Are our current institutions and global governance architecture sufficient to solve the new challenges the world is currently facing? According to Lee Howell, an executive of the Switzerland-based World Economic Forum, the existing institutions and systems around the world, created in the 20th century, are no longer capable of dealing with today's challenges. These have been triggered by multiple geopolitical, economic and environmental crises, as well as newly emerging issues involving innovative technologies. That is why it is important to have conferences like Davos, Howell said in a recent interview in Tokyo, referring to the WEF's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The meeting will see some 3,000 global leaders from politics, business, academia and nongovernmental organizations gather to discuss pressing issues across different sectors. The meeting, dubbed the Davos conference, will kick off on Jan. 22 with discussions on problems ranging from climate change to trade issues and geopolitics to the "Fourth Industrial Revolution," in which artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies are expected to drastically transform how humans work and live.

Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and Pohang University of Science and Technology have introduced a machine learning algorithm system, InstaGAN, which can perform multiple instance-aware image-to-image translation tasks -- such as replacing sheep in photos with giraffes -- on multiple image datasets. The paper InstaGAN: Instance-Aware Image-to-Image Translation has been accepted by the respected International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2019, which will take place this May in New Orleans, USA. An image-to-image translation system is a system that learns to map an input image onto an output image. Unsupervised image-to-image translation has garnered considerable research attention recently in part due to the rapid development of generative adversarial networks (GANs) that now power the technique. Previous methods were not suitable for challenging tasks, for example if the image has multiple target instances or if the translation task involves challenging shapes.

Apple's iPhone SE might be over. The beloved, small phone proved to be a runaway success when it was released in March 2016. But since then there has been little mention of it, and it has never been updated. Hopes were revived this week when the iPhone SE appeared again on the Apple website, after it disappeared following the September launch of new iPhones. But it was being sold at a lower price and in Apple's clearance section, suggesting that it might just have been a way of getting rid of some leftover phones.

Elon Musk has been approached to dig a brand new particle collider that would stretch for 100km under Geneva in Switzerland, the serial entrepreneur has revealed. The Future Circular Collider (FCC) – would replace the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to further push forward our understanding of the universe. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, published a design report for the collider last week, revealing plans for a structure that is almost 4-times longer than its predecessor at a cost of €24 billion (£21.2bn). As the co-founder of the tunnel-digging firm The Boring Company, Mr Musk claims that he could cut several billion euros from this bill. On Monday, he tweeted that the director of CERN asked him about the possibility of employing his tunnel-digging firm.

Facebook and Twitter can be used to work out huge details of your personal life – even if you never actually use them, according to a new study. It is still possible to predict the kind of things you might say simply by looking at the sort of people you hang around with, a new study has found. The research undermines the idea that personal choice is the central part of privacy and that it is possible to opt out of tracking and data collection by social networks on your own, the researchers say. In the research, a team of scientists from the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide took more than more than thirty million public posts on Twitter from 13,905 users. They found it was possible to use the messages from eight or nine of a person's contacts to predict what a person might post next – as accurately as if they were looking at a person's own Twitter feed.

The field of artificial intelligence will be one of the biggest areas where different players will be working to establish regulatory guardrails and answer ethical questions in the future. Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote his influential laws of robotics in the first half of the 20th century, and reality is now catching up to fiction. Questions over the ethics of AI and its potential applications are numerous: What constitutes bias within the algorithms? What privacy measures should be employed? And just how much control should humans retain in applying AI-driven automation?

NASHIK: The Indiranagar underpass is notorious for rampant wrong-side driving. But a new system of smart cameras inside the underpass promises to eliminate the problem. It's a simple setup: the cameras snap photos of motorists entering the underpass from the wrong side and then automatically forwards the images to city police for further action. The system, which uses artificial intelligence, is under construction and will be inaugurated on January 26. Many motorists coming from Govindnagar frequently enter the underpass, which is a traffic violation as per a city police notification.

Uber is working on electric bicycles and scooters capable of taking themselves to charging points autonomously after a ride has been completed. The ride-hailing firm currently employs contractors to collect and charge the bikes and scooters deployed through its Uber Jump business. The two-wheeled vehicles are then manually delivered to areas where rider demand is highest. This logistical operation could be bypassed with the introduction of self-driving technology, though engineering and regulatory challenges remain before they can be introduced. It is not the first time the concept of a self-driving bicycle has been floated by a major tech company, with Google creating a spoof video for the technology for April Fool's Day in 2016.

The jury is still out on whether artificial intelligence (AI) is hype or reality. Yet, organisations that do not harness its potential, do so at their own peril. Those that shun the technology risk falling behind their peers. Among other things, the deployment of AI in the area of human resources (HR) can enhance employee welfare. AI uses multiple algorithms that analyse past data to identify patterns and predict the future.

In a world first, an undersea robot has dispersed microscopic baby corals (coral larvae) to help scientists working to repopulate parts of the Great Barrier Reef during this year's mass coral spawning event. Professor Dunbabin engineered QUT's reef protector RangerBot into LarvalBot specifically for the coral restoration project led by Professor Harrison. The project builds on Professor Harrison's successful larval reseeding technique piloted on the southern Great Barrier Reef in 2016 and 2017 in collaboration with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) and Queensland Parks & Wildlife Service (QPWS), following successful small scale trials in the Philippines funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. "This year represents a big step up for our larval restoration research and the first time we've been able to capture coral spawn on a bigger scale using large floating spawn catchers then rearing them into tiny coral larvae in our specially constructed larval pools and settling them on damaged reef areas," Professor Harrison said. "Winning the GBRF's Reef Innovation Challenge meant that we could increase the scale of the work planned for this year using mega-sized spawn catchers and fast track an initial trial of LarvalBot as a novel method of dispersing the coral larvae out on to the Reef. "With further research and refinement, this technique has enormous potential to operate across large areas of reef and multiple sites in a way that hasn't previously been possible.