In the ninth episode of "Westworld," the HBO television series that imagines an escapist theme park populated by human players and fantasy-fulfulling androids, a character named Dolores questions the appeal of the world outside. If humans are so eager to flee into her reality, she asks, as sentience flickers into her circuitry, why would she ever want to visit theirs? In 2016, the year that facts, political decency, and a handful of our most cherished celebrities joined the choir invisible, who could argue with her? Now more than ever, fiction seems a place of retreat, and the interactive fictions of video games have an especially keen appeal. In times that feel out of control, the controller is a refuge. No matter how dark the world we enter, we are, like Westworld's clientele, made to feel invincible.

Few people picked up on one of the most interesting things that David Marcus, head of Facebook Messenger, said at TechCrunch Disrupt in September. In an offhanded comment, Marcus noted that users could book airline tickets and hotels through Hipmunk's new chatbot and that the experience was "pretty close to having a native app, and definitely better than mobile web." Just think about that for a second. Facebook launched its chatbot platform in April -- around the same time that we opened our Bot Shop. This generation of chatbots has only been around for about eight months, but in that short time they are already starting to surpass the mobile web.

BENGALURU: Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, the poster boys of Indian ecommerce, are brazenly betting on so-called moonshot ideas, backing early-stage technology companies working in areas such as healthcare and otherwise struggling to raise money from traditional investors. The latest such company the Flipkart cofounders have backed is Pandorum Technologies, which has found a way to 3D-print experimental-stage human liver tissues in a laboratory. The two Bansals are also finalising another investment in a startup that makes implants, which would mark their fourth funding deal into a healthcare startup. Overall, one-fourth of the two dozen or so companies in their combined investment portfolios are working on similar deep technology ideas, making the Bansals a rare breed of investors not averse to taking risky bets that can spur truly disruptive innovation. "In India, core sectors like healthcare, education and supply chain will be disrupted (by emerging) technology... Those (startups) don't get funding easily while consumer internet companies do," Binny Bansal said.

A drone belonging to a film crew was reportedly shot down Friday in the Iranian capital Tehran by the country's anti-aircraft forces after it approached the president and the supreme leader's offices. The drone was shot down as "it approached the no-fly zone" near the office of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a source told Iranian Labour News Agency (ILNA), according to Reuters. The drone belonged to a documentary-making team that had acquired permission to shoot but "unintentionally started moving it towards the no-fly zone." According to Tehran's deputy governor general for security affairs, Mohsen Hamedani, the state television crew were shooting Friday prayers and "did not know about the prohibited airspace." In August, the commander of Tehran air defense forces said that the capital's airspace was under full control and "no aircraft can enter it without permission."

A Nobel Prize-winning economist has warned that the rise in robotics and automation could destroy millions of jobs across the world. Angus Deaton, who won the Nobel Prize last year for his work on health, wealth, and inequality, told the Financial Times he believes robots are a much greater threat to employment in the US than globalisation. Addressing the theory that Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential elections was fueled by a backlash against globalisation, Deaton told the FT: "Globalisation for me seems to be not first-order harm and I find it very hard not to think about the billion people who have been dragged out of poverty as a result. I don't think that globalisation is anywhere near the threat that robots are." He added: "It's hard to think that Mark Zuckerberg is actually impoverishing anyone by getting rich with Facebook. But driverless cars are another matter entirely."

Unsecured IoT devices were used to launch crippling DDOS attacks in October 2016, targeting services such as Twitter, Spotify, and GitHub. Subsequent testimony to Congress about potential attacks on office buildings, schools, and hospitals raised the possibility for the IoT to harm and even kill people. Does the government need to intervene? In this power panel at @ThingExpo New York, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, leading IoT and security experts will discuss this very serious topic. Roger Strukhoff is Conference Chair of Cloud Expo @ThingsExpo, and Editor of SYS-CON Media's CloudComputing BigData IoT Journals.

For the casual internet user, a quick Google search is often all it takes to find plenty of information on any particular topic. But for specialized financial research, analysts often find themselves laboriously searching proprietary databases, regulatory filings, and paywalled sources that aren't even indexed by the big search engines, says Jack Kokko, the founder and CEO of financial search engine company AlphaSense. That's why he and cofounder and CTO Raj Neervannan created AlphaSense, which applies natural language processing and machine learning techniques to let users find relevant information in financial documents. "It started from my first job out of college as an analyst at Morgan Stanley, where I was, as every analyst, going through these huge piles of paper on my desk and trying to find information very manually--nights and days spent toiling through that information and still fearing that I'm missing a lot," Kokko says. The San Francisco-based company takes in information from thousands of licensed data sources, as well as public web sources like news reports, and automatically processes them to extract meaning on a sentence-by-sentence level.

As Italy is slowly recovering from a series of deadly earthquakes, researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology of Genoa are developing a new generation of robots to work in disaster zones. The key to the four-legged robot, called HyQ, an acronym for "Hydraulic Quadruped", is its mobility. September ... Teton Capital Partners long / short strategy delivered 8.1% In 2014 Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO) Emerging Markets Bond Fund Suffers Losses on Russian Bets Congress Could Be About to Give this Asset Class a Huge Promotion – Muni Bonds It appears there's no shortage of investor love for municipal bond funds.

Honda, SoftBank want to make cars your new best friends TOKYO -- Honda Motor and SoftBank Group announced a research collaboration Thursday on the use of artificial intelligence in cars, with a goal of creating vehicles that are more than just a machine for transporting people from point A to point B. The two Japanese companies aim to give cars the ability to read the moods and learn the preferences of drivers, not only through cameras and sensors but also by conversing with them. Honda and SoftBank envision the car as less of a tool and more like a member of the family. SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son invited Honda R&D President and CEO Yoshiyuki Matsumoto on stage Thursday at an event for corporate customers in a hotel here.

Tokyo, December 16, 2016 - NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) today announced the development of a "remote gaze detection technology" that enables real-time detection of the direction an individual is looking, even when using existing cameras from remote locations. Conventional technologies estimate an individual's line-of-sight using specialized devices equipped with infrared lights and advanced cameras that detect light as it is reflected from an individual's eye. This new technology, developed as part of NEC's cutting-edge portfolio of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, NEC the WISE (*1), uses face feature point detection technology, the core of NEC's world leading face recognition technology (*2), to accurately identify characteristics in and around the eye, such as the pupil and the corners of the eye, from images taken with common cameras, including web, surveillance, tablet and smartphone cameras, without the need for specialized equipment. These images and technology enable highly accurate detection of an individual's line-of-sight, with a measurement error of less than 5 degrees from the left, right, top and bottom. Moreover, this remote gaze detection technology's advanced response to low resolution images and changes in brightness enable it to detect an individual's line-of-sight, even when they are separated from the camera by 10 meters, making it well suited for automatically detecting products that draw the attention of shoppers at retail stores. Furthermore, the high speed computations of its "feature value extraction technology" enable it to simultaneously detect the line-of-sight of multiple individuals, without compromising the accuracy of its results.