Home printers and scanners had their moment--around the same time flip phones did. Instead, they're swapping out those dusty relics for a powerful little app called iScanner. This mobile document scanner fits in your pocket, fires up instantly, and doesn't charge you monthly. You can grab lifetime access for just 24.99 with code SCAN at checkout while codes last (reg. Last time we ran this deal, they sold out within the day--so act fast if you're interested.

In the fall of 2000, as the first dot-com bubble was bursting, the Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn attended a talk, at Carnegie Mellon, about ten problems that Yahoo couldn't solve. Von Ahn, who had just begun his Ph.D., liked solving problems. He had planned to study math until he realized that many mathematicians were still toiling away over questions that had proved unanswerable for centuries. "I talked to some computer-science professors and they would say, 'Oh, yeah, I solved an open problem last week,' " he told me recently. "That seemed just a lot more interesting."

This funding round was led by Casdin Capital, which was joined by Vensana Capital, PFM Health Sciences, Twine Ventures, Upside Partnership, and Operator Partners as well as a number of notable individual investors. Apella's initial products include sensors installed in the operating room and harnesses a variety of artificial intelligence approaches to collect and analyze new data about surgery. And this data contributes to applications targeted at improving hospital operations, surgical quality, staff training and real-time decision making with the overall goal of improving the quality of surgical care. The funding round will support expanded implementation of Apella's technology with hospital partners. And it will also allow Apella to grow its team and develop new applications based on its core platform and computer vision and machine learning capabilities.

"Apella believes that every patient deserves the best possible outcome from surgery," commented David Schummers, co-founder and CEO of Apella. "Our technology is aimed at helping each member of the surgical team to do their best job." Apella's initial products include sensors installed in the operating room and harness a variety of artificial intelligence approaches to collect and analyze new data about surgery. This data contributes to applications targeted at improving hospital operations, surgical quality, staff training and real-time decision making with the overall goal of improving the quality of surgical care. "At Apella, we know that you can't improve what you can't measure," continued Schummers.

The Company's technology harnesses artificial intelligence to create a systematic method for process improvement and quality control in surgery.

UBS Group AG Chief Executive Officer Ralph Hamers is creating a new bank-wide team to use more artificial intelligence and data analytics to drive the bank's digitization. The new team called AI, Data and Analytics, will be lead by the head of the investment bank Rob Karofsky and chief digital and information officer Mike Dargan, according to a memo Hamers sent to employees on Tuesday and seen by Bloomberg. Its contents were confirmed by a spokeswoman.

Imagine you are buying a new car, and you have shortlisted 3 different models to finalize from. How would you go about it? There are so many aspects to consider, like -- power, safety, price, service network, looks, brand, colour, space and so on. How would you take a balanced decision? Would you use some tool for evaluation?

As we continue to move forward in digital transformation, an increasing number of companies are discovering the promise of robotic process automation (RPA). In a nutshell, RPA allows companies to gain efficiencies and (hopefully) save money by automating routine tasks. RPA is what I'd call the low-hanging fruit of artificial intelligence. It's governed by structured input. Its processes are mundane and rule-based.

The idea of the paperless office has been around for decades yet few companies have been able to achieve anything close to this idea. With all the technological advances we've had, why is it still so hard for companies to move away from their people and paper based processes? It may come as little surprise that organizations are still awash in paper. However, for companies looking to gain insights and extract value from their data, they need to get that data into a state where computers are able to process it. To do that, companies need to digitize and digitalize their information and processes.

This magic is performed using powerful AI software that has only recently become powerful enough to master this formidable challenge. But two French engineering students, Virgile Garnier and Juliette Breurec, decided to take it on and have created an simple, elegant approach to transforming hand-drawn visual diagrams into computer-based maps that can be modified and improved – and save their creators the hours that would be required to do this task manually. I recently interviewed them to learn more about doUmind – how they envisioned this remarkable tool, how it accomplishes this remarkable task and what's next for it. Chuck Frey: Where did you and Juliette come up with the idea for doUmind? Garnier and Breurec: We were both engineering students specializing in mechatronics at the end of our studies at our university, IMT Mines Alès.