Breathtaking time-lapse footage reveals the unearthly beauty in one of life's mundane processes. UN to debate'killer robot' ban next year as experts warn... How do you tell if a rat is smiling? It's all in the ears,... Apple's car plans race ahead as it poaches Porsche racing's... Airbus reveals custom'plane pods' that can drop everything... UN to debate'killer robot' ban next year as experts warn... How do you tell if a rat is smiling? Airbus reveals custom'plane pods' that can drop everything... Captured in high-definition, the dissolving M&Ms look more like candy supernovae, or even a human iris expanding. 'We dropped m&m's chocolate in water and discovered something really wonderful!' the team shared on Vimeo.

VR headsets like the Oculus Rift are expected to sell around 300,000 Samsung's sub-£100 ($100) Gear VR headset is expected to do even better Up to 12 million Amazon Echo and Google Home virtual assistants could sell during over the Christmas shopping period, predicts one expert Samsung's sub-£100 ($100) Gear VR headset is expected to do even better Virtual assistants are set to pummel virtual reality headsets in the fight for consumer cash this Christmas, according to new reports. What do you get the pampered pooch who has everything? New... Which emoji is popular in YOUR region? Bristol loves the... Want the ultimate Christmas party sound system? AmpMe app... Would Apple hire YOU? Revealed: 25 bizarre and tricky... What do you get the pampered pooch who has everything?

Pulling these threads together, recently a gaming AI defeated a US Air Force expert combat pilot in simulated combat.

How to survive the age of Artificial Intelligence? Part 2: "World urban population will double in 2050. So, what should be done? With an exploding world population increasingly becoming urban, new technologies like AI threatening the job market, what should we do? I've read up multiple blogs and articles available out there and couldn't figure out a clear answer – most of them stopped at scaremongering. So, here's an attempt to start finding the solutions. These in no way are concrete solutions, but I see it as a start for ideas and thoughts. As I write this blog, sweeping changes are being made in the world political scene. Donald Trump is the president-elect of USA, Theresa May is busy finding solutions to wriggle out of the BREXIT mess, Modi with one stroke of an executive order has demonetized a major chunk of currencies (Rs) in India. The common theme is CHANGE. We need similar sweeping changes in our policies to be prepared for the future. Future work for humans is not heavy lifting, but creative. Our policies should start focusing on "How could a driver earn his living in the near future?", "How could they contribute to knowledge & creativity?", not "How many unskilled workers got trained as plumbers?" What are they going to do & how will they survive. Does our current rote-based learning system prepare them for future? Focus should be on improving basic needs at rural areas and discourage urbanisation. Policies should also focus on de-urbanisation, like "How to incentivise skilled people like doctors, teachers etc to move to rural areas?" Let's only hope this becomes mainstream policies (like Paris climate agreement). Voters should start demanding action from the elected representatives and start probing on their thoughts. Cost of treating the damage to environment (e.g., air & water pollution) and humans (e.g., depression, medicare) will prove to be very costly. Do we leave everything to our policy makers? We could also start with small changes. Atleast for workers in the knowledge industry this flexibility exists. Learning new skills is going to be very critical in the coming years. There are business & social opportunities in skill development & education. Read part-1 of the series: Why smart city is a dumb strategy? Read part-2 of the series: "World urban population will double in 2050.

Des Nnochiri has a Master's Degree (MEng) in Civil Engineering with Architecture, and spent several years at the Architectural Association, in London. He views technology with a designer's eye, and is very keen on software and solutions which put a new wrinkle on established ideas and practices. He now writes for markITwrite across the full spectrum of corporate tech and design. In previous lives, he has served as a Web designer, and an IT consultant to The Learning Paper, a UK-based charity extending educational resources to underprivileged youngsters in West Africa. His short thriller, "Trick" was filmed in 2011 by Shooting Incident Productions, who do location work on "Emmerdale".

Five years ago, a team of researchers from Google announced a remarkable achievement in one of the world's top scientific journals, Nature. Without needing the results of a single medical check-up, they were nevertheless able to track the spread of influenza across the US. What's more, they could do it more quickly than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Google's tracking had only a day's delay, compared with the week or more it took for the CDC to assemble a picture based on reports from doctors' surgeries. Google was faster because it was tracking the outbreak by finding a correlation between what people searched for online and whether they had flu symptoms. Not only was "Google Flu Trends" quick, accurate and cheap, it was theory-free. Google's engineers didn't bother to develop a hypothesis about what search terms – "flu symptoms" or "pharmacies near me" – might be correlated with the spread of the disease itself.

All sorts of people gathered to attend the #AIEurope conference in London past week. We also encountered more discrete forms of AI specialized in the high speed processing of masses of unstructured data. AI, eagerly awaited by some and much criticized by others, is finally a reality. Whatever the intended use, "the role of AI is to learn from data how to help people do their job," says Adam Devine, VP and head of marketing at Workfusion (intelligent process automation solutions). And its development requires similar ingredients.

Researchers and engineers from BMW are working at IBM's Munich headquarters for its Watson Internet of Things (IoT) technology. They'll help develop IBM's Watson cognitive system for integration into automotive products, which will be able to learn from the physical world and pass intelligence back to it. BMW is Read More ... Tags: Computer systems Vehicle Manufacturers BMW AG Cars Artificial intelligence IBM and BMW Are Using the Watson A.I. to Give Smart Cars More Personality BM and BMW announced Thursday that they have teamed up to figure out how Watson, the A.I. most famous for winning Jeopardy! in 2011, could be used to make driving better. Could this finally make KITT from Knight Rider a reality? The companies said they want to explore the potential of Watson "personalizing the driving experience and creating more intuitive driver support systems for cars of the future." That sounds Read More ... Tags: Vehicle Manufacturers BMW AG Cars Driverless Cars Car Types As if the BMW X6 wasn't already one of the sportiest and most aggressive-looking SUVs (SACs) in the world, this particular one on display at the automaker's Abu Dhabi showroom is taking things even further.

There was the voice recognition software that struggled to understand women, the crime prediction algorithm that targeted black neighbourhoods and the online ad platform which was more likely to show men highly paid executive jobs. Concerns have been growing about AI's so-called "white guy problem" and now scientists have devised a way to test whether an algorithm is introducing gender or racial biases into decision-making. Mortiz Hardt, a senior research scientist at Google who led the work, said: "Decisions based on machine learning can be both incredibly useful and have a profound impact on our lives ... Despite the need, a vetted methodology in machine learning for preventing this kind of discrimination based on sensitive attributes has been lacking." A beauty contest was judged by AI and the robots didn't like dark skin Hardt's was one of several papers on detecting discrimination by algorithms to be presented at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Barcelona this month, indicating a growing recognition of the problem. Nathan Srebro, a computer scientist at the University of Chicago and co-author, said: "We are trying to enforce that you will not have inappropriate bias in the statistical prediction."

According to Gartner's latest report, Worldwide IT spending is forecast to reach $3.5 trillion in 2017, up 2.9 percent from 2016's estimated spending of $3.4 trillion. Additionally, IT services spending is also set to rise 4.8 percent in 2017 to reach $943 billion. All of these figures tell us that many organizations have already allocated billions of dollars to keep up with the emerging trends in enterprise technology. One of our CMS-Connected contributors and a founding partner of Digital Clarity Group, Cathy McKnight, wrote a splendid article about the relationship between artificial intelligence and marketers. She also pointed out that more and more of the technology titans have adopted and leveraged the power of AI to enable their platforms to generate natural language, content optimization, analyze consumer behavior, and ultimately, be ahead of the game by knowing more about their customers' needs than even the customers know themselves.