What if every time you walked down any street in any city, automated cameras - attached to street lights, business facades, mailboxes or homes, or in the form of "body cams" worn by police officers and parking attendants - automatically scanned your face and uploaded a biometric fingerprint to a central server? Or if every time you took a photograph, your smartphone sent a copy to a server for biometric analysis? And what if these servers were monitored by a third-party provider that shared the fingerprints with marketing firms and law enforcement agencies, including border control agencies? The biometric facial recognition technology required to underpin such an undertaking continues to be refined and made available by the likes of Affectiva, Amazon, Google, IBM, Kairos, Microsoft, NEC and OpenCV, among others. Amazon Web Services, for example, in 2016 began to offer biometric capabilities via Amazon Rekognition, and it's ready to highlight positive use cases.

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Your next smartphone might just throw you a curve. Picture this: You pull your phone out of your pocket and unfold it like a napkin into a tablet. You press your finger on the screen, and it unlocks. You switch to the camera app, and a spider-like array of lenses shoot simultaneously to capture one giant photo. These are all things I've seen phones do -- some in prototype form, others in models you can get only in China.

Planck Re announces their first funding round of $12M to empower commercial insurers by generating insights that streamline the commercial underwriting process – enabling insurers to instantly and accurately underwrite any policy. The round was led by Arbor Ventures and includes Viola FinTech and Eight Roads. Founded in 2016, Planck Re is pioneering the commercial insurance data industry, providing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven data platform. Leveraging deep industry expertise and breakthrough data science, Planck Re streamlines the commercial underwriting process by aggregating small and medium businesses' digital footprint to help insurers acquire a comprehensive understanding of customer risk. The end result is a frictionless underwriting process with greater insurance carrier visibility into risk factors, leading to improved conversion, retention and reduced loss ratios.

Powered by a Xilinx automotive platform consisting of system-on-a-chip (SoC) devices and AI acceleration software, the scalable solution will deliver high performance, low latency and best power efficiency for embedded AI in automotive applications today. There are not many additional details about what exactly it will be working on, it is apparently too early for these details. Daimler AG recognized the Xilinx's advancements and the fact that the company managed to ship 40 million cumulative automotive units to automakers and Tier 1 suppliers in the last twelve years. Some of their solutions like FPGA or Over the Air FPGA based silicon where hardware and software can be updated over the air are definitely unique compared to its competitors. You can simply add features to the hardware, something you cannot do in ASIC /SoC approach.

An artificial intelligence (AI) system defeated a team of 15 doctors, 2-0, in two rounds of a competition that looked at the ability to diagnose brain tumors and predict the expansion of brain hematomas. The AI system, BioMind, displayed 87 percent accuracy in diagnosing brain tumors in 15 minutes, according to a report from China Daily. The doctors, from various hospitals located throughout China, displayed 66 percent accuracy in 30 minutes. Paul Parizel, MD, PhD, chair of the radiology department at Antwerp University Hospital in Belgium, said in the China Daily coverage that he sees a lot of potential in what AI can do for healthcare. "It will be like a GPS guiding a car. It will make proposals to a doctor and help the doctor diagnose," he said.

China is buzzing with a revived interest in the past – specifically dinosaurs. A recent Smithsonian article detailed a boom in research and tourist activity around the excavation of dinosaur remains that are over 100 million years old. The irony is not lost in a country that otherwise embraces forward thinking in all facets of life including urbanization, industry, and technology. Through future-centered initiatives such as sustainable infrastructure and technologies targeting economic and social sectors, China is quietly building a global presence in spheres that are being increasingly vacated by Western countries. For example, China has overtaken the United States in the volume of research paper publications in scientific fields, according to the U.S. National Science Foundation.

THE application of artificial intelligence has certainly come a long way, especially in the past year. Despite attempts to sensationalise AI, we have witnessed unprecedented gains in our understanding of the impact of AI-driven technologies in everyday life. Building on this progress, AI is poised to journey into the mainstream through 2018 and beyond. In June, Minister for Communications and Information, S Iswaran, announced that the Singapore government will be setting up an advisory council on the ethical use of AI and data, supported by a five-year research programme. Sharing how "innovative technologies bring economic and societal benefits, as well as attendant ethical issues", the minister underscored the need for solid regulatory frameworks to build public trust in emerging technology.

Uranus's strange climate and unusual tilt could be explained by an impact with a huge object, according to new research. Scientists have long been puzzled over why the planet is shunted slightly over to its side. The new research could finally offer an answer, in a major collision with another object. As well as explaining the planet's jaunty angle, the vast collision might also be the reason why Uranus came to have such freezing temperatures. And it could help us understand the mysterious exoplanets that are dotted throughout the universe and give hope for finding alien life.

However, these all-screen designs present designers with a challenge – where to place the fingerprint scanner button, a vital security measure in modern handsets. With its all-screen iPhone X, Apple dropped the scanner entirely in favour of its facial recognition solution, dubbed FaceID. Meanwhile, rival OnePlus relocated the fingerprint sensor to the back of the handset when it moved to an all-screen design. Researchers now believe they have an ideal solution for phone manufacturers, thanks to a new technology that transforms the entire display into one giant sensor. They say the results match up to the standards for fingerprint recognition set by the FBI and the technology could hit the market within the next 12 months.