Microsoft has added another type of artificial intelligence to its expanding array of machine intelligence systems (among other ventures as profiled in the article "How Microsoft's CEO Nadella has steered the company to success"). This is a form of face-scanning technology that can assess patterns of laughter and potentially assess the degree to which an event or person is found'funny' by an audience. The technology was showcased at the Laugh Battle exhibit which took place at the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, New York. Here a trial took place where the Microsoft technology was used to assess several performers and to determine which comedian was'best' at delivering their jokes based on an assessment of the reactions of the audience, according to Inverse. The reactions were processed by the platform's deep neural network, which was developed by Azure Cognitive Services.

There are hundreds of new cancer drugs in development and new research published minute to minute, helping doctors treat patients with personalized combinations that target the specific building blocks of their disease. The problem is there's too much to read and too many drug combinations for doctors to choose the best option every time. Enter a Microsoft Research machine-learning project, dubbed Hanover, that aims to ingest all the papers and help predict which drugs and which combinations are most effective, according to the company. Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University's Knight Cancer Institute are working with Hanover's architect, Hoifung Poon, to use the system to find drug combinations effective in fighting acute myeloid leukemia, an often-fatal cancer where treatment hasn't improved much in decades. They include Jeff Tyner, and the institute's director, Brian Druker, best known for pioneering Gleevec, a blockbuster drug for a different type of leukemia now owned by Novartis, that's helped double those patients' five-year survival rate since the 1990s.