep disorders. These include dyssomnias (such as insomnia, hypersomnia, and sleep apnea), parasomnias (such as sleepwalking and REM behavior disorder), bruxism, and the circadian rhythm sleep disorders. In mammals and birds, sleep is divided into two broad types: rapid eye movement (REM sleep) and non-rapid eye movement (NREM or non-REM sleep). Each type has a distinct set of physiological and neurological features associated with it. REM sleep is associated with dreaming, desynchronized and faster brain waves, loss of muscle tone,[3] and suspension of homeostasis[citation needed]. REM and non-REM sleep are so different that physiologists classify them as distinct behavioral states. In this view, REM, non-REM, and waking represent the three major modes of consciousness, neural activity, and physiological regulation.[4] According to the Hobson & McCarley activation-synthesis hypothesis, proposed in 1975–1977, the alternation between REM and non-REM can be explained in terms of cycling, reciprocally influential neurotransmitter systems.[5]

In the year 1820, a person could expect to live less than 35 years, 94% of the global population lived in extreme poverty, and less that 20% of the population was literate. Today, human life expectancy is over 70 years, less that 10% of the global population lives in extreme poverty, and over 80% of people are literate. These improvements are due mainly to advances in technology, beginning in the industrial age and continuing today in the information age. There are many exciting new technologies that will continue to transform the world and improve human welfare. Here are eleven of them.

We've talked before about the prospects of artificial intelligence (AI) and how it will likely disrupt things like we've never seen before with some estimates predicting that up to 80% of all service jobs will be impacted. Healthcare is one area where AI is receiving a good chunk of funding. We looked before at one example of an artificial intelligence company called Enlitic that uses machine learning technology to read X-rays better than a human radiologist who makes 286,000 a year on average. There are actually quite a few artificial intelligence companies in healthcare and CB Insights recently identified 65 of them at various stages of funding. Founded just last year, Chinese company iCarbonX has taken in nearly 200 million in funding from investors that include the 200 billion Chinese internet giant Tencent.

Just this week, American fast food chain Taco Bell announced the TacoBot, which you can text via the Slack messaging app. You can use the bot to order food for yourself or a group of friends or co-workers, ask for recommendations and pay for it through Slack. As an executive said at the launch: "TacoBot is the next best thing to having your own Taco Bell butler…and who wouldn't want that?" You can order Domino's pizza through Amazon's AI assistant Echo (which hasn't made its way to the UK yet), and multinationals like Unilever and BMW use a simple Q&A bot that can answer any question a customer services employee would. The Henn-na hotel, which opened in Nagasaki, Japan last summer, is the world's first hotel to be fully staffed by robots – from check-in staff, to porters and the concierge.