Britain's Prince William, left, and his wife Kate the Duchess of Cambridge are greeted as they arrive, in front of a model zebra, to attend the Tusk Conservation Awards at the Royal Society in London, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2013. The annual awards aim to recognize and celebrate outstanding achievement in the field of African conservation. The United Kingdom's national science academy or the Royal Society meets for the first time. The rise of modern science, announced by the foundation of the Royal Society of London… [and] its increasing authority… was another reflection of the waning influence of religious faith in society and the already unquestionable dominance of secular national concerns. It was the importance of science for the English national identity and the function it performed for the cultural image of England that created the state of public opinion favorable to its cultivation, encouraging to those who had the abilities to devote to it, and causing many Englishmen who knew very little about the substance of scientific knowledge to stand in reverence before expressions of scientific creativity.

Artificial intelligence has gone from science-fiction fantasy to imminent component of the future in the space of just a few decades, with many of the fictitious genre's predictions inching closer and closer to reality. One such foreshadowing short story was Philip K. Dick's The Minority Report, which was later made into a feature film directed by Steven Spielberg. In that tale, three mutant beings called "precogs" are able to foretell criminal behavior before it actually happens. The only problem is that they don't always agree, creating an idea about what will happen based on what the "majority report" dictates. Placing faith in their educated guesses, the mutants tell law enforcement what a person will do -- before that person knows themselves.

It may take several years or even decades, but hackers won't necessarily always be human. Artificial intelligence -- a technology that also promises to revolutionize cybersecurity -- could one day become the go-to hacking tool. Organizers of the Cyber Grand Challenge, a contest sponsored by the U.S. defense agency DARPA, gave a glimpse of the power of AI during their August event. Seven supercomputers battled each other to show that machines can indeed find and patch software vulnerabilities. Theoretically, the technology can be used to perfect any coding, ridding it of exploitable flaws.

CT scans don't always provide all the answers patients are looking for, but getting a second medical opinion costs time and money. Now Israeli startup Zebra Medical Vision has machine learning platform that can provide those second opinions. Zebra's online software, called Profound, reads data from CT scans, analyzes the information and produces medical reports with 90 percent accuracy, the company said. "Usually when you go to the hospital for a visit, for example, if you have a chest pain, you go for that particular symptom. The doctor looks for that specific sign looking for the cause, but there is always something that he can't find, and often he doesn't have the time to look at the entire scenario," said Zebra's CEO Elad Benjamin.

The field of surgery is ever-changing and evolving. A major revolution has happened in the last 25 years as the focus has shifted to minimally invasive surgery and subsequently to robotic assisted surgery. Minimally-invasive surgical techniques have benefitted the patients in terms of lower morbidity and mortality through lesser violation of the body's natural barriers. The morbidity associated with open surgery like pain, discomfort, and delayed recovery was mainly due to the process of gaining access through bigger incisions. The same surgeries can now be performed through smaller cuts using minimally invasive techniques leading to lesser pain and faster recovery. In 1985 a robot, the PUMA 560, was used to place a needle for a brain biopsy using CT guidance.

In this blog post, I provide 10 tips on how our sponsors and exhibitors can maximize their participation at our events. But before reading my top 10 tips for our sponsors and exhibitors, please take a moment and watch this brief Sandy Carter video. Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo New York and Silicon Valley provide a full year of face-to-face marketing opportunities for your company. Each sponsorship and exhibit package comes with pre and post-show marketing programs. By sponsoring and exhibiting in New York and Silicon Valley, you reach a full complement of decision makers and buyers in multiple vertical markets.

BMW is an iconic brand in the automobile industry, well-established and well-liked, but that hasn't translated to success for the German automaker when it comes to electric vehicles. Having sold only about 25,000 of the i3 hatchbacks in 2015, the company is planning to upgrade its small car next year. German weekly Welt am Sonntag (in German) reported Sunday the i3 will get a makeover that will see both the front and rear ends of the car reworked. Additionally, new battery technology will give the vehicle increased range as well, which BMW says is currently 114 miles on full charge. The range can be extended up to 180 miles using a "Range Extender."

Today we can collect lots and lots of performance data. We build beautiful dashboards and even have fancy query languages to access and transform the data. Still performance data is a secret language only a couple of people understand. The more business becomes digital the more stakeholders are interested in this data including how it relates to business. Some of these people have never used a monitoring tool before.

TOKYO • Come 2020 when the Olympic Games are held in Tokyo, drone deliveries, driverless taxis, and home robots will be the norm in one part of Japan. Visitors will see a beeline of drones in the sky in Chiba prefecture, just an hour away from the capital by train. At the designated drone zone, to be called Drone City, there will be around 200 of these flying robots whizzing through the air across a 10km distance at any one time, delivering goods from warehouses in Tokyo Bay to apartments that come with built-in landing ports for delivery drop-offs. Leading drone expert and pioneer, Dr Kenzo Nonami of Chiba University, is looking forward to living in such an apartment in Drone City, due for completion in three years' time. "If you don't like drones, don't live there," quipped Dr Nonami, who has helped develop drone technology over the past 20 years, and who painted the 2020 vision to The Straits Times.

The robot has repeatedly flunked the National Center Test since 2013. The team of creators, including members from the National Institute of Informatics, say they are finally quitting their efforts to make the robot smart enough to pass an entrance exam for admission. Mariella Moon, associate editor of Engadget web magazine, said, "Todai Robot's creators have concluded that since they failed to meet their goal this year, the AI can't become smart enough to get into Tokyo U by their March 2022 target date." It turns out the robot is not good at grasping "meaning in a broad spectrum," said Noriko Arai, a professor at the National Institute of Informatics, who heads the team behind Torobo-kun. Torobu-kun, for instance, did not perform well in English, where it had to link phrases to come to logical conclusions. It received scores of 36.2 in listening and 50.5 in written exams.