This year's STATE OF THE ARTS 2016: A.I. and for Good and Music that Transforms focuses on the power of artificial (or machine) intelligence and music to transform our lives. From personal wellbeing, to education, arts and healing, this year's event will honor both 2016 FutureVision Awardees; inventor of iWithin, Eric Shuss, and musician and composer, Ricky Kej. With fear and trepidation around the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI.) and the even more powerful thinking and learning Artificial General Intelligence (A.G.I.), we will explore a future where A.I. becomes a force for good, and helps integrate with humanity to make this world and our next worlds, a better place. The panel will discuss the evolution of AI and AGI, today's reality and tomorrow's potential for super-intelligences to positiviely help raise our consciousness and transform life as we know it. The evening will culminate in the presentation of the annual c3 FutureVision Awards preceded by a presentation and short film by FutureVision Awardee musician Ricky Kej, a Grammy-nominated composer and creator of Shanti Samsara: World Music for Environmental Consciousness.

Signal Media, a London, UK-based AI-powered information intelligence company, raised a further £5.8m Backers included MMC Ventures and Hearst Ventures. The company, which has raised £8.3m ($10.5m) in total funding to date, intends to use the funds to take its business into new industry verticals such as to new verticals including Health, Pharma and Technology, and grow in the financial, legal and professional services markets, to further bolster the senior team and partnerships with universities, expand into the US during 2017 and strengthen the existing product. Co-founded in 2013 by David Benigson and Dr. Miguel Martinez, Signal Media provides an AI-powered information intelligence platform that allows businesses to access to information to track changes in real-time – from competitors, to regulation, to their own reputation – to make faster business decisions. Knowledge workers, communications teams and research executives use Signal's AI to monitor the world's news media.

At the start of December, Stephen Hawking issued a stark warning: Automation and AI are going to destroy middle-class jobs, risking massive political upheaval. "The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing," the famed physicist wrote, "and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes." It's an issue that Shahar Waiser knows about first-hand: In the coming years and decades, almost his entire workforce will become obsolete. The Russian-born entrepreneur is the CEO of Gett -- a taxi app used by thousands of cabbies in more than 100 cities around the world. And all of their jobs are at risk of being replaced by self-driving cars.

A hotel bed will no longer just be a place to enjoy a comfortable night's sleep, as future travelers will be able to choose their own dreams before dozing off - thanks to neuro-technology Amazing photographs of horses smiling and... Have YOU been on one of Britain's ¿ghost trains¿? The... It's illegal to be drunk in charge of a cow and 36% of... Revealing the bottom of your shoes, tipping and giving the... Next year's hot destinations are KAZAKHSTAN and INVERNESS:... Amazing photographs of horses smiling and... Have YOU been on one of Britain's ¿ghost trains¿? The... It's illegal to be drunk in charge of a cow and 36% of... Revealing the bottom of your shoes, tipping and giving the... Next year's hot destinations are KAZAKHSTAN and INVERNESS:... Hotels will self-assemble and morph from one design to another based on consumer's votes Autonomous robots can be designed online before arrival and can be programmed with special talents, skills, languages and information to help make the hotel stay exceptional. Dr Canton explained: 'Let's say I was on the Amalfi coast and there was only one hotel in this little town. An entrepreneur at a high-tech start up for just one month in the summer could create a pop-up hotel.

Tokyo, Japan – Ten months since the official release of Ginkan Inc.'s chat and dating app Festar, the app has seen high successful match rates with 53% of pairs from over 17,000 matches mutually liking each other and choosing to continue to talk after a 10 minute chat. Festar has ditched the dating app standard of picking based on appearances, and is proving just how important mutual interests and meaningful conversation are with thousands of users finding love and friendship through a live 10 minute chat. Festar is now available in 13 countries in English, Korean, and Japanese for both iOS and Android smartphones. How Festar Works: Unlike many dating apps that make users search for a partner, Festar starts by automatically connecting people for a 10 minute real time chat. Users are matched based on mutual interests and hobbies, instead of swiping and searching by looks or social status.

Digital transformation reshapes every aspect of a business, and over recent years this has evolved to become a central component of modern business strategy. There are three fundamental effects of digital innovation: experience and engagement, business innovation, and the secondary effects that result from increased digital capabilities. Over the coming months, as digital technology continues to evolve, I believe organisations will be forced to explore the secondary effects of digital disruption and use technology to reimagine their business and embrace new ways of working in a more efficient, innovative and agile way. Existing digital technology platforms will evolve Digital platforms, interoperable sets of services brought together to create applications, provide the basic building blocks for a [digital] business. There will be growth in each of the five major digital technology platform types to enable the new capabilities and models that characterise today's digital business.

Renewable power sources such as wind now provide about one-third of Germany's electricity. The rows of towering wind turbines and legions of glistening solar panels spread across Germany's landscape are striking emblems of the country's shift to non-nuclear, low-carbon power. But although Germany is the world's poster child for renewable energy, its grids cannot yet cope with the erratic nature of wind and solar power. In June, German meteorologists, engineers and utility firms began to test whether big data and machine learning can make these power sources more grid-friendly. "To operate the grid more efficiently and keep fossil reserves at a minimum, operators need to have a better idea of how much wind and solar power to expect at any given time," says Malte Siefert, a physicist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy System Technology in Kassel, Germany, and a leader on the project, called EWeLiNE.

Artificial Intelligence Just Broke Steve Jobs' Wall of Secrecy WIRED -- www.wired.com And as it happens, AI is more important to the future of tech giants like Apple than any other. Consumer trends come to light due to digital emmersion. The Ericsson ConsumerLab research gives you an insight in 10 hot consumer trends for 2017. We hear and read in the popular media about Artificial Intelligence (AI) all the time. We have movies about them.

If you've ever been handed a wine list the size of an encyclopaedia in a posh restaurant and succumbed to mild panic, you're not alone. Many of us feel sweaty palmed when having to choose from a bewildering array of wines we've never tasted or even heard of, especially when we're trying to impress a hot date or a potential client. And traditionally snooty sommeliers - wine advisers to the uninitiated - trying to embarrass us into spending more than we can afford, only make matters worse. Luckily there are a growing number of wine apps offering to help us navigate the worrying - but wonderful - world of wine. "I used to hate having to choose wine in restaurants... it was horrible," says Matt Gertner, the Prague-based founder of wine app start-up Corkscrew.

One of our greatest challenges in today's society is responding to the impact of technology automation. Over the last decade, technology has increasingly displaced jobs resulting in a reduction of the middle class and the widening gap of income inequality. Other factors such as offshoring play a role in job loss but the impact of technology is in full steam and there is no end in sight. My concern is that our society hasn't come to appreciate the extent of the issue and doesn't have a thoughtful plan to address it. The future of the middle class depends on our ability to comprehend the changing world technology has presented, and how we respond to close the jobs gap.