Soaring over the world's highest buildings and racing a solar-powered car across the desert may not be on your vacation itinerary this summer, but you can still see what such experiences might be like, thanks to the spectacular new IMAX film, "Dream Big: Engineering Our World." The movie takes audiences from Dubai to Australia, while sharing stirring stories about the impact engineers have on society. Narrated by Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges, it celebrates the inspiring work and people behind these engineering feats. Featured footage includes the Great Wall of China and the Golden Gate Bridge, not to mention an underwater robot developed by a team of students from an underprivileged high school in Phoenix. Made up primarily of Mexican immigrants, the robotics team entered its creation in a competition and succeeded against all odds.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being counted (pdf) among the hottest startup sectors in India this year, but the highly specialised space is struggling to grow due to the lack of a primary input: engineers. "Forget getting people of our choice, we don't even get applications when we advertise for positions for our AI team," said 25-year-old Tushar Chhabra, co-founder of Cron Systems, which builds internet of things (IOT)-related solutions for the defence sector. "It's as if people are scared of the words'artificial intelligence.' They start freaking out when we ask them questions about AI." India has over 170 startups focused purely on AI, which have together raised over $36 million. The sector has received validation from marquee investors like Sequoia Capital, Kalaari Capital, and business icon Ratan Tata.

The Defense Department is likely within 18 months of introducing autonomous cybersecurity tools that will be capable of augmenting human analysts by predicting threats, including insider activity, and dynamically isolating parts of the network that may come under attack, the department's outgoing chief information officer said Thursday. Terry Halvorsen, speaking to reporters during his last media roundtable before retiring at the end of the month, said as the department continues deployment of its 12 Joint Regional Security Stacks--a $1.6 billion effort to eliminate hundreds of disparate firewalls with centrally managed commercial security appliances and network monitoring tools--the next major step will be the deployment and testing of AI-based security applications. "Given the volume [of attacks] and where I see the threat moving it will be impossible for humans by themselves to keep pace. We can and we're very close to being able to put more autonomy into the security tools, and we will get to the point within the next 18 months where AI is becoming a key factor in augmenting the human analyst in making those decisions about what to do," Halvorsen said. Halvorsen recently hosted a special meeting of the Five Eyes alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States), plus Germany, Japan, and NATO, at which AI-based cybersecurity was discussed in detail. "This is very real inside the department.

NEW DELHI: Software jobs are still pretty lucrative: Only that robotics, artificial intelligence and Big Data now rake in the money, while mature application services sink fast in the pronounced migration of value toward emerging technologies. Initially built around cost benefits and an improving telecom infrastructure that would allow Indians to follow the US workday, technology is now battling a sweeping wave of de-globalization and automation: Emerging technologies where talent is scarce will likely be the winners when valuemigration is complete, according to hiring and compensation data. At least five search firms and HR heads at technology companies told ET that the demand for professionals with expertise in robotics, machine learning, artificial learning and data science has increased by up to 50% over the last year. Hirings at the top end of the technology spectrum will replace jobs that are repetitive in structure and content, creating a recruitment market premised largely on emerging technologies. "While low-skilled jobs will drop by 30%, automation is expected to increase the middle-skilled jobs by 8% and high-skilled recruitments will rise by 56%," said Debashis Patnaik, senior director, human resources, Dell EMC.

The government plans to compile guidelines for self-driving cars in fiscal 2017 starting in April as it prepares to rework the existing legal framework ahead of the rollout of such vehicles, officials said Thursday. Japan is seeking to promote the spread of automated driving in the run-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, and needs to address legal issues and set new safety regulations. Among potential changes, the government needs to define liability in the event of an accident involving a self-driving car. Based on the guidelines, Tokyo plans to formulate necessary legislative revisions and have them passed during the regular Diet session in 2019. "We will aim to address labor shortages in rural areas and help people with mobility difficulties by introducing automated driving that does not need human drivers by 2020," Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told members of a government panel on future investment.

True to its English-language title, the South Korean action film "Fabricated City" is an amped-up video game vision of a revenge fantasy that's so preoccupied with switching gears that it neglects to provide viewers with any place to park their battered attention spans. Unemployed and unmotivated, Kwon Yu (Ji Chang-wook) is a hardcore gamer referred to as "Captain" by his teammates (heard but not seen), who are collectively known as Resurrection. But Kwon-yu lands in non-virtual hot water after returning a cellphone left in an Internet cafe to its female owner. He subsequently finds himself framed for her rape and murder and tossed into a maximum security prison where his tae kwon do background serves him well. It isn't long before he busts out, and, with some real-world assistance from Resurrection, proceeds to track down the identity of the actual killer.

The 7th Internet of @ThingsExpo will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. Chris Matthieu is the co-founder and CTO of Octoblu, a revolutionary real-time IoT platform recently acquired by Citrix. Octoblu connects things, systems, people and clouds to a global mesh network allowing users to automate and control design flows, processes and sensor data, and analyze/react to real-time events and messages as well as big data trends and anomalies. Prior to co-founding Octoblu, Chris was the founder of Nodester, an open-source Node.JS PaaS which was acquired by AppFog and the founder of Teleku, a communications-as-a-service cloud platform which was acquired by Voxeo. Earlier Chris served as the Tech Chair of SYS-CON's WebRTC Summit.

Everybody seems to want to get in on the machine learning hype these days. According to the head of Google's DeepMind team, however, "There's only a few hundred people in the world that can do that really well." No wonder that Gartner has machine learning at the absolute apex of its 2016 Hype Cycle. Nothing else promises to do so much to transform humanity...with such an anemic record to show for itself. This isn't to suggest that artificial intelligence has a bleak future, but rather that we're getting way ahead of ourselves in terms of what it's delivering today.

Renowned Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities predicted that iPhone 8 would supplant Touch ID with advanced sensors capable of recognizing one's face with very high accuracy. JPMorgan analyst Rod Hall corroborated Kuo's report, speculating that facial recognition would utilize a front-facing 3D sensor. For many people, this has been one of the tougher iPhone 8 rumors to swallow. Touch ID lets you unlock your iPhone without looking whereas facial recognition would require you to face the sensor, a major inconvenience. A few reports have attempted to shed some light on the subject, explaining the basics of 3D motion and object scanning and how Apple might leverage 3D sensors in iPhone 8.

Any dog owner will tell you how smart they think their dog is. What we usually think of as smartness in dogs is measured or observed in their external behaviour. Being able to respond to commands, for example, or remember the location of a hidden toy. Researchers have shown that dogs have significant capacity to remember associations between commands, situations and behaviour. Recent research even showed that dogs can remember specific events like humans and other primates can.