These companies are applying large language models to generate new game characters with detailed backstories--characters that could engage with a player in any number of ways. Enter in a few personality traits, catchphrases, and other details, and you can create a background character capable of endless unscripted, never-repeating conversations with you. This is what got me thinking. Neuroscientists and psychologists have long been using games as research tools to learn about the human mind. Numerous video games have been either co-opted or especially designed to study how people learn, navigate, and cooperate with others, for example.

I did a startup in 1998 by applying AI to the lead generation and qualification problem. It was early. The data was not yet rich enough. Now, the data is there. Can the problem finally be solved at the right level of sophistication? Sramana Mitra: Let's go to the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born and raised? Jonathan Spier: I'm a California guy raised in San Diego. I came up here to go to school at Berkeley. I was never able to escape again. Sramana Mitra: What did you do after Berkeley? Jonathan Spier: I went briefly into consulting and then I landed at a company called Ariba. I was the number 85 employee. Within a few years, we were 3,500 people. It was a fun place to be. Sramana Mitra: We have the Ariba case study. Keith Krach was on the series. Jonathan Spier: He was a great leader. That whole team was amazing. I was the youngest person they hired. It was a really senior team they had by the time I joined. I got pretty much hooked on growth

As Verne understood, the U.S. Civil War (during which 60,000 amputations were performed) inaugurated the modern prosthetics era in the United States, thanks to federal funding and a wave of design patents filed by entrepreneurial prosthetists. The two World Wars solidified the for-profit prosthetics industry in both the United States and Western Europe, and the ongoing War on Terror helped catapult it into a US $6 billion dollar industry across the globe. This recent investment is not, however, a result of a disproportionately large number of amputations in military conflict: Around 1,500 U.S. soldiers and 300 British soldiers lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Limb loss in the general population dwarfs those figures. A much smaller subset--between 1,500 to 4,500 children each year--are born with limb differences or absences, myself included.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will act as an enabler and help accelerate IoT projects, according to VMware's IoT lead. To that end, VMware will work to provide both AI-enabled infrastructure technology as well as leverage AI to optimize the technology it develops and delivers to customers, according to Mimi Spier, vice president of IoT business for VMware. "The ability to get data out of things and the amount of impact you can have when you start to use IoT and AI together is quite profound," Spier said. "For the future, to achieve the picture I just painted, you have to have a flexible, manageable, scalable, secure foundation that enables us to do things on the edge … as well as deeper learning in the cloud." Spier lent her impressions on AI and IoT projects during a recent interview around a PWC report that shed a positive light on AI and job creation, with the report's authors concluding AI-enabled technologies will generate as many jobs as they displace overall, when evened out across different sectors. The recent report comes at a time when businesses are still finding that launching IoT projects is hard, and it's taking longer than many in the industry expected, according to Spier.

People who rely on satnav could be at risk of losing their ability to navigate, an expert has warned. Writing in the journal Nature, former president of the Royal Institute of Navigation Roger McKinlay argues that our reliance on GPS technology is misplaced and could be eroding our innate way-finding abilities. "If we do not cherish them, our natural navigation abilities will deteriorate as we rely ever more on smart devices," he wrote. McKinlay believes huge investment will be needed before navigation systems will be good enough to allow technologies such as autonomous vehicles to take off. In the meantime, he argues, we need better research into systems for navigation while children should be encouraged to learn how to find their way around by more traditional means.

The world's largest dementia research experiment, which takes the form of a video game, has indicated the ability to navigate declines throughout life. The findings, presented at the Neuroscience 2016 conference, harnessed data from 2.4 million people who downloaded the game. Getting lost is one of the first symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. And the researchers at University College London believe the results could help make a dementia test. Sea Hero Quest is a nautical adventure to save an old sailor's lost memories.

A mobile phone game that tests spatial navigation skills and has been played by 2.4 million people, has become the largest dementia study in history and raised hopes of a breakthrough in diagnosing the disease. Sea Hero Quest, a collaboration between Alzheimer's Research UK, Deutsche Telekom, game designers Glitchers and scientists, has generated the equivalent of 9,400 years of lab-based research since its launch in May. Experts hope to use the data to create the world's first global benchmark for spatial navigation, one of the first abilities affected by dementia, and to develop the game into an early diagnostic test for the disease, which is the leading cause of death in England and Wales. Dr Hugo Spiers, of University College London, who presented the preliminary findings at the Neuroscience 2016 conference in San Diego, said: "This is the only study of its kind, on this scale, to date. Its accuracy greatly exceeds that of all previous research in this area.

If there's one thing that I've learned in the few short years that I've been a fully-fledged scientist, it's that time is one of the most valuable commodities that you can give a researcher. In all its myriad forms, time is invaluable to the scientific process – time to develop ideas, time to write grants. The time that you need to run an experiment. Critically, the time that participants are willing to give you in the pursuit of knowledge. It's a precious thing, for everyone involved.

People who rely on satnav could be at risk of losing their ability to navigate, an expert has warned. Writing in the journal Nature, former president of the Royal Institute of Navigation Roger McKinlay argues that our reliance on GPS technology is misplaced and could be eroding our innate way-finding abilities. "If we do not cherish them, our natural navigation abilities will deteriorate as we rely ever more on smart devices," he wrote. McKinlay believes huge investment will be needed before navigation systems will be good enough to allow technologies such as autonomous vehicles to take off. In the meantime, he argues, we need better research into systems for navigation while children should be encouraged to learn how to find their way around by more traditional means.