For centuries, menstruation was managed with homemade solutions--until the world changed in a hurry. Patented in 1931, the first Tampax tampons were sold in 1936 as the first widely marketed internal menstrual product. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. About half of us will use them at some point in our lives. But few of us like to talk about them, at least in public.

We introduce the Contrastive Similarity Space Embedding Algorithm (ContraSim), a novel framework for uncovering the global semantic relationships between daily financial headlines and market movements. ContraSim operates in two key stages: (I) Weighted Headline Augmentation, which generates augmented financial headlines along with a semantic fine-grained similarity score, and (II) Weighted Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning (WSSCL), an extended version of classical self-supervised contrastive learning that uses the similarity metric to create a refined weighted embedding space. This embedding space clusters semantically similar headlines together, facilitating deeper market insights. Empirical results demonstrate that integrating ContraSim features into financial forecasting tasks improves classification accuracy from WSJ headlines by 7%. Moreover, leveraging an information density analysis, we find that the similarity spaces constructed by ContraSim intrinsically cluster days with homogeneous market movement directions, indicating that ContraSim captures market dynamics independent of ground truth labels. Additionally, ContraSim enables the identification of historical news days that closely resemble the headlines of the current day, providing analysts with actionable insights to predict market trends by referencing analogous past events.

A midsize development firm based in India and with offices in multiple countries (including Virginia in the United States), Accubits was founded in 2012 and is known for developing custom AI solutions and other kinds of purpose-built software for the retail, hospitality, real estate and financial sectors. Its services encompass ground-up custom software as well as the adaptation and updating of existing solutions, using software tools and libraries like spaCy, TensorFlow, IBM Watson, Amazon Lex, SkyLearn and Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK). Accubits handles a broad selection of core AI features and functions, including both machine learning and deep learning, conversational tools built for natural language understanding (NLU), sales intelligence solutions that can personalize and enhance the customer experience and analytics tools (including predictive analytics) for video, images and text. The company can also customize AI technologies and robotic process automations and offers a wide variety of enterprise-grade blockchain solutions. Accubits counts the Dubai Land Department and the Dubai Police, ADNEC, Etisalat and Landmark among its major clients.

Johnson & Johnson has signed up Australian software engineering company Max Kelsen to use artificial intelligence to speed up the supply of surgical instruments to hospitals, helping to alleviate the backlog of surgeries that built up during the COVID-19 pandemic. The US pharmaceutical and medical device behemoth said it had begun to use Max Kelsen's SAVI platform, which uses cameras and machine learning to automatically identify and catalogue surgical instruments after they are used in an operation. A single operation can take 10 trays of complex surgical instruments, says Warwick Shaw, customer solutions partner, Johnson & Johnson Medical. The system, which runs part on an iPad and part on machine learning models in the cloud, cuts by at least 40 per cent the time it takes to catalogue the instruments, ensure they are contamination free and in working order, and pass them on to the next hospital, Johnson & Johnson said. While hospitals generally own their own surgical instruments for departments such as accident and emergency, the instruments for specialist surgeries such as knee replacements and spinal fusions are typically checked in and out from equipment rental companies such as Johnson & Johnson like books from a library.

Johnson & Johnson and GE are among the companies best positioned to take advantage of future artificial intelligence disruption in the medical devices industry, our analysis shows. The assessment comes from GlobalData's Thematic Research ecosystem, which ranks companies on a scale of one to five based on their likelihood to tackle challenges like artificial intelligence and emerge as long-term winners of the medical devices sector. According to our analysis, Johnson & Johnson, GE, Apple, Medtronic and Alphabet are the companies best positioned to benefit from investments in artificial intelligence, all of them recording scores of five out of five in GlobalData's Medical Devices Thematic Scorecard. Johnson & Johnson, for example, has advertised for 969 new artificial intelligence jobs from October 2020 to September 2021 and mentioned artificial intelligence in company filings 30 times. GE indicated good levels of AI investment, with the company looking for 446 new artificial intelligence jobs since October 2020 and mentioning artificial intelligence in filings 50 times. The table below shows how GlobalData analysts scored the biggest companies in the medical devices industry on their artificial intelligence performance, as well as the number of new artificial intelligence jobs, deals, patents and mentions in company reports since October 2020.

"We would never have had the capability to understand the COVID-19 genome without the data science. It gave us, frankly, the computer power to understand what that looks like," Gorsky said in an interview with Jim Mazzo, president and CEO of Avellino. Powerful AI gave Johnson & Johnson better capabilities to develop a COVID-19 vaccine and then plan clinical trials with the sites that would offer beneficial insights into safety and efficacy, Gorsky said. When asked about the ongoing role of advancing technology, including AI, in health care and ophthalmology, Gorsky predicted a fundamentally changing landscape moving forward. "I think the health care landscape is going to be fundamentally changed in so many ways by the addition not only of artificial intelligence but of data science and connectivity of so many of these emerging fields becoming more and more ubiquitous across everything that we do," Gorsky said.

Every week, Q.ai brings you a thematic screen, courtesy of the Forbes AI Investor platform. These stocks vary week to week, and even from each other in the same week – they may be different in their industry, sector, and overall ratings. But they always share at least one commonality: a place in the current week's thematic screen. This week, we cast our focus to a new screen – U.S. Large Cap Stocks – to see what's happening in the land of the large. Q.ai runs factor models daily to get the most up-to-date reading on stocks and ETFs.

We see evidence dating back to 2017 that Johnson & Johnson has been regularly publishing about their investments and initiatives related to artificial intelligence. At present, Johnson & Johnson does not seem to boast any mature, deployed applications with the firm itself, but its AI-related investment initiatives indicate their aspirations. According to an analysis by FiercePharma, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) is the largest pharmaceutical firm by revenue, bringing in $82.1 billion in 2019. However, its pharma group has seen the lions' share of J&J's success, outperforming its other units with notable sales expansion in oncology and immunology. J&J claims to be investing in data science competency throughout the firm.

I.S.K. is on the scientific advisory boards of Pulse Data and Medaware, both companies involved in predictive analytics. S.S. is a founder of, and holds equity in, Bayesian Health. The results of the study discussed in this publication could affect the value of Bayesian Health. This arrangement has been reviewed and approved by Johns Hopkins University in accordance with its conflict-of-interest policies. S.S. is a member of the scientific advisory board for PatientPing.

Medopad, the UK startup that has been working with Tencent to develop AI-based methods for building and tracking "digital" biomarkers -- measurable indicators of the progression of illnesses and diseases that are picked up not with blood samples or in-doctor visits but using apps and wearables, has announced another round of funding to expand the scope of its developments. It has picked up $25 million led by pharmaceuticals giant Bayer, which will be working together with Medopad to build digital biomarkers and therapeutics related to heart health. Medopad said it is also working on separate biomarkers related to Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Diabetes. The Series B is being made at a post-money valuation of between $200 million and $300 million. In addition to Bayer, Hong Kong firm NWS Holdings and Chicago VC Healthbox also participated.