Five years ago IBM Watson came to the attention of the world thanks to Jeopardy. The real achievement of Watson, however, wasn't its victory over Ken Jennings, said Rob High Jr., an IBM Fellow and head of the Watson Group, during his keynote at the GPU Technology Conference. Rather it was Watson's ability to digest so much information and understand the questions thrown at it. IBM then looked around to see where else those capabilities might be useful, and the first thing that came to mind was doctors. Since then it has turned out that there are many industries that could benefit from what it calls cognitive computing.

With the deluge of reports lately on how robots are replacing humans at everyday tasks, you may think the end of the world, at least for a certain category of human workers, is nigh. Indeed that may well be the case in certain professions. The Associated Press, for instance, has a team of robots that generates 3,000 news reports about the quarterly earnings releases of companies. This Japanese hotel that I wrote about recently is staffed entirely with robots. The paralegal may soon be a position of the past as law firms commission bots to sift through vast reams of legal information and synthesise them.

You can already control your mobile devices with touch, gesture, or voice commands. Now Finnish researcher Olli Lahdenoja is introducing another mechanism: facial recognition. Lahdenoja, a researcher at the University of Turku, has published a doctoral dissertation which develops a facial recognition method that can fit onto a single electronic chip. The system has the potential to be used in devices such as smartwatches, as well as mobile handsets, thanks to its compact size and low power consumption. "[Using this system] a smartwatch could, for example, switch on when a user looks at it. What's more, the recognition system could be used to identify a person when they access an online service," says Lahdenoja.

A team of Airbus engineers are developing a self-flying taxi that is designed to fly above traffic to carry individual passengers and cargo throughout busy cities. The utopian vision is a bit far-fetched, but they plan to start testing a prototype of the vehicle in late 2017. The technical leader of Ford's autonomous car project speaks about what it's like to be driven by a driver-less car, and how big a deal self-driving vehicles will really be. In Airbus's corporate magazine FORUM, project executive Rodin Lyasoff asserts, "In as little as ten years, we could have projects on the market that revolutionize urban travel for millions of people." The project, dubbed Vahana, launched in February 2016 at A3, which is Airbus Group's innovation division based (where else?) in Silicon Valley.

Robotics is a broad discipline with commercial applications spanning manufacturing, defense, space, entertainment, education and service. The robotics market is approximately $10B but growing rapidly. This study assessed the international state-of-the-art in robotics science, technology and practice. It identifies the significant accomplishments in robotics research, the potential for growth in this emerging industry, and the relative emphasis on different areas across the world. It included analysis of various R&D programs, funding mechanisms and strategic growth directions. This report covers industrial robots, service and personal robots, robotic vehicles, humanoids, space robots, robots used in biological and medical applications and networks of cooperating robots.

TOKYO--Toyota Motor Corp. is pushing back against technology companies muscling in to the automotive business, outlining plans to spend at least $1 billion on a Silicon Valley research center to study autonomous driving and robotics. The move shows that the world's largest auto maker is shedding some of its caution and accelerating plans to develop "smart" cars. Auto makers are rushing to set up labs in the home of technology giants...

Artificial intelligence project AlphaGo clinched the best-of-five series against South Korea's Lee Se-dol

Suppose you could discern market trends, speed up time to see where those trends were going, then bet on what you discovered. Geeks in suits are doing that today. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. I was sitting on a sofa in the guru's office. I trekked to this high mountain outpost a couple of years ago to arrive at one of the planet's power points, the national research labs at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The guru's office was decorated with colorful posters of past conferences that traced the almost mythical career of this high-tech legend: from a maverick physics student who formed an underground band of hippie hackers to break the bank at Las Vegas with a wearable computer, to a principal character in a renegade band of scientists who invented the accelerating science of chaos by studying a dripping faucet, to a founding father of the artificial life movement, to the head of a small lab investigating the new science of complexity in an office kitty-corner to the museum of atomic weapons at Los Alamos -- the office I had trekked to. The guru, Doyne Farmer, looked like Ichabod Crane in a bolo tie. Tall, bony, probably thirty-something, Doyne (pronounced Doan) was about to embark on his next remarkable adventure. He was starting a company to beat the odds on Wall Street by predicting stock prices with computer simu-lations. He was going to hack the global economy. Money is just a type of information, a pattern that, once digitized, becomes subject to persistent programmatic hacking by the mathematically skilled. As the information of money swishes around the planet, it leaves in its wake a history of its flow, and if any of that complex flow can be anticipated, then the hacker who cracks the pattern will become a rich hacker. Some sort of financial hacking has been around as long as computers.

Every few decades, a pandemic flu variant emerges that not only infects humans but also passes rapidly from person to person. The H7N9 avian flu virus that infected more than 130 people in China this spring, primarily from close contact with poultry, hasn't yet become highly contagious among people. But given that humans lack the antibodies to combat the virus, its high lethality rate (44 of the infected died), and the possibility that it could resurface this fall or winter, scientists and public health officials are racing to unravel its mysteries. Recent studies of H7N9 show that it can pass among ferrets, which are often used to model human flu transmission. If the virus gains the ability to spread easily among people, it has the potential to be deadlier than the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic, which may have been responsible for more than 200,000 deaths worldwide. Researchers like Raul Rabadan, a theoretical physicist working in biology at Columbia University, want to understand how viruses that ordinarily infect birds or pigs suddenly jump to humans and then become easily transmissible: "What are the specific mutations that contribute to a virus becoming a human pathogen?" he explained.

Even by the standards of the TED conference, Henry Markram's 2009 TEDGlobal talk was a mind-bender. He took the stage of the Oxford Playhouse, clad in the requisite dress shirt and blue jeans, and announced a plan that--if it panned out--would deliver a fully sentient hologram within a decade. He dedicated himself to wiping out all mental disorders and creating a self-aware artificial intelligence. And the South African–born neuroscientist pronounced that he would accomplish all this through an insanely ambitious attempt to build a complete model of a human brain--from synapses to hemispheres--and simulate it on a supercomputer. Markram was proposing a project that has bedeviled AI researchers for decades, that most had presumed was impossible. He wanted to build a working mind from the ground up. In the four years since Markram's speech, he hasn't backed off a nanometer. The self-assured scientist claims that the only thing preventing scientists from understanding the human brain in its entirety--from the molecular level all the way to the mystery of consciousness--is a lack of ambition. If only neuroscience would follow his lead, he insists, his Human Brain Project could simulate the functions of all 86 billion neurons in the human brain, and the 100 trillion connections that link them.