Amazon is exploring the use of giant airships to serve as mobile, flying warehouses that could help the online retail giant deliver more of its goods by drone. You might already be familiar with Amazon's drone delivery service, which recently received a demo in Britain for the first time. But the idea for a fleet of large airships, disclosed in filings to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, expand on those ambitions dramatically. Imagine you're at a baseball game and wanted to buy a meal or a jersey without ever leaving your seat. The system Amazon describes would allow you to place an order and receive the item within minutes.

Some commentators said it was just a publicity stunt. But the notion began to seem less far-fetched when Google revealed its own drone-based delivery effort in 2014, something it calls Project Wing. And in the early months of 2016, DHL actually integrated drones into its logistics network, albeit in an extremely limited way--delivering packages to a single mountaintop in Germany that is difficult to access by car in winter. "It started to get momentum after serious players came in," says Parimal Kopardekar, NASA's senior engineer for air transportation systems, who has been researching ways to work these buzzing little contraptions into an air traffic control system created for full-size aircraft. "We need to accommodate drones."

Sami Haddadin once attached a knife to a robot manipulator and programmed it to impale his arm. He was demonstrating how a new force-sensing control scheme he designed was able to detect the contact and instantly stop the robot, as it did. Now Haddadin wants to make that same kind of safety feature, which has long been limited to highly sophisticated and expensive systems, affordable to anyone using robots around people. Sometime in 2017, his Munich-based startup, Franka Emika, will start shipping a rather remarkable robotic arm. It's designed to be easy to set up and program, which is nice.

It's the time to reflect and to look forward, to determine new goals – to consult a horoscope for some, to check industry-trend forecasts for others. Among the mega trends that were discussed regarding the Internet of Things, big data, virtual and augmented reality technology, self-driving cars, drones, robotics, nanotechnology, biotech, and online privacy – the most interesting topic for us was how these technologies could affect the hospitality industry and customer service, in particular. Van Hooijdonks predicts that ten years from now, we won't be able to tell the difference between a human and a robot – artificial intelligence will start to play a more "personal role." The ability to process huge amounts of data and solve increasingly complex problems has started to open the doors for artificial intelligence to play a more visible and meaningful role in all of our lives. For the last couple of years, leaders in the travel and hospitality industry have discussed its implementation in the sector and possible applications to enhance and innovate customer service.

Being a scientist can be like willingly entering into a Roman gladiatorial contest. The hours are long, there's a rank smell of indentured servitude, and at any minute your colleagues may attempt to eviscerate you for the pleasure of the crowds. A lot of the time we can look beyond these challenges because we have an innate need to explore our curiosity. Or perhaps (shockingly) because we feel that a life spent in pursuit of knowledge is still a noble and useful thing. At other times I suspect we only stick around because we're playing the real-world equivalent of a video game--conditioned to crave the chemical release from a momentary discovery, or a satisfactory fitting of a curve to data points.

Life in the UK will undergo "radical" change in the 2020s due to Brexit, population changes and jobs being taken by robots, a think tank has predicted. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said there would be a Brexit "aftershock" and that the UK's exit from the EU would be "the firing gun on a decade of disruption". It identified wide-ranging factors that would "reshape how we live and work". The government has promised to "forge a new role" for the UK in the world. In its report, the IPPR, a centre-left think tank, said Brexit would be one of the major "disruptive forces" in the years ahead, saying the vote had delivered a "profound shock" to the UK's political and economic order which was likely to set the country on a path of permanently lower growth and living standards.

ESP, AI or something else? Tesla's Autopilot saw this accident coming and avoided it Like many other driver assists, Tesla's Autopilot feature bounces radar off the road to see what's happening two cars ahead. That's information a human driver wouldn't have otherwise, and as you can see in this video, it helped a Model X avoid joining an accident in the Netherlands. Whether or not they're ready for full self-driving tech, this may at least sell drivers on the effectiveness of Forward Collision Warning systems. Laziness, activate Samsung's Powerbot vacuums connect to Amazon Alexa The next step after having a robot clean up after you is adding voice commands for the full Jetsons experience. The VR7000 doesn't have a video display, humanoid appearance or snappy retorts, but now it can start cleaning whenever you say it should.

Becoming more affordable and easier to program, they are widely present in our everyday life. You name the field, the robots are there: agriculture, tourism, e-commerce, medicine… They even help with household chores. With the accelerating speed of robotics development, it appears a very tempting field for investment. Last month, Credit Suisse's Global Equity Research team published a report examining its potential. We have already accepted big robots working in agriculture (e.g. Some of them, such as smartphones or sensors in cars, have already become an integral part of our lives; others, such as robots with tactile sensing, are still on the way.

Summary: Watson is a remarkably flexible and complete AI development platform. To understand how you might build new services for your current employer or imagine your own Watson-based startup, look at these 30 companies that are leading the way. In our recent reviews of historical Watson and the modern Watson of today we concluded that IBM's Watson Group may have the first or at least the current strongest comprehensive AI platform. This is the first time that we know of that all three elements of AI have been brought together in a single user friendly platform: image processing, text and speech processing, and knowledge retrieval. This is not so much a platform for data scientist to use to expand the capabilities of AI as it is a platform for business users (with the aid of data scientists) to exploit the capabilities of modern AI by building new products and services.

Subscribe to our RSS feed to get the latest realty news. You can get our headlines via email as well, or follow us on Twitter. We'll see autonomous vehicle technology expand its reach. AI systems will be more fully utilized for sensing and decision making in self-driving. They'll also begin to transform the driver's experience inside the car.