The world's first AI healthcare companion for the home can store, dispense and even order medication The rise of fitness trackers and exercise programs with a cult following have made it clear that our society is desperate to get and remain healthy. Those looking for a high-tech way to keep track of their well-being might be interested in a new home health robot called Pillo. A combination of face recognition, machine learning, automation and video conferencing make Pillo a personal health assistant that can even dispense your daily vitamins and medication. According to the company responsible for the device, the system uses facial recognition and can identify the face and voice of every user in a household, and dispense the right pills at the appropriate time. The medication is stored in a tamper-proof casing that can fit up to 250 medium-sized pills.

After decades of stagnation in research and development of artificial intelligence solutions, machine learning has blossomed again – and its seeds are spreading to financial services. Sofia Lotto Persio reports on how AI is improving the field. Almost 20 years later, in March 2016, Google's AlphaGo programme beat South Korean champion Lee Sedol at four matches of Go, a strategy game, in what represents another historic breakthrough for artificial intelligence (AI). In the two-decade span between these achievements, AI has progressed tremendously. Go is a much more complex game than chess, as there are more possible positions on the board than there are atoms in the universe.

So Brexit turned out to be the non-event for markets we expected with asset prices booming to record highs while support for remaining inside the single currency free-trade zone has risen within other European Union countries. As is often the case, the trade was to "fade" – or bet against – the apocalyptic hyperbole both before and after the referendum. Remarkably one boutique Australian quant shop did exactly this by leveraging academic studies of "blue green algae", which helped it generate enormous 32 per cent returns on the day of the vote. Taaffeite Capital Management (TCM) claim their "artificial intelligence" (aka computer code operating autonomously of humans) figured out that there were massive financial market mispricings that warranted shorts on equities and long positions on government bonds without actually knowing that a referendum was being held. The intellectual property underlying this "systematic" – or automated – trading strategy belongs to Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD Desmond Lun, who is a 36-year old Australian professor of computer science at Rutgers University in the US, and a Melbourne University alumnus.

Looking for something to read? Check out:There was a good amount of eye-rolling in the Engadget Slack channel when Shervin Pishevars mobile app response to recent police shootings was brought up (Okay, most of it was mine). Maybe his heart was in the right place, or maybe it was just his pocketbook, but the fact remains: It might be time to admit that not everything needs an app or a Silicon Valley-style "disruption" to be solved. Because Verizon is our parent company, people often think we can't write about them objectively. Cherylnn Low's honest coverage of Verizon's new data plans is sure to ruffle some feathers on both sides of the fence (and has already provoked quite a few thoughts in the comment section).

Nowadays you look around and it seems like everyone at the gym or the park is wearing the coloured band of a FitBit, FuelBand, Apple Watch, Jawbone Up or some other activity tracker on their arm. You might very well have one on as you read this. These tools work to collect huge amounts of data about our personal activity, relatively inexpensively and easily. This allows us to quantify how much we do to improve our health by taking measurements of ourselves performing activites such as running, swimming and lifting weights. However, rarely do we try to quantify how well we perform an activity.

That's what the most ubiquitous genre of video games are colloquially called. They are the reason critics constantly say that video games are obsessed with guns. Since the early 1990s when titles like "Doom" and "Wolfenstein 3-D" popularized the concept of a gun-based game from a first-person perspective, shooters have dominated. It's a gun-obsessed medium that mirrors a gun-obsessed society. But as mass shootings become an increasingly regular part of the news cycle, it's fair to ask: Did the industry create a monster?

The legality of and public's view towards marijuana is rapidly changing as more states decriminalize and legalize the drug. As such, how have the words associated with marijuana in news articles changed over time? I developed a two-step approach to to try to answer this question. First, I wanted to identify distinct eras characterized by the use of key words associated with marijuana. Second, I aimed to assess whether words in each era represented larger themes regarding the public's view toards marijuana and the the drug's legality.

The Vermont countryside provides a beautiful backdrop to the headquarters of the Terasem Movement Foundation, where Bruce Duncan is busy working on changing the future as we know it. Seeker Stories correspondent, Laura Ling, visited Terasem and Duncan to get a sense of what could be around the corner in artificial intelligence. There, Ling met Bina48, a social robot considered to be one of the most advanced of her kind in the world. She runs on a type of software called a character engine, which allows her to interact with humans at an unprecedented level. It may even allow her to evolve.

According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report released in 2011, about 820,000 women and men aged 15-24 were newly infected with HIV in developing countries. Over 60% of these were women. Among so many other challenges, developing countries are plagued with serious reproductive health illnesses such as sexually transmitted infections (STIs), unintended pregnancies, and complications from childbirth. A key priority for policymakers, researchers, and health care providers working in developing nations is to emphasize prevention and distribution of information about STIs and other reproductive tract infections (RTIs). This report on Improving Reproductive Health in Developing Countries from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences contains additional information on the topic.

The classifiers can be represented as discrimination maps, where a red color indicates that the intensity at that location contributes to the likelihood of the images belonging to the more advanced stage, and a blue color to the likelihood of belonging to the less advanced stage. Weights are shown inside the mask that resulted in the highest accuracies for each classification: A: Alzheimer's disease (AD) vs. subjective cognitive decline (SCD); B: AD vs. mild cognitive impairment (MCI); C: MCI vs. SCD. At the VU University Medical Center Amsterdam researchers are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to be able to detect early signs of Alzheimer's on MRI scans. The parenchyma exhibits small incremental changes on the scan as the disease develops, but these are difficult to spot in new patients. Only once the disease is at a later stage clinicians are able to identify the disease from the scans, but by then it's usually already exhibiting well known symptoms.