Recently I chatted with Candace Roulo, managing editor of Advanced Manufacturing Now, about some of the most important trends in medtech and the technologies that are taking the industry to the next level. Click below to listen to the podcast, or read on for select highlights of the conversation – what I consider to be five trends medtech professionals should be talking about. Advanced Manufacturing Now: You mentioned connectivity. With the healthcare sector embracing the interconnectivity of the Internet of Things for more proactive patient management, what are the opportunities and challenges associated with using sensors in medical devices? And if you could, give us a couple examples of those medical devices.

DigitalGlobe's WorldView 3 satellite captured this image of Sydney, Australia in January 2015. DigitalGlobe has formed a partnership with Ecopia Tech to use proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms and cloud computing to create building footprints. By using Ecopia's U.S. Building Footprints powered by DigitalGlobe, customers will have current information on structures in their areas of interest. Ecopia, a developer in DigitalGlobe's Geospatial Big Data platform (GBDX) ecosystem, established a process to create building footprints quickly and at scale by leveraging machine learning in combination with DigitalGlobe's cloud-based 100 petabyte imagery library. According to Ecopia, the service provides actionable insights for observing, analyzing, and monitoring business processes such as supply chain management, urban planning, and asset monitoring for industries that include energy, insurance, real estate, telecom, and location-based services.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Oh yes, this is an excellent idea. Cassie Blue is controlling the motion of the Segway by body lean, just as a human rider would do.

Next generation roadside detectors could soon be snapping motorists using smartphones behind the wheel without them realising, say police in Australia. High tech cameras that can detect the presence of the gadgets in the hands of drivers could be commonplace in the near future, they say. Drivers distracted by talking or texting on the phone are one of the biggest dangers on the road, and the new technology could help to crack down on the practice. It's not exactly clear how the cameras will work, but it seems likely they will incorporate image recognition AI software. Next generation roadside detectors could soon be snapping motorists using smartphones behind the wheel, say police in Australia.

It's no secret that the U.S. spends a lot on health care, around 18 percent of its GDP or $9,400 per capita, nearly double what other high-income countries such as Canada, UK, Germany, and Australia spend. But more spending doesn't necessarily yield better results. In fact, studies show that many of the countries that spend less than the U.S. see better outcomes in the overall health of their citizens. According to a new report published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), a little less than half the health care expenditures in the U.S. go into planning, regulating, and managing medical services at the administrative level. And industry experts believe we can reduce a lot of this spending with the help of artificial intelligence.

Apple's HomePod doesn't appear to be as big of a hit as the tech giant had hoped. In January, the firm finally released its smart home speaker that was bid as a rival to the Amazon Echo and Google Home. But by last month, Apple slashed sales forecasts for the HomePod as inventory for the device began to pile up, Bloomberg reported, citing sources close to the situation. In January, the firm finally released its smart home speaker that was bid as a rival to the Amazon Echo and Google Home. It also cut HomePod orders with one of its manufacturers that assembles the device for the company, Inventec, according to Bloomberg.

When 26-year-old Clementine Jacoby thinks back on her childhood, she remembers using printed maps to navigate strange new cities -- one of the many tools that smartphones have rendered largely obsolete. "My parents, I think, are just chronically bored," she says in a conference room at Google's New York offices. "We moved around a ton, and I was also sort of an agitated and ambitious kid and traveled a bunch on my own." It's perhaps fitting then that, after a year-long stint as a circus performer and graduating from Stanford University with a degree in symbolic systems (a program that focuses on a combination of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction), Jacoby ended up working as a product manager for Google Maps. It's a role that Jacoby feels like was made for her.

At Digital Global, 80TB of high resolution satellite images are analysed each day to make sense of changes in physical environments, facilitate urban planning and even identify wild fires in Australia. Discover why European cloud adopters are dissatisfied with their cloud providers' security and how providers are focusing on security in the design phase of products and introducing new security mechanisms. You forgot to provide an Email Address. This email address doesn't appear to be valid. This email address is already registered.

April 12, 2018 --Visit this online directory of the nearly 200 faculty members at Hampshire College and you'll find that, listed between a professor of communications and a visiting professor of video and film, is a petri dish of yellow schmutz. The schmutz is a plasmodial slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, a glob of living cells that exhibits decidedly non-schmutzlike behavior, such as solving mazes and anticipating periodic events – so much so that in 2017 Hampshire, a private liberal arts school in Amherst, Mass., awarded it a position of "visiting non-human scholar." The abilities of non-animals to remember events, recognize patterns, and solve problems are prompting scientists and philosophers to rethink what thinking is. In the 20th century, science demolished the notion that humans are the only animals to exhibit complex thinking; in the 21st, biologists are beginning to see cognition in other biological kingdoms – not just slime molds, but also plants. This shift in thought could not only help scientists better understand cognition's workings and its origins, but it could also help in the search for intelligence beyond Earth.

A pepper-picking robot named Harvey is being developed by Queensland University of Technology with the aim of reducing crop waste.