With the adoption of Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, the Internet of Things (IoT) is already part of our home lives. Many of us also use a smart thermostat to monitor the temperature of our living rooms, and maybe even a smart doorbell to keep an eye on the front porch. What technologies do you think are likely to change the way people do business? I definitely believe embedding communications via WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) will be the next big thing for businesses, especially since it directly affects our rate of communication and in turn our rate of efficiency. Anything that will make life easier will affect our productivity and is going to be here to stay.

More cities are adding smart city features so that Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and other connected technologies can improve the lives of citizens and visitors. As everyone knows, technology moves fast and finding out what's in store next is crucial to stay in the game. Diabetics have been waiting for years for better technology to manage their condition. Some got tired of waiting and hacked together an open source hardware and software solution. The concept of a smart city has been around for more than a decade, but it was only recently that the phrase "smart city" became part of the modern lexicon.

A network of computers fed a large image dataset can learn to recognize specific plant diseases with a high degree of accuracy, potentially paving the way for field-based crop-disease identification using smartphones, according to a team of researchers at Penn State and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), in Lausanne, Switzerland. The technology could have particular benefits for producers in developing countries, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, who often do not have the research infrastructure or agricultural extension systems to support smallholder farmers, the researchers said. "Global food security is threatened by a number of factors, not the least of which is plant diseases that can reduce yields or even wipe out a crop," said study co-author David Hughes, assistant professor of entomology and biology, College of Agricultural Sciences and Eberly College of Science, Penn State. In addition, Hughes said, plant diseases can have disastrous consequences for smallholder farmers whose livelihoods depend on healthy crops. In the developing world, more than 80 percent of agricultural production is generated by smallholder farmers, and as many as half of hungry people live in smallholder farming households.

The best science fiction blends reality and imagination, so a viewer walks away contemplating the limits of human possibility. The worst take leaps of faith that toss a viewer into an oblivion of head scratching. Passengers, a space thriller directed by the Imitation Game's Morten Tyldum and starring Hollywood mainstays Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, begins in the first category before rocketing into the second. In the film, Avalon -- a commercial starship -- ferries more than 5,000 colonists on a voyage from Earth to a new home world called Homestead II. To survive the 120-year trip, the travelers are placed into induced hibernation, but an accident rouses Chris Pratt's character -- mechanical engineer Jim Preston -- 90 years early.

SVKM's NMIMS University is all set to organise International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare on 27-28th December, 2016 at its Shirpur campus in Northern Maharashtra. The conference aims to bring together leading academic scientists, researchers and research scholars to exchange and share their experiences and research results on all aspects of Artificial Intelligence in healthcare. It also provides a premier interdisciplinary platform for researchers, practitioners and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, and concerns as well as practical challenges encountered and solutions adopted in the fields of Artificial Intelligence in healthcare, says Dr R.S. Gaud, Chairman of the conference. The conference will be inaugurated by Dr Shailendra Saraf, Vice President of Pharmacy Council of India, New Delhi. About 12 speakers from the national and international universities and research centres will deliver their scientific lectures in the two-day international conference.

We are all witnesses that 2016 was the year when Digital Health technologies took off and developed actively. Such rapid growth was partly due to the emergence of numerous wearable tech devices, but also due to numerous breakthroughs in other IT-related business areas. Digital health improves the quality of life, increases the lifespan, and gives people an opportunity to learn more about their lifestyles and how their bodies work. Most importantly, digital health (or, more specifically, digital healthcare) changes and improves the quality of care for patients, by enhancing the instruments for surgeons and other medical staff. Let's find out what are the main trends in health information technologies (HIT) and how will they affect the development of the sphere as a whole.

Daniel Waterhouse is a general partner of Balderton Capital. The gulf between "human" and "machine" is closing. Machine learning has enabled virtual reality to feel more "real" than ever before, and AI's replication of processes that were once confined to the human brain is ever-improving. Both are bringing technology into ever-closer proximity with the human body. Let's use this question as a starting point: Is standing on the edge of the roof of a Minecraft cathedral in VR mode scarier than looking over the edge of a mountain in Norway?

The year is nearly over, and I don't think I'm alone in saying that I'm ready to leave behind the dark, twisted fantasy that is 2016. No matter your political persuasion, social status or country of residence, you'll have felt disquieted by events at some point this year. The sheer scale of 2016's failings allows for such blanket statements. Natural disasters, mass shootings and political events have left me buffeted by wave after wave of anxiety. Because of this never-ending cycle of unease, video games have been more important to me this year. Of course, they're always a form of escapism, but in 2016 they've had to function as a kind of digital cocoon. Gaming has been a place to retreat. Whether passing the minutes on a mindless clicker or puzzle game, losing myself for hours in grand strategies and sport sims or taking a long weekend to head out on a fantastic adventure, gaming has helped me. Perhaps that's why I've been reacting to game delays with all the composure of a YouTube commenter. And, God, the delays have come thick and fast.

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Will technology at last help us to feel richer in 2017? The prevailing concern for several years now has been that despite rising GDP most people are not feeling any richer, and some people attribute the success of populist politicians to this sense of resentment. But we will hear a lot more about the clutch of technologies that potentially can transform our living standards, and accordingly give a practical response to populism by showing that things can and will get better. The core set of these technologies goes under the umbrella term Artificial Intelligence. The New York Times Magazine has just run a piece by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, under the title "The Great A.I. Awakening", which sums up what is happening.