If you live in a connected home, you've likely spent a great deal of time customizing it for your needs and preferences. That's because the smart home is actually rather dumb, until you've invested some time teaching it: While some smart-home components--such as the Nest thermostat--are capable of learning on their own, there are no connected-home hubs that do. The Klug Home promises to change that. The Klug Home, from Singapore-based Intraix, is a 79 smart hub that plugs into one of your router's USB ports. It's available for preorder on Indiegogo, with delivery expected in October 2016.

In a bid to push forward with plans for self-driving cars, Alphabet's Google has teamed up with Ford and Uber to form a coalition to push for federal action. Sweden-based Volvo, which is owned by China's ZhejiangGeely Holding Group, and Uber rival Lyft also arepart of the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets. The group said in a statement it will'work with lawmakers, regulators and the public to realise the safety and societal benefits of self-driving vehicles.' In a bid to push forward with plans for self-driving cars, Alphabet's Google has teamed up with Ford and Uber to form a coalition to push for federal action. Sweden-based Volvo, which is owned by China's Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, and Uber rival Lyft also are part of the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets The coalition said David Strickland will be the coalition's counseland spokesman.

Amy Ingram, the artificial intelligence personal assistant from startup X.ai, sounds remarkably like a real person. The company designed her to take on the mundane tasks of scheduling meetings and e-mailing about appointments. If a bot had access to your calendar and was cc-ed on correspondence, why couldn't it do the work for you? After she made her debut in 2014, users praised her "humanlike tone" and "eloquent manners." But what most people don't realize about this artificial intelligence is that it isn't totally artificial: Behind almost every e-mail is an actual human--someone like 24-year-old Willie Calvin. Calvin, who worked as an AI trainer for X.ai before he said he quit in October, was part of the reason Amy never tripped up, sending the sort of blind response that reveals she's a bot.

Startup Zero Zero Robotics just took the wraps off its eye in the sky, the Hover Camera. The company hasn't set a price but expects the lightweight drone (it weighs in at 240 grams) to cost under US 600. The flying camera is a relatively new type of gadget. It all started about a year ago, when startup Lily Camera came out of stealth with its 500 to 1000 camera drone and argued that it wasn't so much a drone as a simple-to-use flying camera. This March, drone-maker DJI introduced the Phantom 4, with autonomous flying and tracking features that essentially make it that company's first flying camera at 1400.

Soon, software will know how you feel--and will use that data to sell you things. The gig economy will go global (but it's not Uber-take-all). The tech industry will finally be inclusive. AI will achieve something like common sense, and it will be open source too. But that future won't build itself. Actual people (at least for now) have to make these things happen, and they aren't the C-suite hotshots you always hear about. The 25 people in these pages are the unsung creative, technical, and social visionaries working to bring the incredible world of tomorrow to you today. Get to know them now. Welcome to our second annual Next List. Surveillance is about to get much harder for overly snoopy governments. In November 2014 the Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp made a big change to its Android app: It encrypted messages so that even Facebook can't descramble them, no matter how many court orders the company receives. But the crypto software wasn't written by a Facebook employee.

Online shopping giant Rakuten Inc. is venturing into the uncharted territory of drone delivery, enabling golfers to order snacks, beverages and golf equipment while playing a round. Rakuten on Monday announced the nation's first drone delivery service, a monthlong experiment from May 9 at Camel Golf Resort in Chiba Prefecture. Rakuten will then consider whether to continue and expand the service based on the results. "We decided to provide a delivery service in golf parks, since there are regulations that restrict drones from flying over crowded areas such as (urban) yards and verandas," said a Rakuten spokeswoman. A smartphone Android application will be used by golfers to have food, drink and equipment delivered to fixed pickup points.

Diffbot, an artificial intelligence company that helps clients extract and combine data from multiple Web sources, announced today it raised 10 million from investors including Tencent and Felicis Ventures to expand its "knowledge-as-a-service" offerings to businesses and consumer apps. The Palo Alto, CA-based startup, founded in 2009, still has a tiny staff of 14. But Diffbot's ambition is huge: to catalog trillions of facts across the Web--many of them drawn from page elements such as comment forums, which can't be mined by traditional search engines. The startup says it has made a significant start on that goal, having indexed 1.2 billion entities such as people, products, and places since the middle of last year. Its Global Index also encompasses 10 to 20 times that number of facts, says Diffbot founder and CEO Mike Tung.

AlphaGo, Google's artificially intelligent computer program, beat a professional human Go player last October in 4 out of 5 matches. Go is a very complex board game to master and has been around since the 1000s. The game requires the players to think ahead a few moves and consider what the opponent might or might not do. Tasks that involve a lot of decision-making or snap decisions have typically been difficult for computers to achieve. AlphaGo is helping to break that barrier.

Poaching is one of the greatest threats in the conservation of wildlife, and even patrol rangers' extreme efforts are not enough to completely fend off poachers, especially in very large protected areas. "In most parks, ranger patrols are poorly planned, reactive rather than pro-active, and habitual," said Fei Fang, a Ph.D. candidate in the computer science department at the University of Southern California, in a statement. With these in mind, researchers, in collaboration with the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office, have developed a new Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based application employing game theory to efficiently map out patrol routes and areas. According to the press release of National Science Foundation, game theory uses mathematical and computer models of conflict and cooperation between rational decision-makers to predict the behavior of adversaries and plan optimal approaches for containment. The application, dubbed "Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security" or PAWS, uses mathematical models to effectively analyze data from previous patrols and evidence of poaching.

Jia Yeuting may be a relative unknown in the rarefied world of Silicon Valley but the billionaire Chinese businessman in charge of the conglomerate LeEco -- which is also funding Faraday Future -- is not afraid to ruffle some pretty big feathers, taking aim at both Apple and Tesla in his first interviews with Western media. Jia called Apple "outdated," claiming the reason for Apple's slowing growth in the key Chinese market was down to a lack of innovation from the iPhone maker, pointing to the launch of the iPhone SE as an example. "From an industry insider's perspective, this is a product with a very low level of technology," Jia told CNBC. "We think this is something they just shouldn't have done." Not content with take aim at Apple, Jia, who last week launched LeEco's first self-driving car, also took aim at Tesla, saying his company would eclipse Elon Musk's electric vehicle efforts.