An eight-year-old boy who became the world's youngest coder has set his sights on building a robot doctor. Kautilya Katariya, who set a world record for being the youngest qualified computer programmer two years ago, recently achieved grade nine in GCSE maths, the highest possible mark. Katariya, from Northampton, has already developed AI software and one day hopes to set up his own company. The Year 3 pupil taught himself coding during the Covid-19 lockdowns and prepared for his GCSE exams alongside students in Year 10 and 11. Rather than playing computer games, he has more fun building them using programming languages such as Python.

What do you picture when you think of a robot? That's the first question asked by "The Robot Doctor" -- a new series created by Carnegie Mellon University educators, RobotWits, the Pennsylvania Rural Robotics Initiative and WQED. Airing on PBS stations across Pennsylvania, the eight-episode program is geared toward high school students who may lack access to a computer during school closures, and who live in underresourced areas with limited STEM opportunities. "We're going to explore how robots solve the problems that allow them to be useful in the world. We'll do this with nothing more than the math concepts you may already know: geometry, trigonometry, basic algebra and a few concepts from physics," Jonathan Butzke says in the first episode. Butzke, an alumnus of CMU's Robotics Institute, hosts the show and is lead robotics researcher for RobotWits.

Artificial intelligence and robotics experts in Edinburgh are working to create what they hope will be the first healthcare robots to hold a conversation with more than one person at a time. It is a project designed to help older people, but it could one day be used to help handle virus outbreaks like the coronavirus pandemic. "It's not something we had actually considered while designing the project," says Heriot-Watt's professor of computer science Oliver Lemon. "But as it turns out it's quite relevant to what's going on today. "You can imagine in the future that when you walk into a hospital waiting room, instead of encountering a human you encounter a robot who's able to help you.

Can AI solve the big problems confronting healthcare? Healthcare is a personal experience that's intrinsically part of our shared human experience. Even healthy people at some point see a doctor of some sort, get vaccinated for school or travel, be prescribed medicines, undergo tests, maybe even get stitches or surgery. Small wonder, healthcare is the fastest growing sector in our economy. Access to care, and the quest for preventative care and to cure the currently uncurable conditions that affect 40% of Americans are among the biggest problems facing medicine and the society it serves. Technology in healthcare as in other user sectors has always been a R&D enabler helping researchers to work faster and collaborate better.

The idea of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and robot doctors conjures up images of all-powerful machines taking over our lives. But the reality is quite different from this. These advances and breakthroughs often have a favorable effect on people's lives and the world, though they're typically introduced at a breakneck pace and can leave your head spinning as you try to comprehend them. With this in mind, here we explain four of the most exciting and world-changing technologies. Get the entire 10-part series on Charlie Munger in PDF.

At 2 a.m. in February, I found myself speaking with the family of a dying man. We had never met before, and I had only just learned of the patient. As an ICU doctor, I have been in this situation on many occasions, but there was something new this time. The family was 200 miles away, and we were talking through a video camera. I was staffing the electronic intensive care unit, complete with a headset, adjustable two-way video camera, and six screens of streaming data. The eICU at Emory University in Atlanta provides care by physicians trained in critical care medicine to a number of hospital locations within the large Emory system.

While robotic surgery already exists, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence advancing the medical industry means we're only going to see more of it. And leading experts say it's not as far off as we might think. Professor Dian Tjondronegoro, of Southern Cross University, has listed the top five ways we will see robots in medicine in the next decade. Virtual doctors could help us through our smartwatches, with their advice verified by a human doctor, alerting us to potential emergencies before they happen, saving the health system millions. And Prof Tjondronegoro said because the doctor-to-patient ratio was continually decreasing globally, AI was going to transform the future of healthcare.

Videos of increasingly agile robots from Boston Dynamics steal headlines about the AI-apocalypse, while AI's application in other industries can be all but ignored by the mainstream. However, amid all the worry about AI taking jobs, there's little informed debate and nowhere is this more true than in healthcare. As far as the public perception of AI and health, we have struggled to move beyond the idea of robot doctors. The reality of AI's likely influence in health is more nuanced and, I'd argue, more exciting. The healthcare sector is already a key battleground in the coming AI revolution, with the AI health market expected to reach $6.6 billion by 2021.

In the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, an ambulance speeds through traffic on a wave of green lights, helped along by an artificial intelligence (AI) system and big data. The system, which involves sending information to a centralized computer linked to the city's transport networks, is part of a trial by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. The Chinese tech giant is hoping to use its cloud and data systems to tackle issues hobbling China's healthcare system like snarled city traffic, long patient queues and a lack of doctors. Alibaba's push into healthcare reflects a wider trend in China, where technology firms are racing to shake up a creaking state-run health sector and take a slice of spending that McKinsey & Co estimates will hit $1 trillion by 2020. Tencent-backed WeDoctor, which offers online consultations and doctor appointments, raised $500 million in May at a valuation of $5.5 billion.

HANGZHOU, China/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - In the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, an ambulance speeds through traffic on a wave of green lights, helped along by an artificial intelligence (AI) system and big data. The system, which involves sending information to a centralized computer linked to the city's transport networks, is part of a trial by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. The Chinese tech giant is hoping to use its cloud and data systems to tackle issues hobbling China's healthcare system like snarled city traffic, long patient queues and a lack of doctors. Alibaba's push into healthcare reflects a wider trend in China, where technology firms are racing to shake up a creaking state-run health sector and take a slice of spending that McKinsey & Co estimates will hit $1 trillion by 2020. Tencent-backed WeDoctor, which offers online consultations and doctor appointments, raised $500 million in May at a valuation of $5.5 billion.