I'd love to talk more about Flowcast, but I'm still not able to shake the image of you making a robotic submarine run by San Diego poolside (laughs). As a STEM enthusiast, I have been in awe of IBM Watson's capabilities. And I feel it's an honor to be talking to someone who has contributed to its capabilities. Now, let's come back to Flowcast. Can you share more information and shed more light on how Flowcast came about?

What comes first: the chicken or the egg? People have asked that question for ages, but nobody seems to have the answer. Which entity created the second one? How does one help the other to evolve? How do they work separately, or together? And what happens if they finally combine into one platform?

More recently, we've witnessed the encroachment of robots on the highly specialized and technical field of medicine. In 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a machine to administer the sedative propofol without the presence of an anesthesiologist. Computer-aided diagnosis, or CADx, has become a progressively important part of radiology, with a recent study by the Royal Society of Medicine showing that it outperformed radiologists in identifying radiolucency (the dark spots on an X-ray) by a factor of 10. More impressive -- because it marries finger dexterity with analytical prowess -- is the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, or STAR, which can stitch up tubular tissue, like blood vessels, with greater accuracy than its human counterpart. There's no reason why at some point in the future computers will not be able to take over other diagnostic and surgical tasks.

Researchers from Harvard and the University of Vermont have found a way to use Instagram to detect depression. Using machine learning tools, they developed a model that can predict whether a person is clinically depressed with surprising accuracy, just by looking at their Instagram photos. It's important to note right away that this model is just the beginning. The researchers themselves only go so far as to say that "these findings suggest new avenues for early screening and detection of mental illness," and "the findings reported here should not be taken as enduring facts." That said, their results are impressive.

Searching for a way to help children with autism, researcher Gail Alvares came up with a fairly simple equation. "We like games, we know that kids like games, so why don't we develop something that could become an additional part of therapy," she told Mashable Australia. As part of her work at the University of Western Australia and the Telethons Kids Institute, a medical research organisation based in Perth, Alvares is working on a video game project aimed at teaching kids with autism vital social skills. The game, currently dubbed Frankie and Friends, is intended to help such children begin to process social information -- an idea Alvares described in an article for ABC News. "One of the difficulties that some children with autism may experience is paying attention to social information with people," she explained.

Visualise and explore the work of 44,579 superstar Researchers from 8,437 Research Institutions in 118 countries on every sport in the Olympics 2016 Research Dashboard by wizdom.ai, the world's largest research knowledge graph powered by big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. With all eyes set on the Rio Olympics 2016, the world witnesses the greatest display of human strength, endurance, dexterity and performance by participants from across the globe. Everyday over the course of the two weeks, over 11,400 athletes compete for the gold medal in their game. They have undertaken intensive training for months and years to reach the epitome of physical fitness and to optimise their performance, making every millisecond count. Backing the Olympians that make it to the podium in every field, all along through their training there are thousands of researchers around the world who have extensively studied the games to raise the bar for human performance.

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.