One key buzzword these days is "algorithm," which technically means any computational formula but which has come to mean a formula that predicts our behavior. Amazon and Netflix have algorithms that predict what books a user is likely to want to read or what movies and TV shows he or she is likely to want to watch. Facebook has an algorithm that predicts the news a user is likely to want. Dating sites like Match.com and OkCupid use algorithms to predict with whom we would fall in love. Google, with the most famous algorithm of all, predicts what we want when we type a search term.

As the average age of farmers globally creeps higher and retirement looms, Japan has a solution: robots and driver-less tractors. The Group-of-Seven agriculture ministers meet in Japan's northern prefecture of Niigata this weekend for the first time in seven years to discuss how to meet increasing food demand as aging farmers retire without successors. With the average age of Japanese farmers now 67, Agriculture Minister Hiroshi Moriyama will outline his idea of replacing retiring growers with Japanese-developed autonomous tractors and backpack-carried robots. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has warned that left unchecked, aging farmers could threaten the ability to produce the food the world needs. The average age of growers in developed countries is now about 60, according to the United Nations.

Big data can't deliver on its potential unless enterprises have the right tools to extract insights. Woodside, an Australia-based oil and gas giant, realizes this and is using advanced machine learning technology to leverage its data via predictive analysis. Front and center in the company's toolkit is IBM Watson, a cutting-edge machine learning and natural language processing platform that analyzes vast amounts of unstructured data. According to CIO, Woodside is using a variety of big data tools -- including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apache Spark and Watson -- to improve operational efficiency and predict potential catastrophes at its production facilities. Elsa Jordan, principal data scientist at Woodside, told attendees of the Chief Analytics Officer Forum in Sydney how the company has implemented these data science technologies in recent years and how the Watson engine has become a key component of the organization's big data platform.

One week ago, I asked Facebook's Messenger to send me the weather forecast every morning. It has yet to do so. Messenger is supposed to deliver me the weather through a free service called Poncho, one of the first "chat bots" to live inside Facebook's messaging app behemoth. Instead of checking the weather through an app like Dark Sky or even Poncho's own iPhone app, Poncho's playful Messenger bot is designed to chat with me about the weather like a human being. Poncho's bot has not only failed to send me the weather like I asked, but its bot has so far proven to be the most complicated method of getting the weather imaginable.

Research funded by the National Science Foundation may have found an ingenious solution to poaching: applying game theory and computer science to real-life situations. One of the biggest factors in why there are so many endangered animals today is poaching – a centuries-old problem. The dwindling tiger population is one of the most glaring examples of this. Whether for sport, medicine, pelts or other body parts, poaching remains a huge threat to wildlife. Patrols have long been the most direct form of human intervention in wildlife protection.

See Sea Hunter hunt submarines. Was it really only December that DARPA told us it was building a submarine-hunting drone-ship for the Navy? Well, get ready to be surprised. Just four months after we learned of the existence of the Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel program, or ACTUV, it's already complete -- and afloat. Last week, the Pentagon's mad scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency unveiled the ACTUV prototype in Portland, Ore., christening the vessel Sea Hunter.

In the race to develop self-driving cars, the United States and Europe lead in technology, but China is coming up fast in the outside lane with a regulatory structure that could put it ahead in the popular adoption of autonomous cars on its highways and city streets.

Over the last several decades, the digital revolution has changed nearly every aspect of our lives. The pace of progress in computers has been accelerating, and today, computers and networks are in nearly every industry and home across the world. Many observers first noticed this acceleration with the advent of modern microchips, but as Ray Kurzweil wrote in his book The Singularity Is Near, we can find a number of eerily similar trends in other areas too. According to Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns, technological progress is moving ahead at an exponential rate, especially in information technologies. This means today's best tools will help us build even better tools tomorrow, fueling this acceleration.

Bruce Wilcox is the director of natural language strategy for Kore. The discussion around robots has only increased in the past few years -- especially when things like IBM Watson and Siri are well-known topics for everyday conversation. But beyond the physical capabilities of robots, the bigger question is what robots' minds will be capable of in the future. How will we communicate with a robot's mind? Will it only act in the physical world or will it also be able to act in the Internet world?

A century ago, more than 60,000 tigers roamed the wild. Today, the worldwide estimate has dwindled to around 3,200. Poaching is one of the main drivers of this precipitous drop. Whether killed for skins, medicine or trophy hunting, humans have pushed tigers to near-extinction. The same applies to other large animal species like elephants and rhinoceros that play unique and crucial roles in the ecosystems where they live.