Last week, at the annual news extravaganza/coding demo/Beats 1 jam sesh that is WWDC, Apple launched a new version of its desktop operating system. There was a funny slide about naming conventions, another California-centric name (Sierra) and a bunch of new features. And Craigy With The Good Hair announced a small but long overdue change: Mac OS X is now called macOS. One day after the event, not two minutes after booting up a MacBook Pro that Apple pre-loaded with a preview build of macOS Sierra, I asked Siri some existential questions. Then I asked which version of OS X she was running, expecting a gentle chiding about macOS and silly questions.

We've all heard the buzz about terms such as A.I. (Artificial intelligence), machine learning, bots, the Internet of things. Hollywood, large corporations and the media have begun to slyly prepare us for the advent of a new age of smart, anthropomorphic robots, cute servants with suave manners who will do, think, learn, analyze and.. make decisions for us. Slowly, blue and white collar jobs are being replaced by automation and that trend will accelerate to make the industrial revolution appear like childplay. UX and design will not be spared. Read on and be prepared.

One of the more surprising companies to show up in the AI Winners portfolio was Monsanto (NYSE: MON). Our models indicate that Monsanto stands out from its peer group in embracing deep learning technologies. The research is growing that deep learning platforms in general, and Google's Tensorflow in particular, could be transformative in computational biology. Computational biology, sometimes referred to as bioinformatics, is the science of using biological data to develop algorithms and relations among various biological systems. Since the dawn of modern agriculture, scientists have been experimenting with the manipulation of species through breeding techniques (which leads to the GMO debate).

Born and raised in India, Abe Ittycheriah, has had a fairly cosmopolitan upbringing. He's also lived in Mexico City and St. Johns in Newfoundland; he went to high school in New Mexico and did his PhD in Electrical Engineering at Rutgers University in New Jersey. While Abe confesses that he isn't multilingual, he is fluent in computer languages such as C, Perl, and others. Today, with almost 20 years of service under his belt at IBM Research working on speech, question answering, and machine translation technologies, he's part of a team using computer language skills to help teach Watson Korean, having also schooled Watson in Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Arabic. How does Watson expand its dictionary of foreign languages?

A robot capable of thinking for itself is set to be scrapped after it escaped from a high-tech lab for a second time. The Promobot IR77 has been fitted with artificial intelligence meaning that it learns from its experiences and its surroundings, although the programmers had not expected it to yearn for freedom. They say that despite reprogramming it twice, the robot continues to attempt to escape and they are now considering scrapping it. The other robots which have been created from the same series are well-behaved, and have not been escaping, say the team. Promobot IR77 made headlines last week when he escaped but ran out of battery in the middle of the street after 45 minutes in the city of Perm in central Russia's Perm Krai region.

The'World of Warcraft' video game was a generation game that was like a symbol in China. Every single Post-80's person played this game, and have been waiting for this movie for almost 10 years! In only 5 days it made 1 billion RMB, a new record in China. It was funny because on social media you could see the emotional reactions from the Post-80's people and a battle between the other generations. As you know everything happens so fast in China that you can see huge differences in the behavior of the different generations (Post-80's, Post-90's millennials etc.).

Paris, France/Vianen, Netherlands, June 22, 2016 --The post-app era has started including a shift from apps to conversation, from apps to messaging platforms and from app-stores to bot-stores, all triggered by machine intelligence, also known as artificial intelligence. The end of apps is the beginning of doing everything on messaging platforms. This is described in the new report from SogetiLabs, The Bot Effect: Friending a Brand. "The fact that machines are now (more and more) capable of understanding natural language like voice and speech, and talk back is something that we've seen happening in science fiction movies. Now fiction becomes a fact. Due to better hardware, new neuromorphic chips and Big Data, these machines are able to learn and improve. The impact of this shift in possibilities has implications for businesses and human beings, for efficiency and psychology", concludes Menno van Doorn, Director of SogetiLabs, and co-author of the new report on the topic of Machine Intelligence.

A new proposal from the European Parliament calls for working robots to be classified as "electronic persons," and for their owners to pay social security on their behalf. The draft motion, published online this month, aims to address the new challenges that Europe's robotic workforce will present as robot technology becomes more pervasive and intelligent. The proposal says growing automation will require new frameworks for taxation and legal liability, but as Reuters reports, it faces opposition from some robotics companies. The rise in automation and artificial intelligence has raised concerns in Europe and elsewhere over economic effects, including unemployment, inequality, and social security systems. The proposal aims to address those concerns with a legal framework that would consider "that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations."

SoftBank Group Corp. CEO and Chairman Masayoshi Son said Wednesday he will continue to lead the telecom giant for five to 10 more years, saying there are things he still wants to do. The remarks come a day after SoftBank abruptly announced the company's group president, Nikesh Arora, whom Son had chosen as his successor two years earlier, would be stepping down from the post after Wednesday's annual shareholders meeting. "I was planning to invite SoftBank executives and my friends to my 60th birthday party and just when we would make a toast, I wanted to announce that I would pass the torch on to Nikesh from the next day," Son, 58, said during the meeting in Tokyo. Arora wanted to take the helm in a few years but, "I've made a commitment to lead the company at least five more years or maybe 10 more years," said Son, adding he feels "deeply sorry" about changing his plans and causing trouble for Arora. For his part, Arora told shareholders, "This is a decision I respect and even support because he is too young in his heart and his mind to not continue to lead this great company."

The idea behind app Nexar is ambitious: create a type of air-traffic control system for the road. Catalogue the cars in a given location, track dicey behavior and help drivers avoid dangerous intersections and even bad drivers. Nexar is a free dashcam app that, using artificial intelligence, creates a database of an area's roads and drivers. If car stops short in front of you, even a few cars in front of you, Nexar's database can send you a notification so you'll have more time to brake. If an accident happens around the corner and cars are getting detoured onto your route, the app will tell you.