This year's Global Litigation 50 report focuses on a subject that has never been more topical – the inexorable rise of technology across all stages of the litigation process. Providing clients with a service that is as fast as possible, of the highest quality, rigorous and yet still cost-effective is of paramount importance to the world's top law firms. This is why the commercial market for these services is booming – and why over the past decade, and particularly the past three to five years, leading litigation practices have been driving forward a plethora of tech-enabled initiatives to enhance the delivery of their legal services to clients. This year's edition of The Lawyer Global Litigation 50 contains dozens of examples of cost-effective innovations from the leading litigation practices. Frankly, firms have no alternative. Clients are demanding this approach and rivals that aren't law firms are increasingly providing it.

In this April 2017 photo provided by GiveDirectly, GiveDirectly basic income recipient Irine Ogolla poses in front of her home with her son near Lake Victoria in Kenya. Hawaii is considering doling out universal basic income, where everyone gets a chunk of money with no strings attached. The idea has attracted supporters across the U.S. and elsewhere as technology leaders, elected officials and economists debate what our lives will look like when robots and machines take over more jobs that human beings have held for decades.

SINGAPORE – Passengers' baggage is collected by robots, they relax in a luxurious waiting area and then get a face scan and swiftly pass through security and immigration -- this could be the airport of the future. Planners hope this vision will become reality as new technology is rolled out, transforming the exhausting experience of lengthy lines in aging, overcrowded terminals into something far more pleasant. The Asia-Pacific region has been leading the way but faces fierce competition from the Middle East as major hubs compete to attract the growing number of long-haul travelers who can choose how to route their journey. The regions "are the two leading pockets of technology growth because they are really competing to be the global hubs for air transportation," said Seth Young, director of the Center for Aviation Studies at Ohio State University. "If I'm going to fly from New York to Bangalore, do I transfer through Abu Dhabi or Dubai, or do I transfer through Hong Kong?

A world renowned pioneer in social robotics, Cynthia Breazeal splits her time as an Associate Professor at MIT, where she received her PhD and founded the Personal Robots Group, and Founder and Chief Scientist of Jibo, a personal robotics company with over $85 million in funding. While Breazeal's work has won numerous academic awards, industry accolades, and media attention, she had to fight early skepticism in the 1990s from other experts in robotics and AI. At the time, robots were seen as physical and industrial tools, not social or emotional companions. Her first social robot, Kismet, was unfairly called out in popular press as "useless". Breazeal bucked the trend with a very different vision: "I wanted to create robots with social and emotional intelligence that could work in collaborative partnership with people. In 2-5 years, I see social robots helping families with things that really matter, like education, health, eldercare, entertainment, and companionship." She hopes her work and influence will inspire others to create robots "not only with smarts, but with heart, too."

Check out the worlds of Destiny 2. Time Fall is approaching, which means we're about to the reach the most wonderful time of year to be a video game player. In late August, Electronic Arts launched its pro-football simulation Madden NFL 18, which has become the unofficial beginning to the holiday video game season. Between now and December, video game publishers will release some of their biggest hits. Here's a look at the nine games players will talk about a lot this fall (Bonus: if you're a parent of a gamer, or have friends who play, consider these for the holiday shopping list). Where can I play it?

Finally, a martian rover to call your own. A Polish team of engineers who first created a rover in a NASA contest that eventually led to Curiosity have revealed a remote control, backpack-sized version of their'land drone' designed to be used on Earth. The $1400 'Turtle Rover' has a robot arm that can be remotely controlled, a HD camera for livestreaming, and can have everything from GoPro's to laser mapping attachments added to it. The'Turtle Rover' land drone is built on NASA-inspired suspension and can conquer every terrain and even be submerged under water, making it possible for everyone from researchers to wildlife photographers to explore what might otherwise be inaccessible parts of Earth Its makers boast it can conquer every terrain and even be submerged under water, making it possible for everyone from researchers to wildlife photographers. ''The only real limit is your imagination' are not just empty marketing words we use,' Simon Dzwonczyk, CEO and mechanical designer of Kell Ideas, the maker of Turtle Rover, told DailyMail.com.

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook revealed that two of its artificial intelligence (AI) machines had developed their own language to communicate in a more efficient fashion. The response was wide-scale scaremongering from pundits who lamented the evolution of computers. It might be a while before robots take over, but a recent study from Oxford University suggests that robots and AI will replace most human tasks by as early as 2051 and all human jobs by 2136. Technology has already progressed enough to give us driverless cars, robot police and autonomous delivery drones, but the true impact will go beyond making large swaths of the population redundant and drastically alter our society as we know it – from education and health care, to the criminal justice system. "Traditionally, to get a computer to do something, you had to write code and algorithms, but AI is different...the algorithm works independently," said Duncan Angove, president of software company Infor at a recent conference in New York.

The n-Queens problem is to place n chess queens on an n by n chessboard so that no two queens are on the same row, column or diagonal. The n-Queens Completion problem is a variant, dating to 1850, in which some queens are already placed and the solver is asked to place the rest, if possible. We show that n-Queens Completion is both NP-Complete and #P-Complete. A corollary is that any non-attacking arrangement of queens can be included as a part of a solution to a larger n-Queens problem. We introduce generators of random instances for n-Queens Completion and the closely related Blocked n-Queens and Excluded Diagonals Problem. We describe three solvers for these problems, and empirically analyse the hardness of randomly generated instances. For Blocked n-Queens and the Excluded Diagonals Problem, we show the existence of a phase transition associated with hard instances as has been seen in other NP-Complete problems, but a natural generator for n-Queens Completion did not generate consistently hard instances. The significance of this work is that the n-Queens problem has been very widely used as a benchmark in Artificial Intelligence, but conclusions on it are often disputable because of the simple complexity of the decision problem. Our results give alternative benchmarks which are hard theoretically and empirically, but for which solving techniques designed for n-Queens need minimal or no change.

ARUSHA, Tanzania: Nigerian neuroscientist Oshiorenoya Agabi may have found a way to solve one of life's puzzling dilemmas: how to make air travel pleasant again. What if you could skip tedious airport security lines, while a special device able to sniff out explosives works silently in the background? This is only one of the possible uses of what Agabi says is the world's first neurotechnology device developed by his Silicon Valley-based start-up Koniku and unveiled at the TEDGlobal conference in Tanzania Sunday (Aug 27). While those in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are working furiously to create machines that can mimic the brain, or - like tech entrepreneur Elon Musk - implant computers in our brains, Agabi has found a way to merge lab-grown neurons with electronic circuitry. As many grapple with the finite processing power of silicon, the 38-year-old said he had looked to the brain which is "the most powerful processor the universe has ever seen."

Pioneers from the worlds of artificial intelligence and robotics – including Elon Musk and Deepmind's Mustafa Suleyman – have asked the United Nations to ban autonomous weapon systems. A letter from the experts says the weapons currently under development risk opening a "Pandora's box" that if left open could create a dangerous "third revolution in warfare". The open letter coincides with the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which is currently being held in Melbourne, Australia. Ahead of the same conference in 2015, the Telsa founder was joined by Steven Hawking, Steve Wozniak and Noam Chomsky in condemning a new "global arms race". Suggestions that warfare will be transformed by artificially intelligent weapons capable of making their own decisions about who to kill are not hyperbolic.