The ticket kiosks at Shanghai's frenetic subway station have a mind of their own. Walk up to one and state your destination, and it'll automatically recommend a route before issuing a ticket. In the interest of reducing the rush-hour stampede, the system is set up to let you find information and buy tickets without pushing a button or talking to a person. More impressive still, all this happens successfully in the middle of a crowded, noisy station. Each kiosk has to figure out who is speaking to it; zero in on that person's voice within the crowd; transcribe the incoming speech; parse its meaning; and compare the person's face against a massive database of photos--all within a few seconds.

The Hippocratic oath states: "first do no harm." In today's era of personalized medicine, we are trying to uphold this oath, but we also break it. Modern medicine has moved away from this oath in many ways. But new technologies that enable personalized medicine and a population-based approach to health will be the key to making Hippocrates' vision come true. Physicians today focus on specific diagnoses and specialized treatments, both of which were espoused by the Knidian school.

The world is full of connected devices – and more are coming. In 2017, there were an estimated 8.4 billion internet-enabled thermostats, cameras, streetlights and other electronics. By 2020 that number could exceed 20 billion, and by 2030 there could be 500 billion or more. Because they'll all be online all the time, each of those devices – whether a voice-recognition personal assistant or a pay-by-phone parking meter or a temperature sensor deep in an industrial robot – will be vulnerable to a cyberattack and could even be part of one. Today, many "smart" internet-connected devices are made by large companies with well-known brand names, like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Samsung, which have both the technological systems and the marketing incentive to fix any security problems quickly.

It's 9 am on a February morning and the mercury is just inching past 20 degrees Celsius in Bengaluru. The workday is already two hours old in the metropolis's densely laid-out eastern suburb of Marathahalli. A student batch of both unemployed and working software professionals at Robotek Minds, a tech training institute, has just finished its data science class. Data science is the new buzzword in the tech industry and the code jocks in the Marathahalli class have a singular focus: a job or a leg-up at one of the shiny information technology campuses dotting the city and housing the world's leading tech corporations. Which, they hope, will be a passport to a comfortable salary that will grow in long strides in the years ahead as the use of data in the world economy explodes.

"More than a dozen armed drones descended from an unknown location onto Russia's vast Hmeimim air base in northwestern Latakia province, the headquarters of Russia's military operations in Syria, and on the nearby Russian naval base at Tartus," The Washington Post reported. "Russia said that it shot down seven of the 13 drones and used electronic countermeasures to safely bring down the other six." And these drones appeared substantially less sophisticated and maneuverable than a DJI Phantom 4, the leading consumer drone. The National Academy notes that most of the counterstrategies that the Army has developed are "based on jamming radio frequency and GPS signals." The thinking was: Drones needed those information flows to navigate effectively.

A U.S. Air Force MQ-1B Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), carrying a Hellfire missile flies over an air base after flying a mission in the Persian Gulf region on January 7, 2016. A U.S. Air Force MQ-1B Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), carrying a Hellfire missile flies over an air base after flying a mission in the Persian Gulf region on January 7, 2016. A Google spokeswoman said the company provides its TensorFlow application programming interfaces, or APIs, to a pilot project with the Department of Defense to help automatically identify objects in unclassified data. APIs are software-based rules that let computer programs communicate. TensorFlow is a popular set of APIs and other tools for AI capabilities such as machine learning and computer vision.

Any mention of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, inspires some trepidation in many people, including designers, but those most familiar with it say that designers should be excited about the advent of AI. "I'm very excited about the future with AI, but we do need to make sure we are responsible with it, as with any other technological development,'' Silka Miesnieks, head of the design lab at Adobe, told the Brainstorm Design conference in Singapore on Wednesday. "Our superpower as humans is our creativity, and we are all creative," she said, adding that AI can aid human creativity but not replace it. "We spend a lot of time thinking about unintended consequences and trying to avoid them. And we urge all designers to do that too," she said. Rod Farmer also embraces the possibilities. As digital expert associate principal at McKinsey, Farmer researches how to bridge the gap between human-computer interfaces and software engineering practices. He took a similar view to Miesnieks. "In most cases, AI only affects a percentage of a job a person does, but rarely the whole job.

PlayStation has refused to sell a game intended to teach men how to pick up women. 'Super Seducer', a controversial new release, has been criticised for encouraging men to be creepy and disrespectful to women. But it is still available on other platforms, despite being blocked on PlayStation. Richard La Ruina claims to be a dating and runs a company offering training in pickup artist techniques. The game aims to teach some of those techniques, which vary from things to talk about in conversation to psychological tricks.

"AI is processing more and more data faster. It's an efficiency play, because time is money," said Dr. William Morris, associate chief medical information officer at Cleveland Clinic. The promise of AI to do just that--by augmenting human activities, not replacing them--is real. It may one day help physicians with diagnoses, guiding them rather than dictating. "We are not looking for robots to do work for us," said Manu Tandon, chief information officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. "We are looking to make better decisions by benefiting from machine learning and AI." How quickly and successfully AI gets there depends on clinical knowledge.