There is no need to worry about whether robots might start taking our jobs. Three of the world's 10 largest employers are already replacing tens of thousands of their workers with robots: Foxconn, a key manufacturing partner for Apple, Google, and Amazon, is the world's 10th largest employer and it has already replaced 60,000 workers with robots, according to a recent note written in part by analyst John Seagrimat CLSA. Walmart, the third-largest global employer with 2.1 million workers, wants to replace its warehouse stock-checkers with flying drones that can scan miles of shelves in a fraction of the time. And the US Department of Defense, the No.1 global employer, is already; flying the world's largest fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles - drones, basically - in its various Middle East conflicts. The US DoD has at least 7,362 RQ-11 Ravens in operation for instance.

Artificial intelligence has long fascinated the technology industry and it's easy to see why. Creating a piece of software that can think, and act, like a human mind would be one of the biggest advancements in computer science ever, and that might even be an understatement. The interest in A.I. has meant that big companies, like Google or Facebook, are hiring teams of engineers and researchers to build the technology into their products. While humans have not created anything close to the human mind, machines and software are becoming much better at predicting what we want based on a much smaller set of information. Google, for example, spent much of its annual I/O conference talking about advances in A.I. and how the company plans to implement the technology.

In this paper, we will investigate the efficacy of IMAT (Iterative Method of Adaptive Thresholding) in recovering the sparse signal (parameters) for linear models with missing data. Sparse recovery rises in compressed sensing and machine learning problems and has various applications necessitating viable reconstruction methods specifically when we work with big data. This paper will focus on comparing the power of IMAT in reconstruction of the desired sparse signal with LASSO. Additionally, we will assume the model has random missing information. Missing data has been recently of interest in big data and machine learning problems since they appear in many cases including but not limited to medical imaging datasets, hospital datasets, and massive MIMO. The dominance of IMAT over the well-known LASSO will be taken into account in different scenarios. Simulations and numerical results are also provided to verify the arguments.

Daniel Faggella is founder of TechEmergence, a news and advice website for entrepreneurs and investors interested in the intersection of technology and the mind. Speech recognition technology has been around for more than half a decade, though the early uses of speech recognition -- like voice dialing or desktop dictation -- certainly don't seem as sexy as today's burgeoning virtual agents or smart home devices. If you've been following the speech recognition technology market for any length of time, you know that a slew of significant players emerged on the scene about six years ago, including Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft (in a brief search, I counted 26 U.S.-based companies developing speech recognition technology). Since that time, the biggest tech trend setters in the world have been picking up speed and setting new benchmarks in a growing field, with Google recently providing open access to its new enterprise-level speech recognition API. While Google certainly seems to have the current edge in the market after substantial investments in machine learning systems over the past couple of years, the tech giant may yet have a potential Achilles' heel in owning an important segment of the global market -- lack of access to China.

In 10 years, we'll see big changes in how people live their lives and how companies operate, thanks to the innovation that's now being kindled around the world. So says Alec Ross, former innovation adviser to Hillary Clinton during her term as U.S. Secretary of State, who lays out the thesis in his new book, The Industries of the Future. In Part 1 of our interview, Ross explains how the technology underlying the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, blockchain technology, will greatly reduce the friction in financial and other transactions. Here he discusses the impact of cognitive robots and the outlook for U.S. companies trying to compete on a global scale. You talked about robotics a lot in your book and you focused for the most part on physical robots.

A sequel about married paranormal investigators, "The Conjuring 2," ascended to the top of the Friday box office, outperforming runners-up "Warcraft" and "Now You See Me 2." The three debuts supplanted last week's box-office leader "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows," which landed in the fourth spot, followed by the Warner Bros. romance "Me Before You." "The Conjuring 2" earned an estimated 16.4 million overnight. The New Line/Warner Bros. film exceeded expectations while on its way to a projected 40 million opening weekend. Though hardly a disappointment, the sequel has a steep climb to reach the tally of its predecessor, which ultimately earned nearly 320 million worldwide. Audiences liked the movie, which stars Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as believers working to exorcise demons from a home in North London. Like its predecessor, the second installment earned an A- from the polling firm CinemaScore.

It's no mystery that big data presents a challenge to privacy. But perhaps more alarming is the emergence of technology that combines facial recognition and data analytics to create a powerful surveillance tool. It's a disturbing development that combines the most worrisome aspects of algorithmic and big data technology with the chilling and dangerous threats inherent in facial recognition. A Chicago tech company is advertising its "predictive video" to anticipate behavior "based on the emotional state and personality style of any person in a video." In Russia, the app FindFace gives users "the power to identify total strangers on the street," according to The Atlantic. Google's new chat app Allo has a "smart reply" feature that apparently analyzes photos from contacts and offers suggested responses to them .

Recently a drone filmed a pair of whales feeding for perhaps the first time. Bryde's whales (named after the Norwegian merchant who built the first whaling stations in South Africa) reach a maximum length of over 54 feet. That's humongous, and should make it easy to observe them. The vastness of the ocean disagrees, and happily hides the whales in their vast tropical water range. Until recently, Bryde's whales had rarely been observed feeding in the wild.

A self-driving John Deere tractor rumbles through Ian Pigott's 2,000-acre farm every week or so to spray fertilizer, guided by satellite imagery and each plot's harvesting history. The 11-ton behemoth, loaded with so many screens it looks like an airplane cockpit, relays the nutrient information to the farmer's computer system. With weather forecasts and data on pesticide use, soil readings, and plant tissue tests pulled by various pieces of software, Pigott can keep tabs on the farm down to the square meter in real time without ever leaving his carpeted office. "This is becoming more standard," says Pigott, who grows a rotation of wheat, oilseed, oats, and barley on his farm in the rolling Hertfordshire countryside an hour north of London. German chemical company Bayer cited the growth in such digitally assisted farming as a key reason for its 62 billion bid for Monsanto, which has become a leading provider of analytics used by growers.

Months after Susan Tully and friends bought a pair of professional video game teams for an estimated 1 million, her four-man "Call of Duty" squad finished its season in 11th out of 12 places. There, exposure and sponsor interest would dissolve. The distress Tully felt as she spent an April afternoon in a small, dark Burbank video studio watching her team attempt to avoid demotion was not the emotion she banked on when she put her money into the burgeoning industry. But upheaval is becoming something of a routine for the investors fueling pro video gaming's rapid rise. China's richest man, Russia's richest man, the U.S.'s fourth-richest man and a string of American multimillionaires all have ties to teams now.