Today in Switzerland, the 135 members of the Human Brain Project gathered to kick off the 10 year global project that will give us a deeper and more meaningful understanding of how the human brain operates. This project is considered the most advanced neuroscience project in the world. The Human Brain Project's is comprised of 130 research institutions throughout Europe and coordinated through the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EFPL). In the launch of the project, neuroscientists, doctors, computer scientists, and roboticists will begin to refine the project in across six research platforms including neuroinformatics, brain simulation, high-performance computing, medical informatics, neuromorphic computing and neurorobotics, each composed of technological tools and methods to ensure the project's objectives will be met. The scientists, through their research institutions, will set up and test the platforms over the next 30 months and in 2016, these platforms should be ready for testing by the Human Brain Project scientists and researchers from around the world.

For decades, increased automation has led to greater productivity, displacing some classes of jobs, but creating whole new industries. Innovations like robots in factories, ATM machines and self checkouts in stores have all met with some grumbling, but have also lowered prices while providing more convenience. Generally,the chattering classes have taken it in stride. After all, when poorly educated workers' jobs are being replaced, they can be trained to do higher level work. The attitude has basically been, "when computers can replace human thinking and intuition, then we'll worry about it."

This article is by Sean Varah, founder and chief executive of MotionDSP, a company that makes advanced image processing and video analytics software. Last month the Federal Aviation Administration made a decision that marks a significant step for the commercial drone industry, permitting six movie and television production companies the right to use drones. This is the first time the FAA has allowed this type of industry exemption from the rules that prohibit drones from flying in U.S. airspace. Despite Congress' request that it develop standards in support of safe drone use by September 2015, and despite corporate America's campaigning for drone operations, the FAA has been dragging its feet. Thanks to Hollywood and the broader entertainment industry, a door has been opened for commercial drones.

Ulf Zetterberg, CEO of Seal Software – the contract discovery and analytics start-up that was founded in Europe in 2010, before Ulf relocated the company's top brass to Silicon Valley – declares himself mystified by the sheer volume of paper-based communication he receives on a daily basis in the States. "Every week, a small bible's worth of paper goes into my recycling bin," he told me last week. "Why do companies still feel the need to communicate in this way?" In today's business environment, a company that is unable to manage its affairs electronically without resorting to a paper trail can come across as disorganised and lacking faith in its own technology. This, in fact, is one of the major pain points that Seal Software was founded to solve.

In the last decade, technology has made it cheaper and easier to start new businesses, finance them, realize operational efficiencies and scale geographically. It has also empowered customers and employees through social media, which has created opportunities for competitors. While these changes have been transformative, coming technology advances in the areas of smart robotics, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and Big Data ("AI Revolution") will metamorphose how businesses are staffed, operated and managed. Businesses of the future will look a lot different than the businesses of today. Most will be staffed by some combination of smart robots, smart machines and people.

TaylorMade, an Adidas subsidiary, has three titanium drivers in its 300 Series, the most popular line with professional golfers. But the company doesn't know which $499 club will score best with plain old duffers. To find out, TaylorMade is turning to a fortune-teller: demand management software. Businesses have spent billions in the past few years automating their supply chains. Now many are focusing on the other end of the spectrum: demand.It poses a much tougher challenge and, potentially, a far richer payoff.

If you want a notion of how easy it would be for terrorists to slip a dirty nuke, a canister of nerve gas or a bundt cake of C4 through a container port, consider this statistic from the Brookings Institution in Washington: If the newly renamed U.S. Customs & Border Protection agency were to inspect all incoming containers, it would need to spend $50 billion a year. The Customs inspection budget is $2.3 billion. Currently, American authorities physically search only 2% of them. There's no reason to think things are too different elsewhere. "You ought to be damn afraid," says Thomas Sheets, chairman of the National Cargo Security Council trade group in the U.S. and director of corporate security services at Palo Alto, California-based CNF, a logistics company.

The robots are on the move–leaping, scrambling, rolling, flying, climbing. They are figuring out how to get here on their own. They come to help us, protect us, amuse us–and some even do floors. Since Czech playwright Karel Capek popularized the term ("robota" means "forced labor" in Czech) in 1921, we have imagined what robots could do. But reality fell short of our plans: Honda Motor trotted out its Asimo in 2000, but for now it's been relegated to temping as a receptionist at Honda and doing eight shows a week at Disneyland.

This is the motto of Euklid, the fintech startup which aims to disrupt the investment banking arena leveraging the potential of the blockchain and artificial intelligence. Thanks to a sound technical background of its Rome, Italy-based team led by CEO & Algo-Trader Antonio Simeone, Algo-Trader Franco Grassi, CTO Francesco Di Leva and lead programmer Mario Giancola, Euklid is pioonering a platform that allows people to make investments based on sophisticated algos, which analyze financial markets with no human analysis. In details, the technology combines elements of bio-computing, soft computing and evolutionary computation to offer a Long-Short Equity Fund, which aims to outperform the market while maintaining a low level of risk thanks to a diversified portfolio including over 70 among the most liquid assets between indexes and stocks. It also performs algo-trading on cryptoassets including Bitcoin and Ethereum. Simeone told me that indexes and stocks have seen a 10% increase yoy (max drawdown 1.5%) while Bitcoin have seen a massive growth (109% yoy).

Czech playwright Karel Capek coined the term'robot' in post-WWI 1920 in his play R.U.R. (for Rossum's Universal Robots) that was first performed in Prague in 1921. It was taken from the Czech word'robota' meaning work, to describe humanoid androids designed for menial and repetitive labor. In the play, docile mechanical creatures with human characteristics were produced in Rossum's factory, until one scientist gave them emotions and turned them into killing machines that took over the world.