Prior to Spain's King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella financing Columbus' voyage to discover the New World, the Strait of Gibraltar was flanked by two pillars that bore the warning non plus ultra or, "Nothing further beyond," serving as a warning to Mediterranean sailors and navigators to go no further. However, Ferdinand and Isabella's grandson, Charles V, essentially reversed this line of thinking with his own motto, plus ultra, which translates to "Further beyond" or "limitless." I believe the American economy will change more in the next 10 years than it has in the 500 years since Charles V colonized the Americas. Transformative technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, the internet of things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, virtual reality, digital traceability and blockchain will fundamentally change how we consume goods and services. These new market tools will create limitless opportunity, but they'll also create new challenges.

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's Marks & Spencer has signed a strategic partnership deal with Microsoft to test the integration of artificial intelligence technologies into the retailer's stores and operations, it said on Thursday.

Ronald Shrewsbery II used to be the Robot Doctor. Now he's known by the more bureaucratic-sounding title "WCM (World Class Manufacturing) Electrical Technical Specialist," but he still doctors the robots. There are a thousand of these machines inside Ohio's Toledo Assembly Complex, a 312-acre manufacturing leviathan dedicated to producing Jeeps. The Toledo Assembly Complex is one of the most heavily automated car factories in the United States. It can extrude 500 cars in a shift, far more than the Cove, the old Jeep plant that was shut down in 2006. And the machines make the work easier. There used to be a lot more lifting, more pushing.

SAN MATEO, CA and COLUMBIA, SC – June 21, 2018 – SIOS Technology Corp., the industry pioneer in the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to help enterprises lower costs and ensure resilience of their critical information technology infrastructures, today announced the opening of the SIOS R&D facility at the M. Bert Storey Engineering and Innovation Center at the University of South Carolina's College of Engineering and Computing in Columbia. The new facility will serve as the SIOS R&D center for product development and is strategically located at the University for the purpose of advancing collaborative research in AI and machine learning through collaboration with students and faculty. With the new R&D facility located on-campus, students will have an opportunity to work with the latest AI technologies on projects addressing real-world problems alongside senior research engineers at SIOS. In turn, SIOS has the unique opportunity to participate deeply in a vibrant and rich academic community, tapping into academic programs, intern programs, Capstone projects, and helping to design meaningful research projects. To support the fostering of leading-edge research in AI, SIOS has also awarded the University a $475,000 grant for the use of its SIOS iQ software.

With each passing year, our sector continues to demonstrate its evolving approach to fighting cyber threats, as cyber crime itself continues to evolve. As both business and government move forward with digital transformation initiatives to improve processes and efficiency, the overall security attack surface continues to expand with more potential points of access for criminals to exploit. However, our industry is tackling these challenges head-on, with numerous innovative solutions continuing to come to market. So, what have been the key trends of 2018 thus far? From attending trade shows, to speaking to customers, partners, analysts and the media, several examples have come to the forefront.

Artificial intelligence with machine learning is arguably the most significant of modern analytics techniques being exploited to extract value from the growing mass of modern utility data. A key use case is around asset management and maintenance, which E.ON north German regional grid operator subsidiary Schleswig-Holstein Netz AG has implemented on its medium-voltage grid. After nine months of use, the results, which by extension serve as a power failure warning indicator, have apparently even astonished the company. "The probability that we can predict a defect in the power grid has increased by a factor of two to three," says Thomas König, who is responsible for E.ON's German grid business. "And our customers benefit as well because possible sources of error that we identify in advance reduce the number of faults and make our grid more stable."

At the developer's conference of Microsoft, the CEO of the company Satya Nadella announced a five year'Artificial Intelligence for Accessibility' project of $25 million to utilize the full potential of AI for the betterment of the lives of people with disabilities. The project is for the researchers, the NGOs, and developers. During the conference, Satya Nadella said, "It is important for us to help more people and it's been a passion of mine to help people suffering from disabilities like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and autism. The AI for accessibility will provide technologies and platform for the developers to use AI solutions to help billions of people". Across the world, 1 out of 10 people with the disabilities has access to assistive technologies.

The map of Damascus in the first Assassin's Creed was 0.13km². Since then, the map in each successive game has been bigger than the one before. Based on that history, we can expect the map for the upcoming AC: Odyssey to be bigger than last year's brilliant AC: Origins. Dimitras Galatas put together a short video comparing maps from several of the Assassin's Creed games. The map of Greece for Odyssey is shown at 130km², a substantial increase over the tiny map of Damascus and more than 2.5 times as large as AC: Origin's 80km² map of Egypt.

A woman in Copenhagen hears a loud crash in the next room and rushes in to discover her father sprawled on the floor, unresponsive. She quickly calls Denmark's health-emergency hotline, where a person answers the phone--but a computer is eavesdropping. As the operator runs through a series of questions--the patient's age, physical condition, what he was doing when he fell--the computer quickly determines the man's heart has stopped and issues an alert. "Those human dispatchers have an amazingly hard job," says Andreas Cleve Lohmann, co-founder of Corti SA, a Danish artificial intelligence software house that created the program. "This software can help them save lives."

Scientists have successfully created super pigs resistant to a killer virus which costs the worldwide farming industry billions per year. Researchers at the Roslin Institute, which cloned Dolly the Sheep, used gene-editing to protect pigs from a respiratory condition. They have now proven the pigs do not become ill when infected with the virus. The breakthrough raises fears over'Frankenstein food', with the team stating last year that they could produce GM bacon, sausages and pork within a decade. But researchers say it will still be'several years before we're eating bacon sandwiches' from the genetically modified pigs.