Holidaymakers will be guaranteed a room with an incredible view at these futuristic hotels, which would put guests in the sea, famous parks or even outer space. The stunning concepts are vying for top prize in an annual design competition that aims to flip the hospitality industry on its head. This year's finalists have proposed bean-shaped pods which can be flown to hard-to-reach locations using drone technology, and guest rooms on stilts in major cities such as New York or London. The hotel is made up of several modular units including bars, kitchens and courtyard pods. Designed by HOK's Toronto office, the hotel has modular units which use drone technology to fly (top right) to hard-to-reach locations Driftscape, one of two professional concepts up for the Radical Innovation Award, is a mobile, self-sustaining hotel that allows guests to roam or touch down in diverse locations such as the sea, desert or rice paddy fields.

Wealth management firms, among the least tech-literate sectors of the financial services industry, might become obsolete with high net-worth individuals (HNIs) increasingly adopting digital technologies that provide algorithm-based portfolio management advice. A new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers that surveyed 1,000 HNIs in Europe, North America and Asia, found only 25 per cent of wealth management firms globally offering digital channels beyond emails. The Tokyo office of McCann has created what it is claiming to be the first ad to be made by artificial intelligence. An ad for mint candy brand Clorets Mint Tab has been creative directed by AI-CD ß, which became the first machine member of McCann Japan's creative department at the beginning of April. "If we have been living in rigid ice, this is liquid-a new phase state.

Olli, created by Arizona-based Local Motors, officially hit the streets of the nation's capital Thursday. Using an app similar to Uber or Lyft, ride-seekers can order the bus to pick them up and drop them off at their destinations of choice. Olli is electric-powered and 3D-printed, reducing the vehicles footprint before and after it hits the road, Local Motors wrote in a release. The bus can even talk to riders. "Olli offers a smart, safe and sustainable transportation solution that is long overdue," John B. Rogers Jr., Local Motors CEO and co-founder, said.

If you're lucky enough to get a ticket to this year's Wimbledon tennis championships, be prepared to be scanned by a supercomputer. Cameras linked to IBM's Watson "machine-learning" platform may be monitoring your facial expressions and trying to work out what emotions you are displaying. If Watson learns quickly enough over the fortnight, it will apparently be able to work out which player you are supporting just by reading your face. The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) and its tech partner IBM are remaining tight-lipped on the details of the new technology - not least because it needs legal approval and raises privacy concerns. But it is another example of how sport is becoming increasingly digital, for fans, players and venues alike. Even if Watson isn't tracking your every cheer and grimace at the championships - which begin on Monday 27 June - it will be digesting millions of conversations on social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and using natural language processing to identify common topics - not necessarily just about tennis.

Young people may have their first sexual encounter with robots in the near future, according an expert, which could hinder their ability to form meaningful relationships. Speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, professor Noel Sharkey from Sheffield University cautioned that android sex dolls may have damaging reverberations for society. "Sex robots are accessible now and certainly [will be common] within the next 10 years. I think there will be an age limit. Certainly there should be, but if your dad or mum had one, you could sneak in and use it," he said.

Robots will soon outnumber human beings and 3D printers will be used to create human organs, according to a survey of over 2,000 British adults. The next two decades will see technology radically impact healthcare and automotive industries, according to SMG Insight and YouGov research commissioned by London & Partners, with GP consultations available through virtual reality or driverless cars replacing traditional vehicles. The research was inspired by predictions made by Imperial College London's Tech Foresight research team ahead of London Tech Week, an event celebrating innovation with the UK's capital city. "London's technologists, scientists, medics and entrepreneurs are creating the future," said professor David Gann, vice president innovation at Imperial College London. "No city in the world enjoys London's quotient of talent, technology culture and capital. It is a potent combination. "London is an environment where ideas flourish, design and innovation is embraced and new technologies are transforming our lives for the better.

The ability to represent complex high dimensional probability distributions in a compact form is one of the key insights in the field of graphical models. Factored representations are ubiquitous in machine learning and lead to major computational advantages. We explore a different type of compact representation based on discrete Fourier representations, complementing the classical approach based on conditional independencies. We show that a large class of probabilistic graphical models have a compact Fourier representation. This theoretical result opens up an entirely new way of approximating a probability distribution. We demonstrate the significance of this approach by applying it to the variable elimination algorithm. Compared with the traditional bucket representation and other approximate inference algorithms, we obtain significant improvements.

With laptops and hand-held devices slowly replacing pencils and paper, some educators question the importance of teaching handwriting in the classroom. Although some say it is a nonessential motor skill, researchers have found evidence that in fact it helps children pay attention to and understand the written language. Brain scans in children who did not yet know how to print revealed they are unable to distinguish letters and respond to them'the same as to a triangle'. Although some say it is a nonessential motor skill, researchers have found evidence this skill helps children pay attention to and understand the written language. Brain scans in children who did not yet know how to print yet revealed they are unable to distinguish letters and respond to them'the same as to a triangle' You have to see letters in'the mind's eye' in order to create them on a piece of paper she explained.

Great hardware needs great software. To help data scientists and developers make the most of the vast opportunities in deep learning, we're announcing today at the International Supercomputing show, ISC16, a trio of new capabilities for our deep learning software platform. The three -- NVIDIA DIGITS 4, CUDA Deep Neural Network Library (cuDNN) 5.1 and the new GPU Inference Engine (GIE) -- are powerful tools that make it even easier to create solutions on our platform. NVIDIA DIGITS 4 introduces a new object detection workflow, enabling data scientists to train deep neural networks to find faces, pedestrians, traffic signs, vehicles and other objects in a sea of images. This workflow enables advanced deep learning solutions -- such as tracking objects from satellite imagery, security and surveillance, advanced driver assistance systems and medical diagnostic screening.

A few years before he passed away, Roger Ebert stirred up a lot of game fan anger when he claimed that "video games can never be art". In response, livid gamers submitted numerous examples of games that can (rightly) be used to refute that argument. But when it comes to the vast majority of games that people are playing on their mobile devices, Ebert was right. Over the last decade, we've seen the rise of mega-hits like Farmville, Candy Crush Saga, Clash of Clans, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, Hearthstone, and many more of the "freemium" games that litter the mobile marketplace. They're free to play as long as you're willing to grind your way through a minimal experience.