Ignoring everything they've seen throughout the Terminator franchise, a group of Japanese researchers have come up with a computer that writes short stories… and it's actually produced a piece of work that got through the first round of a literary competition. Creative writing as a manufactured commodity – that's a scary thought, but perhaps it's inevitable. Companies love automation: feed a few instructions in one end and get a finished product out of the other. It's always been a popular notion that there are only a handful of stories and that everything written is a variation on those; if that's true then why can't a machine just write a half decent story? And does it even have to be half-decent to sell by the thousands?

Tech is about to change dramatically next year. Want to stay up to date? In each section, a designer explains all of the details. Which one is already on your radar? I want to hear your viewpoints, so drop me an email.

Connected hospitals with intelligent messaging In today's hospitals, pacemakers, defibrillators and oximeters are all connected to the internet and share vitals immediately with doctors, in turn speeding response times. Hospitals have technicians, nurses, staff, billing departments, insurance providers, patients and patients' families as stakeholders, each with different requirements of information about the care given to patient. Unified Inbox offers an AI-based unified cloud IoT messaging platform for internet of things devices to connect various stakeholders, giving them the freedom to receive different messages at different frequency, with different senses of urgency in different mediums of their choice. Unified Inbox launched this at Nanyang Polytechnic in Singapore as "CUBE," the IoT-secured messaging gateway for healthcare. The artificial intelligence makes the hospitals connected, giving peace of mind to patients and their loved ones while improving efficiency in the overall hospital management and interaction with all stakeholders.

Maps of infectious disease---charting spatial variations in the force of infection, degree of endemicity, and the burden on human health---provide an essential evidence base to support planning towards global health targets. Contemporary disease mapping efforts have embraced statistical modelling approaches to properly acknowledge uncertainties in both the available measurements and their spatial interpolation. The most common such approach is that of Gaussian process regression, a mathematical framework comprised of two components: a mean function harnessing the predictive power of multiple independent variables, and a covariance function yielding spatio-temporal shrinkage against residual variation from the mean. Though many techniques have been developed to improve the flexibility and fitting of the covariance function, models for the mean function have typically been restricted to simple linear terms. For infectious diseases, known to be driven by complex interactions between environmental and socio-economic factors, improved modelling of the mean function can greatly boost predictive power. Here we present an ensemble approach based on stacked generalisation that allows for multiple, non-linear algorithmic mean functions to be jointly embedded within the Gaussian process framework. We apply this method to mapping Plasmodium falciparum prevalence data in Sub-Saharan Africa and show that the generalised ensemble approach markedly out-performs any individual method.

From driverless cars and smart robots to drones and computer chess champions, is technology making our lives more interesting, convenient and safer? Or is it evolving faster than we can absorb? This is a collaboration with Turning Points, a magazine published by The New York Times international edition, that explores what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead.

No one can predict how the future will shake out, but we can make some educated guesses. Global design and strategy firm frog has released its 2017 forecasts for the technologies that will define the upcoming year. Last year, the firm correctly predicted that virtual reality would explode in popularity and that sensors in things like appliances and thermometers would continue to shrink in size. Around the world, large companies are leading the way in building solar-powered offices that don't rely on fossil fuels. Frog strategist Agnes Pyrchla expects the trend to continue in 2017. "Taking a nod from natural patterns," she writes, "material scientists and architects have developed bricks with bacteria, made cement that captures carbon dioxide, and created building cooling systems using nothing but the available wind and our vibrant sun." Business bots are going to be huge.

For someone who is blind or partially sighted, everyday tasks can be a pain -- choosing the right can from the pantry, for instance, or picking up the right book from the table. A smartphone could help them with this kind of problem, of course, if it knew how to identify objects and describe them to the user -- which is precisely what this app from a 12th-grade student from Toronto does. It isn't the only app out there that can tell what it's looking at, but it has the advantage of being aimed at visually impaired users and multiple languages from the start. Anmol Tukrel began working on it a year ago after learning about the possibilities of machine learning and computer vision. They also have been trained on a wide variety of objects and expressions, so it won't be stumped easily.

More of Earth's surface is covered by liquid water now than three decades ago. But some countries in Central Asia and the Middle East have lost more than half their surface water, satellite images show. There have also been losses in the US and Australia. The changes are mainly a result of activities such as irrigation and dam building, but climate change is playing a part too. Previous studies of surface water have largely relied on how much water countries estimate they have..

Not only will smart cities leverage sensors to use energy efficiently, buildings and highways will also be constructed out of materials that work more intelligently. Taking a nod from natural patterns, material scientists and architects have developed bricks with bacteria, made cement that captures carbon dioxide, and created building cooling systems using nothing but wind and sun. This trend could be a massive opportunity for cities, as well as industries like hospitality that depend on large energy-intensive buildings. MGM Resorts, Wynn, and Las Vegas Sands have all recently been outfitted for solar, for example, showing that large companies are taking the first steps toward sustainable infrastructure, both to cut costs and to appeal to environmentally conscious customers. With a growing need for global initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, fight climate change, and evolve cruelty-free foods, the race is on to define how we consume protein, potentially without involving any animals.

Meet SALTO: a powerful new wall-jumping robot built by researchers at UC Berkeley. According to SALTO's makers, the diminutive, one-legged hopper not only has the "highest robotic vertical jumping agility ever recorded," but also the ability to link together multiple jumps in quick succession. SALTO stands for saltatorial locomotion on terrain obstacles, and the motion of the mechanical jumping leg was modeled after galagos -- small jumping primates native to Africa that have stretchy tendons in their legs that allow them to store energy and jump with more force than if they only used their leg muscles alone. The galago is so agile not only because it can make a big leap, but also because it can essentially wind up its legs into a crouched position in mid-flight and immediately leap again upon landing. At just 100 grams and 26 centimeters (10.2 inches) tall when fully extended, SALTO can jump a little bit more than one meter (3.3 feet) high in a single leap.