Jamie Metzl is a Senior Fellow for Technology and National Security at the Atlantic Council. After 4 billion years of evolution by one set of rules, our species is about to begin evolving by another. Overlapping and mutually reinforcing revolutions in genetics, information technology, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and other fields are providing the tools that will make it possible to genetically alter our future offspring should we choose to do so. Nearly everybody wants to have cancers cured and terrible diseases eliminated. Most of us want to live longer, healthier and more robust lives. Genetic technologies will make that possible. But the very tools we will use to achieve these goals will also open the door to the selection for and ultimately manipulation of non-disease-related genetic traits -- and with them a new set of evolutionary possibilities.

A theme park in Japan is set to introduce 200 robots as members of staff - a move that bosses claim is just the beginning of a technological revolution in the country's service industry. Amusement park Huis Ten Bosch will open the "robot kingdom" area of the attraction in July. Hideo Sawada, president of the park's operator, said: "Robots will arrive in this kingdom one after another, and the time will come when these technologies will be in use worldwide." The robots will include a chef that can cook different meals on demand. Also among the incoming robot staff is a bartender that can make 10 different cocktails.

Artificial intelligence and autonomous cars are no longer exclusive to science fiction. Google's self-driving cars have driven more than five million kilometres, while some Teslas can drive themselves under certain conditions, and Singapore could see a fully autonomous taxi hit the streets by the end of the year. While all these initiatives are focused on what's outside the car, on equipping and teaching machines to understand and react to the outside world, it's also important to understand the people inside. The solution they created – a camera that can understand when drivers are fatigued or distracted, has helped save thousands of lives. The company traces its origins to a group of roboticists at the Australian National University in 1997.

After being stranded in the Mediterranean for three days, fear had overcome Alou Sango. "I thought that we would all die, because there was nothing left, the petrol had finished," he says of his journey from Libya. Like thousands before him, Sango boarded an overcrowded boat to escape the country's turmoil after being unable to return to his native Mali. But after days at sea the captain lost his way and, without a GPS position to give to the Italian authorities, the 100 or so passengers were losing hope. Their rubber dinghy was finally spotted by a Chinese vessel, which picked up the migrants and took them to Italy, where Sango, now 24, is studying through a Rome-based charity, Sant'Egidio Community.

How do you train a car to drive itself? Let it watch real drivers. Engineers from graphics processing unit (GPU) company Nvidia designed a system that learned how to drive after watching humans drive for a total of 72 hours, as reported by NetworkWorld. The likely conclusion of the system's success is that driverless cars are coming faster than most of us expected. The details of how Nvidia trained two test cars are in a file titled End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk's Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free Cade Metz WIRED "In the rarefied world of AI research, the brightest minds aren't driven by--or at least not only by--the next product cycle or profit margin. They want to make AI better, and making AI better doesn't happen when you keep your latest findings to yourself." ROBOTICS: When a Robot Kills, Is It Murder or Product Liability? Ryan Calo Slate "There is a fundamental similarity between the question of whether a robot can be responsible and the question of whether a robot should enjoy rights...We wouldn't say of a driverless car that it possesses a responsibility to keep its passengers safe, only that it is designed to do so. But somehow, we feel comfortable saying that a driverless car is responsible for an accident."

China has rich talent sources and great potential on AI or artificial intelligence thanks to strong mathematics and IT research as well as local firms' expansion into AI, said LinkedIn in a report yesterday after the AlphaGo's winning in a machine-vs-human Go match. There are totally 250,000 people work and research on AI globally, mainly in the United States, Europe, India and China, according to LinkedIn, the world's largest business social network. Besides the eye-catching AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence is already part of people's lives, from applications used in navigation, Siri and Google Translate to robots deployed in manufacturing and stock-advice software. AI technologies have been evolving steadily alongside the development of the Internet, big data, cloud computing and graphic chips. The United States has the most AI talents with the top employers Google, developer of AlphaGo, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Apple.

DBS Bank of Singapore's recently unveiled Digibank, what it claimed is India's first mobile-only bank. Digibank brings together an entire suite of technology – from biometrics to artificial intelligence (AI) – to customers and is a completely paperless, signatureless and branchless bank. While most banks are offering banking facilities through mobile, DBS has said digibank has some unique features. Here are some of those features. Wherever they are, whatever their need, digibank customers can converse with digibank's AI-powered virtual assistant to get their queries answered or banking transactions performed.

Software services major Infosys has launched an artificial intelligence platform'Mana' that will help clients drive automation and innovation. The company said that the platform, that brings machine learning together with'deep knowledge of an organisation', will enable businesses to continuously reinvent their system landscapes and lower maintenance cost of assets. Coupled with Aikido service offerings, Mana will help clients capture knowledge while delivering new and delightful experiences to their end users, it said. "Over the last 35 years, Infosys has maintained, operated and managed systems with global clients across every industry. Building on this deep experience, Infosys has recognised the need to bring artificial intelligence to the enterprise in a meaningful and purposeful way," Infosys CEO and Managing Director Vishal Sikka said at Infosys Confluence 2016.

In an Estimation problem, looking at a data to derive any inference about a'characteristic' of a Population, this approach mainly uses a sample taken at'random' from a collection of these similar items. An'estimate' of that characteristic (also known as a parameter) of the collection (or Universe, Population), is computed from that sample. This estimate is then tested to find out how close it might be to the original parameter, which is usually unknown. Graphical methods such EDA (Exploratory Data Analysis) are also used to study and guess the nature of the characteristic in the population, based on the data from the sample. Sampling is repeated or replicated several times, to reduce the error in the estimate.