Heart disease scanner
Doctors have developed an AI tool that can identify signs of heart failure and heart valve disease from routine ECG results in less than two seconds. The system has been trained on data from millions of patients and extracts information from ECGs that may not be visible to the human eye. Details of the breakthrough, which could boost early diagnosis of heart disease, were presented to thousands of delegates at the European Society of Cardiology annual congress in Munich, the world’s largest heart conference.
Farmers’ assistant
Deere & Co has introduced an AI assistant called JD in its Operations Center mobile application. The chatbot uses data collected from high-tech tractors during planting, crop treatment and harvesting to help farmers make decisions, such as whether fields need more or less fertiliser. Powered partly by a LLM, JD can analyse field data during the growing season rather than after harvest.
Author as a ‘person’
The Indian Copyright Office has ruled that an AI system cannot be named the author of a work it creates, while the work itself may be eligible for copyright protection. The finding came in a case involving US AI researcher and Imagination Engines CEO Stephen Thaler, who sought copyright registration for an artwork, A Recent Entrance to Paradise, generated by his AI system DABUS. The office cited the Copyright Act’s definition of an author as a “person”.
Shirt that can ‘hide’ you
Berlin artist Simon Weckert has created ‘Digital Camouflage’, a 65 euros recycled-polyester shirt featuring high-contrast pink, orange and green patterns designed to disrupt computer-vision systems. The geometric shapes and high-contrast colour blobs break up the statistical visual markers (like edges, contours, and proportions) that algorithms rely on. Weckert tested the patterns against YOLO, an open-source object-detection system, until its confidence in detecting a human body dropped sharply. The project was developed in response to pilot AI video-surveillance deployments in public spaces, including Berlin’s Kottbusser Tor.
Musicians hijacked by spam
The Spotify, Amazon Music and YouTube profiles of several deceased jazz musicians have been flooded with newly uploaded AI-generated music. Artists, including William ‘Sonny’ Criss, Jean Carne, Red Nichols and Jimmie Noone have had new tracks and anime-style cover art posted to their profiles, attributed to a publisher named ‘Ami bacuk’. The jazz-inspired songs do not appear to be remixes of identifiable recordings by the musicians.
Analysing e-books
Google introduced Expert Intelligence, linking Google Play Books with Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM. It lets users add eligible purchased ebooks to a notebook to ask questions, cross-reference personal data, and generate audio overviews, quizzes, infographics, with Gemini providing citations from the book. The feature can turn chapters into study guides and combine book content with users’ notes, PDFs or spreadsheets.
‘Talking’ statues
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has introduced an AI experience that lets visitors interact with four medieval sculptures through voice or text. QR codes allow visitors to ‘talk’ to statues of Mary Magdalene, Saint Augustine, Saint Savina of Troyes and Balthazar. The underlying Town Square AI model was developed with Ask Mona and trained using input from curators, conservators and provenance experts from the Met’s Medieval Art department.
Blockbuster robot
Microduck, a programmable personal robot from Pollen Robotics, the French subsidiary of Hugging Face, uses Rockchip’s RK3566 chip, which incorporates technology licensed from ARM. The robot has sold more than 10,000 units since its launch, generating more than $4 million at a $399 unit price, and new orders are now facing delivery delays beyond the original Christmas 2026 estimate. Rockchip chips are used in on-device AI and machine-vision applications including object detection and image recognition.