The free service offers retro graphics, smooth tunes, and up-to-date forecasts. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The Weather Channel's accuracy has undoubtedly improved since the early days of cable TV, but the same can't necessarily be said about The Weather Channel's . That's not meant as an insult to the company's art design team--but there is simply no real match to that distinctly minimalist, retro-rudimentary look of forecasts from the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s. Need further proof that there are those out there who yearn to return to the days of meteorology reports coupled with smooth jazz?

Technologically speaking, we live in a time of plenty. Today, I can ask a chatbot to render The Canterbury Tales as if written by Taylor Swift or to help me write a factually inaccurate autobiography. With three swipes, I can summon almost everyone listed in my phone and see their confused faces via an impromptu video chat. My life is a gluttonous smorgasbord of information, and I am on the all-you-can-eat plan. But there is one specific corner where technological advances haven't kept up: weather apps.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and its subsidiary The Weather Company, which includes The Weather Channel digital properties, were determined to be "the overall most accurate provider globally" by ForecastWatch, a premier organization for evaluating the accuracy of weather forecasts. In its latest comprehensive study of forecast accuracy released today,ii Global and Regional Weather Forecast Accuracy Overview, 2017-2020, commissioned by IBM, ForecastWatch named IBM's The Weather Company as the weather forecast provider whose forecasts overall were the most accurate globally when aggregated across all geographic regions compared and time periods covered. Further, the data showed that the gap between The Weather Company (noted as The Weather Channel in the report) and the next best overall provider has increased every year of the study.iii "A forecast is most helpful when it comes from a recognized, trusted source, and the pursuit of accuracy is at the foundation of what we seek to provide to help customers, consumers and marketers to make important decisions every day," said Sheri Bachstein, CEO of The Weather Company and GM of IBM Watson Advertising. "The study is evidence of how IBM is helping advance the science of weather forecasting through continued innovations in AI, data and cloud computing."

As the novel coronavirus pandemic COVID-19 continues to spread across the globe, researchers are racing against time to find possible preventive measures, tests and cures to arrest the spread. While the pandemic enters the stage of community spread in many parts of the world, countries are running short of essential medical kits to test sufficient numbers of people. Testing is the need of the hour, and to catalyse the pace of testing, scientists have now developed an artificial intelligence-based diagnostic tool. The incredible new tool can help predict if an individual is likely to have COVID-19 disease, based on the symptoms they display. The discovery was recently published in the journal Nature Medicine.

India and Sweden on Monday announced the launch of a pilot project to convert paddy stubble into green coal in Mohali, Punjab, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and visiting Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf inaugurated a bilateral high-level policy dialogue on innovation policy. The dialogue created a platform for key stakeholders from the government, private sector and academia to provide strategic direction for joint innovation policy formulation. The dialogue jointly formulated and implemented short- and long-term projects in strategic areas such as, but not limited to, circular economy, digital health, artificial intelligence, sustainable energy and future mobility, a statement said. The dialogue brought together government officials, prominent industrialists as well as renowned academicians from both Sweden and India. Sweden's Minister for Business, Industry and Innovation Ibrahim Baylan, and Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister for Science and Technology, Earth Sciences, Health and Family Welfare, were also present for the dialogue.

On Friday afternoons, Caitlin Kontgis and some of the other scientists at Descartes Labs convene in their Santa Fe, New Mexico, office and get down to work on a grassroots project that's not part of their jobs: watching hurricanes from above, and seeing if they can figure out what the storms will do.* They acquire data from GOES, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite operated by NOAA and NASA, which records images of the Western Hemisphere every five minutes. That's about how long it takes the team to process each image through a deep learning algorithm that detects the eye of a hurricane and centers the image processor over that. Then, they incorporate synthetic aperture data, which uses long-wave radar to see through clouds, and can discern water beneath based on reflectivity. That, in turn, can show almost real-time flooding, tracked over days, of cities in the path of hurricanes.

"What good are wings without the courage to fly?" These words of wisdom come to mind as I consider the open-source craze among leading artificial-intelligence technology providers. Top firms, including IBM, Google and Facebook, have opened the source code of their artificial intelligence software tools, making them available for developers to use in their own devices and applications. This is most certainly a good thing, for the companies themselves and for the AI business generally. However, open source is only part of the equation.

The Weather Company, acquired by IBM in January, will begin rolling out digital ads that people can communicate with this fall. Powered by IBM Watson's artificial intelligence, consumers will be able to ask questions via voice or text and receive relevant information about the product or offering. The first companies to tap Watson ads will be Campbell Soup Company, GSK Consumer Healthcare and Unilever. Unlike ads tied to keyword searches, Watson Ads are able to pick up the nuances of natural language. For example, a consumer seeing a Campbell's digital ad may ask by voice interaction, "What can I make for dinner tonight?"

IBM Watson has talked tennis with Serena Williams and music with Bob Dylan. Now it wants to talk to you -- via online ads. The Weather Company, acquired by IBM in January, will begin bringing Watson-enhanced interactive advertisements to The Weather Channel and Weather Underground apps on Android and iOS and to weather.com and wunderground.com The ads, powered by Watson's artificial intelligence, will prompt consumers to ask questions such as "What would be good to cook for dinner?" or "Is this medicine safe for my child?" The first companies with Watson-enabled ads will be Campbell Soup, GSK Consumer Healthcare and Unilever.