Star Trek turned 50 in 2016. In its half-century of existence -- on TV, on the big screen, and in the worldwide community of its fans -- Star Trek has become an integral part of our everyday lives. Even casual viewers know the pointed ears, the Vulcan salute, and the meaning of "beam me up, Scotty." Yet, Star Trek does not owe its enduring popularity and its place in our collective imagination to its aliens or to its technological speculations. What makes it so unique, and so exciting, is its radical optimism about humanity's future as a society: in other words, utopia.

AI is entering Financial Services by automating processes, identifying patterns by crunching Big Data, and interacting with humans through voice. What areas of Financial Services will NOT be affected, and how will consumers buy banking and insurance services in the future? Artificial Intelligence surrounds us so seamlessly interwoven in our daily lives that we hardly pause to contemplate it during the day. Most of us carry around in our pockets our very own artificial intelligence assistants: iPhone s personal servants "Siri", Windows' "Cortana" and Android's "Google Now". All assistants communicate with us through interpreting and "understanding" natural language.

Might be used in some typical heavy applications we might not even know about. The first impression when a layman gets to hear about machine learning. You are surrounded by the things that consist of machine learning. The predominant tech companies are using it massively, understanding the user like never before. Recently there has been excitement at its peak regarding the launch of Netflix in India.

The definition of civility typically revolves around the rules, mores and assumptions for how we deal with each other. The previous talks in this series have focused on that kind of civility in a variety of human activities including sports, education, business and law enforcement. But I'm going to be talking about something that is not human--the increasingly clever computing technology that surrounds us. And how we think about, relate to and interact with this technology. For the title of this talk, I chose the most evocative term, artificial intelligence, or AI for short. It was "cooked up," as its author the mathematician John McCarthy once told me, for a grant proposal he wrote in 1955. He was seeking funds for a conference the following summer at Dartmouth College. It was a brainy marketing pitch.

One of these commercials for Clorets mints is being billed as the first campaign from McCann Erickson Japan's new AI creative director. The other is the work of a human. One is about a flying dog. The other features a barefoot calligrapher. Mondelez brand Clorets Mint Tab is asking the Japanese public to vote on which ad is more effective, without telling people which one is the product of artificial intelligence.

We are about to see a black hole for the first time ever, scientists hope. A team of scientists are hope to use a computer algorithm and a range of equipment to take the first ever picture of a black hole's event horizon next year. The picture will be taken by a project called Event Horizon Telescope – a network of nine radio telescopes placed all around the world. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station.

OSAKA – Omron Corp. has developed a new in-vehicle sensor for monitoring drivers from real-time video and pictures. The Osaka-based automated control equipment maker aims to put the sensor into use in 2019 or 2020. The sensor, which draws on artificial intelligence, uses a camera to monitor the driver's condition. In the event of a sudden change, the sensor will sound an alarm or stop the automobile safely. The new sensor will support autonomous driving technology by offering a new method for managing a vehicle when changing driving mode from autonomous to manual safely.

By now, every business knows it has to be smart in its online strategy. Gone are the vanity metrics of yesteryear, with numbers of downloads, visitors, and the like. This startup based in Singapore and India is using AI to automate a lot of what goes into generating sales leads and acting on them fast. More and more sophisticated tools are coming into the market to help with tracking what's actionable that really matters to the business. Conversion rate optimization, funnel analysis, real time heat maps, abandoned cart recovery, sales lead generation – there are tech tools for all that and more.

Scientists at Microsoft Research and their colleagues are developing an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can tell stories based on photos. The aim is not just to explain what items are in the picture, but also what appears to be happening and how it might potentially make a person feel, US-based website livescience.com For example, if a person is shown a picture of a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a long, white dress, instead of saying, "This is a bride and groom," he or she might say, "My friends got married. They look really happy; it was a beautiful wedding." "The goal is to help give AIs more human-like intelligence, to help it understand things on a more abstract level and what it means to be fun or creepy or weird or interesting," Margaret Mitchell, study senior author said.

Loyal readers will recall that last spring we conspired with artificial intelligence expert Randal Olsen to develop the ultimate U.S. road trip. The map Olson came up with -- he did all the work, really -- optimized the best way to drive by car to 50 major U.S. landmarks, using machine learning algorithms and Google Maps. We're happy to report that Olsen is back at it, just in time for summer road tripping. By leveraging the power of genetic algorithms and other artificial intelligence technology, Olsen's optimized loop route will get you across the country and back in a little over eight days -- starting in Concord, New Hampshire, and dropping you back in Boston, Mass. How did Olsen generate his road trip map?