Well then it looks like you might want to...pick up a copy of Assassin's Creed: Origins later this year. Last week at an Assassin's Creed: Origins preview event here in San Francisco, Ubisoft revealed that the latest in the globetrotting murder series will feature a brand new "Discovery Tour" mode. In the Discovery Tour, all combat and story will be stripped away, leaving Ubisoft's massive map of Egypt a sort of living museum. You'll be able to walk around the map and explore at your leisure, but more importantly you'll also be able to access the titular tours. For our demo, Ubisoft showcased a "Mummies" tour consisting of 30 nodes placed around the map.

Computer scientists, public figures and reporters have gathered to witness or take part in a decades-old challenge. Some of the participants are flesh and blood; others are silicon and binary. Thirty human judges sit down at computer terminals, and begin chatting. To determine whether they're talking to a computer program or a real person. The event, organized by the University of Reading, was a rendition of the so-called Turing test, developed 65 years ago by British mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing as a way to assess whether a machine is capable of intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.

In February 2014, Satya Nadella became the third CEO of Microsoft . Nadella, more soft-spoken than his predecessors, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, assumed the company's helm amid one of its stormiest chapters. Ballmer, toward the end of his 14-year tenure, had purchased Nokia's mobile phone business at great cost ($7.2 billion) but failed to make a dent in the market dominance of Apple and Samsung . Nadella quickly nixed those ambitions and instead ramped up investment in artificial intelligence and commercial cloud computing. The result has been a remarkable turnaround, featuring major growth in cloud services revenue, a doubling of year-on-year profits and an all-time stock price high. In his new book, Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone (released September 26), Nadella, 50, explains this corporate transformation, lays out his hopeful vision for technological progress and recounts his own rich personal history.

Join IBM November 1 at 21st Cloud Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, and learn how IBM Watson can bring cognitive services and AI to intelligent, unmanned systems. In this session we will build a chatbot powered by IBM Watson, connect it to third-party APIs, and share best practices of chatbots co-existing with humans. Cognitive analysis impacts today's systems with unparalleled ability that were previously available only to manned, back-end operations. Thanks to cloud processing, IBM Watson can bring cognitive services and AI to intelligent, unmanned systems. Imagine a robot vacuum that becomes your personal assistant that knows everything and can respond to your emotions and verbal commands!

If you close your eyes for a moment, stop and think about a customer experience which stands out to you. Think about what makes you remember that particular engagement and what this means to you. Customer Experiences which stay with you – which leave you with an impression – positive or negative – almost always have one thing in common. These interactions occur across multiple channels – in person, online, in social forums, by phone. And these experiences have a direct correlation to our engagement, and spend with that company. American Express have quoted that customers who have a positive customer experience spend 74% more! Whilst McKinsey have reported that 70% of buying experiences are based on how an individual "perceives" they are being treated. This perception comes back to the simplicity and personalisation of the engagement – and again the emotional reaction of the experience. Personal, simple and emotionally connected experiences – piece of cake right…??

Refactoring6 is something software developers like to do. But do they refactor as much as they would like? Are there barriers that prevent them from doing so? Refactoring is an important tool for improving quality. Many development methodologies rely on refactoring, especially for agile methodologies but also in more plan-driven organizations. If barriers exist, they would undermine the effectiveness of many product-development organizations. We conducted a large-scale survey in 2009 of 3,785 practitioners' use of object-oriented concepts,7 including questions as to whether they would refactor to deal with certain design problems. We expected either that practitioners would tell us our choice of design principles was inappropriate for basing a refactoring decision or that refactoring is the right decision to take when designs were believed to have quality problems. However, we were told the decision of whether or not to refactor was due to non-design considerations. It is now eight years since the survey, but little has changed in integrated development environment (IDE) support for refactoring, and what has changed has done little to address the barriers we identified.

Innovative technologies including 5G, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT) featured prominently today as the doors opened for ITU Telecom World 2017, an international platform for accelerating information and communication technology (ICT) innovations and partnerships. The event runs 25-28 September and aims to fast-track economic development and social good through its forum for sharing knowledge, exhibition for digital solutions, and business networking hub connecting nations, companies, organizations and individuals. It is organized annually by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations' specialized agency for ICT-related issues. Participants include exhibitors bringing with them the smartest ideas and entrepreneurial spirit of digital start-ups and ICT small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as well as governments, regulators, industry leaders, consultants and experts from emerging and developed markets around the world. The event was launched with a high-level opening ceremony featuring a live orchestra and traditional dance performance from Busan National Gukak Centre, and a video message delivered by Moon Jae-in, President of the Republic of Korea.

Alexander the Great's'lost city' was a magical place where people drank wine and naked philosophers imparted wisdom, ancient accounts claim. Now, nearly 2,000 years after the great warrior's death, archaeologists believe this illusive city may have finally been discovered in Iraq. Experts first noticed apparently ancient remains in the Iraqi settlement, known as Qalatga Darband after looking at declassified American spy footage from the 1960s. The images were made public in 1996 but, due to political instability, archaeologists were not able to explore the site properly for years. Using more recent drone footage, experts have now established there was a city during the first and second centuries BC which had strong Greek and Roman influences.

AI has taken some steps into banking, but it also poised to transform how banks learn from and interact with customers. Financial services will lead the charge in the implementation of AI. Africa's mobile phone market has expanded to become larger than either the EU or the United States with some 650 million subscribers (2016 data). At the same time, Internet bandwidth has grown 20-fold as hundreds of thousands of kilometres of new cables have been laid across the continent to serve an increasing number of its 1.2 billion Africans. Augmented experience on how to recommend how much to spend and on what.

Johannesburg - Medicine will look and be practised differently in the future. Already, digital health and, in particular, artificial intelligence are changing doctors' jobs. In the not-too-distant future, patients will be at the centre of the healthcare system, with care and management delivered on a "platform", rather than face to face. Digitisation in the medical realm is set to create a "patient-centric healthcare system", according to Ryan Noach, deputy CEO of Discovery Health medical scheme. Speaking at a two-day Digital Disruption and Innovation conference, hosted at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (Gibs) in Johannesburg from September 12 to 13, Noach said innovation and change management were key factors in improved and digitised healthcare.