You've read about cities installing smart parking meters and noise- and air-quality sensors, but are you ready to embrace the idea of a city brain? The residents of Singapore are on track to do just that. Creating a centralized dashboard view of sensors deployed across a distributed network is nothing new, but it takes on a bigger -- perhaps ominous -- meaning when deployed across a major city. Many technologically advanced cities worldwide are exploring ways to build such comprehensive digital views for managing traffic and parking, monitoring water and air quality, and offering such citizen-facing services as web-based tools for interacting with government agencies. Some smart city experts call this system approach a "city brain" or, less glamorously, a "municipal backplane."

Ford CEO Mark Fields holds Velodyne Puck LIDAR sensor at a press conference at CES in Las Vegas in January. Carmakers and tech firms competing to develop automated vehicles seek a combination of sensors and cameras that provide maximum perception and visibility of surroundings at a cost that's manageable for mass production. Velodyne, a leading maker of laser-based LiDAR, or Light, Detection and Ranging, sensors, says it has designed a new solid-state version of its technology that provides 3D imaging for automated vehicle systems that will cost less than $50 per unit when manufactured at high volume. That's a fraction of the $8,000 cost of its current mechanical spinning LIDAR devices used in prototype robotic cars. The new design "creates a true solid-state LiDAR sensor, while significantly raising the bar as to what can be expected from LiDAR sensors as far as cost, size and reliability," company founder and CEO David Hall said in a statement.

Apple has launched its newest iOS update, bringing with it a huge range of new emoji – some of which are a little odd. The new update, numbered iOS 10.2, is now available for everyone with an iPhone or iPad to download. It has a corresponding update to macOS Sierra, which also enables the new emoji. Many of the changes have been long-trailed and heralded as important additions to the emoji keyboards. Those include things like new professions, with teachers, astronauts and scientists, as well as gender options meant to address the apparent sexism coded into some of the previous choices.

In this episode: Brett King traveled to Helsinki and Tokyo and spoke to experts about how artificial intelligence and augmented reality will change people's financial lives. He interviewed Kristian Luoma, who runs an accelerator program at Finnish financial services firm OP Financial; Ville Hulkko from fintech startup Valossa, which has built an artificial intelligence engine that watches videos and can describe what happens in them; Megan Beck, author of The Network Imperative, a book about digital transformation; Natalie Shiori Fleming and Hiroki Kudo from Fintech Association Japan; and Toshi Taki from Money Forward, a personal financial management software startup in Japan that uses AI to categorize transactions.

Like fake news, the over hyped, bi-modal approach to IT and digital transformation is a flawed fallacy perpetuated by ivory tower, non-pragmatic legacy research firms. Sustaining operations keep the lights on. The bulk of an organization focuses on keeping the lights on. This team's goal is to deliver operational efficiency, rock-solid reliability, and massive economies of scale. Key team traits include an attention to detail, strong work ethic, adherence to standards and rules.

The animation displayed by Kawakami included a sequence where humanoid characters grotesquely contort themselves as they move around by using their heads as feet. "This is the result of teaching it to'move faster,'" Kawakami said. "Basically there's nothing like sensitivity to pain, and it lacks the concept of the head being important, so it's using the head like a foot for movement." The presentation was to showcase efforts by the CGI team at Dwango Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where Kawakami serves as chairman, in exploring nascent field of image processing using artificial intelligence. Aired on Sunday as part of NHK's documentary series "NHK Special: Hayao Miyazaki -- The One Who Never Ends," the program reveals the decorated animator and director's journey as he takes up animated shorts following his retirement from full-length feature animations in 2013.

US-based Microsoft Ventures, the venture capital arm of software giant Microsoft, announced on Monday that it has formed a new fund for investments in startups focused on artificial intelligence. Nagraj Kashyap, who heads Microsoft Ventures, confirmed the development in a blog post. The corpus of the new fund was not announced, but the company has already made its first investment from this fund in Montreal-based firm Element AI. "This new fund will make investments of similar size to previous Microsoft Ventures investments, and will only include businesses with promise for strong financial returns (as opposed to non-profits or NGOs)," Kashyap wrote in a blog post. Founded in 2016, Element AI offers artificial intelligence solutions to large corporations through its incubator platform. The firm's team comprises academic researchers from research labs across North America.

People in the FinTech space like to say that FinTech will disrupt financial services beyond recognition, causing mass disruption of its delivery to consumers. Artificial intelligence ("AI") will disrupt all financial services, indeed all of our society. Technically, AI is intelligence created by machines or software, sometimes called machine learning and sometimes confused with robotics. Robotics is just the robotization of something – if is has the capability to learn, then robotics can be AI. The artificial intelligence and robotics market combined was worth US$10.7 billion in 2014 and is expected to be worth US$153 billion by 2020, and to have a disruptive impact of between US$14 to US$33 trillion.

In the beginning, there were mainframe computers and punch cards. Since then, we've seen three transformations. The latest, augmented reality plus artificial intelligence, will change more than the previous three combined. At least, that's what tech evangelist Robert Scoble and author Shel Israel say in their new book: The Fourth Transformation: How Augmented Reality & Artificial Intelligence Will Change Everything. First was text and MS-DOS.

This year's STATE OF THE ARTS 2016: A.I. and for Good and Music that Transforms focuses on the power of artificial (or machine) intelligence and music to transform our lives. From personal wellbeing, to education, arts and healing, this year's event will honor both 2016 FutureVision Awardees; inventor of iWithin, Eric Shuss, and musician and composer, Ricky Kej. With fear and trepidation around the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI.) and the even more powerful thinking and learning Artificial General Intelligence (A.G.I.), we will explore a future where A.I. becomes a force for good, and helps integrate with humanity to make this world and our next worlds, a better place. The panel will discuss the evolution of AI and AGI, today's reality and tomorrow's potential for super-intelligences to positiviely help raise our consciousness and transform life as we know it. The evening will culminate in the presentation of the annual c3 FutureVision Awards preceded by a presentation and short film by FutureVision Awardee musician Ricky Kej, a Grammy-nominated composer and creator of Shanti Samsara: World Music for Environmental Consciousness.