Computing and robotics is changing the face of medicine at a faster rate than ever before, and is going to affect the way we treat patients says a medical expert. Michael Gillam, who is heading to the SingularityU summit in Christchurch next month, is a physician, medical informatics expert and IT health specialist. He is also one of four directors that built and sold the patient information software Amalga which became one of Microsoft's flagship products. According to Gillam, as computing power continues to increase and the cost of testing and research decreases, health providers will be able to tailor treatment to patients. "When I started studying there were a few known types of blood cancers and by 2005, there were over 80 different types so we've come a long way," Gillam said.

For young children, adults learning English, or individuals with language disorders, complex narratives are difficult to create and understand.  While narratives can easily be assessed in terms of their lexical and syntactic difficulty, automatically measuring the level of narrative complexity is a challenging problem.  We present and evaluate a preliminary system for assessing narrative complexity, which should help identify suitable texts for readers and assist in narrative skill evaluation.