A large yet tidy refugee camp rises from the desert near the Syrian-Jordanian border. Most people wouldn't think of this as a hub of innovation, but nevertheless, a science and technology show has arrived with cameras and microphones. They're interviewing officials from UNICEF who describe the techniques they developed to safely remove sewage from the camp. Another week, and the cameras arrive in Stockholm to watch a new type of drone make its way through a dark tunnel. The show in question is 4Tech, a program on the BBC Arabic that since 2011 has attracted viewers in a market dominated by glitzy Arab versions of reality shows like "The Voice" and "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire."

In 1955, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story about an experiment in "electronic democracy," in which a single citizen, selected to represent an entire population, responded to questions generated by a computer named Multivac. The machine took this data and calculated the results of an election that therefore never needed to happen. Asimov's story was set in Bloomington, Indiana, but today an approximation of Multivac is being built in China. For any authoritarian regime, "there is a basic problem for the center of figuring out what's going on at lower levels and across society," says Deborah Seligsohn, a political scientist and China expert at Villanova University in Philadelphia. How do you effectively govern a country that's home to one in five people on the planet, with an increasingly complex economy and society, if you don't allow public debate, civil activism, and electoral feedback?

Elon Musk says he is unable to work proper hours, even if his habits are causing him serious damage in his personal life. The Tesla boss has been called on by people including Arianna Huffington, who said that he needed to adopt a healthier work-life balance. But he said such a decision was not an option. The comments came after Mr Musk conducted a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times in which he detailed the stress of running his company and the ways it was ruining his personal life. He broke down as he described not celebrating his own birthday and nearly missing his brother's wedding.

The Bank of England has weighed into a debate on the looming impact of AI on our lives, most pertinently the jobs market, by calling for a skills revolution to prevent sections of society from becoming'technologically unemployed'. The bank's chief economist, Andy Haldane, issued his call to action with a prediction that the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution will be of a'much greater scale' than the industrial revolution Britain underwent in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Haldane fears that a failure to adapt to these changes in good time could augur a period of rising inequality, social tension and a'hollowing out' of employment, and argues for new training to be put into place now to prevent such an eventuality from coming to pass. Speaking to the BBC's Today programme, Haldane said: "This is the dark side of technological revolutions and that dark-side has always been there. "That hollowing out is going to be potentially on a much greater scale in the future, when we have machines both thinking and doing - replacing both the cognitive and the technical skills of humans." Haldane isn't entirely pessimistic, however, believing that a new class of jobs could emerge to compensate for those lost. He concedes that any attempt to quantify this counter shift is currently lost in the realms of speculation. He added: "What we can I think say with some confidence, however, is that given that the scale of job loss displacement it is likely to be at least as large as that of the first three industrial revolutions.

Wait a minute, cats already rule the'interwebs'. Wouldn't handing the growing Internet of Things over to them be the end of civilisation as we know it? If you have been keeping an eye on this radical development appearing on the pet community radar. You will probably agree that a cat would prefer a long nap. Let's find out why! We can't give you an Internet of Things tutorial, but we can give you an idea of what's coming your way. We found an Internet of Things definition that helps us show the IoT as it affects pet owners, and their fur families.

Sessions are subject to change. Day & Time: Wednesday, 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM, Grand Oaks A&B Presenter: Jim Breen, Doug Foster Need to get your team trained on InterSystems products quickly? Attend this session to learn how you can get your employees up to speed and add value to your company – fast! Hear how other InterSystems' clients have created successful teams using Learning Services content as one piece of the puzzle, and how you can too! Takeaway: InterSystems Learning Services can help me quickly onboard new employees and grow the skill sets of existing employees. Day & Time: Monday, 2:00 PM – 2:45 PM, Grand Oaks E&F Tuesday, 2:00 PM – 2:45 PM, Grand Oaks C&D Presenter: Andreas Dieckow This session provides an overview of what it takes to move an existing Caché or Ensemble application to InterSystems IRIS Data Platform. You will learn that migration is not urgent (unless you want to take advantage of new features in InterSystems IRIS) but that it is often less complex than you might expect.

Just as the kaleidoscopic dramas of Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina, the pseudo-non-fiction murk of Alan Moore's comic From Hell and the domestic pragmatism of Jamie Oliver's 15 Minute Meals meet under the fat banner of prose, so the body of video games becomes an ever broader church. It is impossible to enforce orthodoxy in a medium where shifting technology defines the canvas. The artform now embraces work from a dizzying spectrum. A challenging time, then, for the Victoria and Albert Museum to stage its first major video game exhibition. Rather than reach into the primordial digital soup of the 1950s, or the gambling-adjacent squalor of the Pac-Man and Space Invaders arcade era, the V&A's exhibition, titled Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt, begins in the mid-2000s. This was the moment at which technological advances began to alter dramatically the way in which games were designed, made and played.

STOCKHOLM--Artificial intelligence (AI) can kick butt in games such as Pong and Space Invaders, but it comes off like a common n00b when playing Ms. Pac-Man (pictured). Now, by making AI play six classic arcade games, researchers are closer to figuring out why thinking machines excel at some games and stink at others, they reported last month at the International Conference on Machine Learning here. The team developed a new system for visualizing how Atari-playing AIs operate. They chose Atari because the games are relatively simple and a frequent focus for researchers developing "reinforcement learning" algorithms, AIs that learn behaviors through trial and error. An AI "sees" the screen (as an input of ones and zeroes) and at first randomly responds with commands for "left," "right," "fire," and so on, slowly shaping its strategy as it receives points for certain actions.

The year 2018 has seen a good influx of innovative medical devices. Artificial intelligence (AI) serves as a critical component in most of these novel devices. FDA has defined artificial intelligence as: "A device or a product that can imitate intelligent behavior or mimics human learning and reasoning. Artificial Intelligence includes machine learning, neural networks, and natural language processing. Some terms used to describe artificial intelligence include: computer-aided detection/diagnosis, statistical learning, deep learning, or smart algorithms."

The machine works out a solution from the data collected from a series of patterns or algorithms. AI – sometimes called machine intelligence – appears to be gaining momentum and is a term now used for a collection of technologies and applications, such as scan interpretation and laboratory results reading. In the world of technology, this concept seems like a shiny, new thing. It has, however, been with us in healthcare for some time. The main functions of AI in healthcare are in learning situations, planning simulations, problem-solving and even speech recognition.