The House of Lords has passed the Investigatory Powers Bill, putting the huge spying powers on their way to becoming law within weeks. The bill – which forces internet companies to keep records on their users for up to a year, and allows the Government to force companies to hack into or break things they've sold so they can be spied on – has been fought against by privacy campaigners and technology companies including Apple and Twitter. But the Government has worked to continue to pass the bill, despite objections from those companies that the legislation is not possible to enforce and would make customers unsafe. In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles 23/40 The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight. At this biennial event, the participating companies exhibit their latest service robotic technologies and components 24/40 The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight 25/40 Government and industry are working together on a robot-like autopilot system that could eliminate the need for a second human pilot in the cockpit 26/40 Aurora Flight Sciences' technicians work on an Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automantion System (ALIAS) device in the firm's Centaur aircraft at Manassas Airport in Manassas, Va.

The dream of creating intelligent computers has inspired the development of exotic chips based on the structure of the brain, which operates in mysterious ways. Some researchers are making such chips from components found in today's computers. Using components pulled off store shelves, researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, have made a chip for intelligent computers that can learn. The chips are structured to discover patterns through probabilities and association, helping with decision making. The researchers are using off-the-shelf, reprogrammable circuits called FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) to simulate the way neurons and synapses in a brain operate.

Florent Perronnin was director at Fair in Paris until July 2016, when he moved to Xerox in Grenoble. He is now deputy manager of the analytics laboratory at Xerox Research Centre Europe. One of the primary areas of focus at Xerox is computer vision. "You need a certain combination of ingredients for a country to be strong in AI," said Perronnin. "You need good research institutions. And France is very strong in two of the competencies required for AI research – mathematics and computer science."

My first drone flight experience was with the DJI Phantom 2 Vision, and as much as I appreciated its advanced capabilities at the time, I longed for something more compact -- a device so small that I wouldn't need to carry a separate bag or case for it, preferably without sacrificing performance. Eventually, a Chinese startup called Zero Zero Robotics released the $599 Hover Camera Passport, which comes in the unique form of a foldable cage while packing cool features like body tracking, face tracking and orbiting. I got to spend some time with the Passport over the past few weeks, and eventually it got to the point where I rarely leave home without it, lest I find time to take it for a quick spin. Compared to higher-end foldable drones like DJI's Mavic Pro and GoPro's Karma (assuming GoPro issues a fix for random power losses), the Passport's major advantages are its size, weight and caged propellers. At just 242 grams, or 0.53 pounds, the Passport is exempt from the FAA's mandatory registration and is also unlikely to hurt anyone should something go wrong, as its propellers are shielded by a carbon fiber enclosure.

Renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking said in a speech at Oxford University Union that humanity only has about 1,000 years left of viable existence if it doesn't leave the planet and colonize the stars. The professor argued that humanity is unlikely to survive all of the different crises we will face over the next millennium. But humans can avoid extinction, he said, if we have colonized other planets by that time, giving humanity a fighting chance away from our "fragile" Earth. Dr. Hawking's prediction may seem gloomy, but much of his speech took an optimistic tone. After all, a thousand years is a long time to figure out how to colonize space, and plans are already underway for humans to visit Mars with an ultimate goal of colonizing the red planet.

The world is speeding up and accelerating as you read this article. Big data keeps piling up; new IoT devices are multiplying exponentially; new patterns of threats and opportunities are emerging by the second; decisions are lagging optimal conclusions; the goals keep changing; the governance complexity is growing; and your actions had better be on the mark. Your processes can't hang with this pace and you can't collaborate fast enough to get the brain power on the job. It's worse than the game called "Whack a Mole," where the mole heads pop up faster than you can hit them accurately. Cognitive AI will help us power through Digital Transformation.

Who needs tickets when you have a face? From today, the ticketed tourist town of Wuzhen in China is using face-recognition technology to identify people staying in its hotels and to act as their entry pass through the gates of the attraction. The system, which is expected to process 5000 visitors a day, has been created by web giant Baidu – often referred to as the "Chinese Google". Wuzhen is a historic town that has been turned into a tourist attraction with museums, tours and traditional crafts. When people check in to hotels in the tourist area, they will now have their pictures taken and uploaded to a central database.

The 30 nominees for Japan's top buzzwords of 2016 were announced Thursday by the Jiyukokuminsha publishing house, covering a variety of new popular terms ranging from the "Shin Godzilla" film to the "Zika fever." Comedian Pikotaro was just in time to make the list with his "PPAP," music video going viral on social media since September. The finalists for the 2016 U-Can Shingo Ryukogo Taisho (2016 U-Can New Words and Buzzwords Awards) included many phrases that highlighted the year's cultural trends. The augmented reality phone app "Pokemon Go," released in Japan in July, of course made the cut. But so did "aruki-sumaho," or literally, "smartphone walking," a term describing the act of walking while looking down at a smartphone screen.

ComeOn, a world-leading online gaming platform, has agreed a partnership with Featurespace, the gaming sector's number one machine learning fraud prevention company. The collaboration will see Featurespace's ARIC platform integrated into ComeOn's system to improve player protection from fraud attacks, without impacting the customer experience. Featurespace was created out of Cambridge University's Engineering Department, co-founded by world-renowned experts in applied statistics, Professor Bill Fitzgerald and Dave Excell. The agreement further underlines ComeOn's commitment to innovation and continues to put the customer at the heart of the ComeOn player experience. Featurespace is the world-leader in Adaptive Behavioural Analytics and creator of the ARIC platform, a machine learning software system developed out of the University of Cambridge.

For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I write frequently about Fourth Industrial Revolution (#4IR) themes such as Tech Innovation, Agtech, and Industrial Disruption. If I had to pick one area I find most exciting, most potentially disruptive and thus the best opportunity for return on investment, it would be A.I. Artificial Intelligence is the brain that makes everything work. It's easy to get lost in #4IR Tech Innovation jargon with complex topics such as: Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), Augmented Intelligence, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Neural Networks Internet of Things (IOT), Internet of Industrial Things (IOIT), IOE (Internet of Everything) Blockchain, Fintech, Mobile Payments, Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin Big Data, Data Science, Data Mining: Especially for Healthcare and Agriculture Cybersecurity, Cyber Terrorism, Hacking, Asymmetrical Warfare Smart Cities, Smart Grid, Energy Storage, Portable Power 3D and 4D Printing: BioPrinting, Cloud Manufacturing, Bionics, and printing objects that assemble and reshape themselves over time Industrial Revolution says that, ultimately, the innovation leads to disruption, change, and economic unrest… but also leads to a new era of opportunity and invention. Or is it the other way around? The anatomy of infrastructure is not unlike that of the human body, and we all know it's possible to live long, healthy lives.