Using humanoid robots to study human behavior.

While China raced ahead to become a manufacturing superpower, India focused on IT services. Without the infrastructure and ability to displace populations, India had little choice. Meanwhile, US manufacturing suffered a steady hollowing out as its corporations rushed to China. Seduced by government subsidies, cheap labour, lax regulations and a rigged currency, these corporations had little choice. The next decade will, however, show that China's manufacturing advantage was short-lived.

As Obi Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader pulled out their light sabers for a deadly battle 30 years ago today, "Stars Wars" movie-goers asked themselves one thing: Where can I get one of those? The iconic movie series prompted young children to tote R2D2 lunch boxes and teenage boys to fall in love with side hair buns and gold bikinis. But in 1977, the groundbreaking fan favorite did more than just secure its place in Americana -- it also captured the hearts and minds of scientists of the '70s and a few younger, budding lab rats waiting in the wings. "I think the influence is huge," Michio Kaku, one of the world's most prominent physicists and the co-founder of string field theory, told ABCNEWS.com. "Many people don't realize that science fiction has been an inspiration for the world's leading scientists."

Bangalore: Tereadata India released its technology predictions for the India market in 2017. Smart commercial buildings are predicted to be the highest user of IoT until 2017, followed by smart homes. Together these two categories will consume just over 1 billion connected devices by 2018. The Internet of Things (IoT) has vast implications for government institutions from city hall to international governing bodies. Tens of billions of physical devices are expected to join the global network by the end of the decade, providing a number of concerns and opportunities for planners, policymakers and regulators.

This week's top Machine Learning stories, with a special focus on how deep learning is changing the world! Machine Learning is one of the most exciting fields in the world. Every week we discover something new, something amazing, something revolutionary. It's incredible, but it can also be overwhelming. That's why we created This Week in Machine Learning!

In Davos right now, the world's best and best-performing economic minds are gathered for their annual bout of elite networking. You know you're not invited because a ticket costs $35,000, and that's before the cost of membership, which is also required, and even more expensive. But we get news reports from the proceedings and the most interesting one today concerns the World Economic Forum's recent report which claims the biggest risk in 2017 is people losing their jobs to robots. The word out of Davos is we have nothing to fear. If you don't believe them, you might find some comfort in a story about Donald Trump that's been kicking around for a couple of years that is, well, intriguing. The next Leader of the Free World has never used a computer. It's great fun (Matt Novak has tenaciously taken up the baton at Gizmodo), and not at all as far-fetched as you might be thinking right now. We know Trump tweets, badly. But it is actually surprisingly difficult to find evidence of him looking comfortable behind a MacBook.

The child of a refugee from Vietnam is striving to realize her dream of building a Japanese language school in the Southeast Asian country. "My dream is to do something that would serve as a bridge between Japan and Vietnam," said Doan Thy Trang, 27. To achieve that goal, she founded a consulting firm in Akashi, a city in Hyogo Prefecture facing the Seto Inland Sea, in January 2015. Trang explained that many business trainees from Vietnam she meets through her work have little difficulty communicating with Japanese in daily conversations but struggle with technical terms. "Vietnamese need a school that teaches them Japanese language used in workplaces," she said.

This week we are celebrating Computer Science Education Week around the globe. In this "age of acceleration," in which advances in technology and the globalization of business are transforming entire industries and society itself, it's more critical than ever for everyone to be digitally literate, especially our kids. This is particularly true for women and girls who, while representing roughly 50 percent of the world's population, account for less than 20 percent of computer science graduates in 34 OECD countries, according to this report. This has far-reaching societal and economic consequences. One issue sometimes cited for the dearth of women in computing fields is the lack of professional role models who could inspire girls to pursue their STEM dreams. We've attempted to counteract this by asking 17 women within Microsoft's global research organization their views on what's likely to occur in their fields in 2017.

Chinese online search giant Baidu has named former Microsoft global executive vice president Qi Lu as its group president and chief operating officer. Lu, a leading authority in the area of artificial intelligence, will be in charge of products, technology, sales, marketing and operations, effective immediately, according to a Baidu statement issued on Tuesday. "To achieve our goals, especially in artificial intelligence, which is a key strategic focus for the next decade, we will need to continue attracting the best global talent. With Dr. Lu on board, we are confident that our strategy will be executed smoothly and Baidu will become a world-class technology company and global leader in AI," said Robin Li Yanhong, Baidu's chairman and group CEO. Prior to joining Baidu, Lu served as Microsoft's global executive vice president and led one of Microsoft's three business units.

This year has been rollercoaster crash for many with numerous tragedies and crises occurring all over the world, but it doesn't mean that everything was grim in 2016. Join IBTimes UK as we take a closer look at the many new developments across various fields of technological research, each with the potential to revolutionise human life for the better. This section is devoted to the computer science research into replicating the human mind and helping computers solve complex tasks. For developments concerning the machines themselves, see our articles on robotics. In 2016, computer scientists have begun concentrating more efforts on building deep learning neural networks which are large webs of artificially intelligent classical computers that are trained using computer algorithms to solve complex problems in a similar way to the human central nervous system, and where different layers examine different parts of the problem to combine to produce an answer.