Imagine you're part of a great swelling crowd, one of 60,000 people who fill up the cauldron of noise and chaos that is a sold-out football stadium. For you and everyone around you, the game is an open-air gathering place, a chance to steam and scream and worry about nothing except the other team's menacing D. To the security officials responsible for your safety, it is a constant source of worst-case-scenario planning. They install metal detectors; they enlist a kennel's worth of bomb-sniffing dogs; they plant concrete pillars around the perimeter to keep out cars; they train personnel in the dark art of bag searching; they even obtain a temporary flight restriction from the FAA to keep all aircraft above 3,000 feet for a radius of 3 miles. They spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours to keep you safe, yet they know that none of it can stop a 3-pound off-the-shelf drone from flying in and dropping something on the crowd. Whatever it is, you'll never see it coming, and because there is currently no legal way to bring down a drone with any accuracy or reliability, there's nothing anyone can do but wait for it. In the summer of 2015, Ross Lamm and Dave Romero watched just such a scenario unfold from within a skybox at a large university stadium. The head of security for the college, fearful of the damage drones could do, had decided to run a simulation of a drone attack inside his 60,000- capacity football stadium.

SINGAPORE, 22 February 2017 -- In our increasingly digital world, new and emerging innovations are set to disrupt the way people live, work and play. According to youth across the Asia Pacific region, the most exciting technologies expected to have the largest impact on their future lives will be artificial intelligence (AI), virtual/mixed/augmented reality (VR/MR/AR), and Internet of Things (IoT), based on survey findings released today by Microsoft. In the Microsoft Asia Digital Future Survey, 1,400 youth were polled across 14 markets across the Asia Pacific region, comprising Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. Artificial intelligence (AI) is ranked as the top technology that youth expect to have the biggest impact on their lives. In recent years, the confluence of power devices, cloud and data has enabled bold visions on how AI can be an integrated part of our digital future.

Microsoft Monday is a weekly column that focuses on updates in regards to the Redmond giant. This week, Microsoft Monday includes details about Windows 10 upgrade revealed, EU still not satisfied with data collection transparency, HoloLens used for designing operating rooms, the launch of Skype Lite, an investment in AirMap, Halo split-screen is returning, new features for the Mail and Calendar apps for Windows 10 and much more! Microsoft has recently announced that a fourth major Windows 10 upgrade is being planned. Microsoft made the announcement at Ignite Australia roughly about two weeks ago. The first three updates are known as November Update, Anniversary Update and Creators Update.

In my last blog, I discussed how digital complacency could put your business at risk and how technological change is fast outpacing businesses ability to adapt. This trend continues its relentless pursuit to consume those whom choose to answer today's questions with yesterday's thinking. Furthermore, as we move into 2017 yet another transformational technology is redefining the industry and it has the potential to change everything. Machine Learning is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides computers with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning focuses on the development of computer programs that can teach themselves to grow and change when exposed to new data.

Recently, technologies such as face detection, facial landmark localisation and face recognition and verification have matured enough to provide effective and efficient solutions for imagery captured under arbitrary conditions (referred to as "in-the-wild"). This is partially attributed to the fact that comprehensive "in-the-wild" benchmarks have been developed for face detection, landmark localisation and recognition/verification. A very important technology that has not been thoroughly evaluated yet is deformable face tracking "in-the-wild". Until now, the performance has mainly been assessed qualitatively by visually assessing the result of a deformable face tracking technology on short videos. In this paper, we perform the first, to the best of our knowledge, thorough evaluation of state-of-the-art deformable face tracking pipelines using the recently introduced 300VW benchmark. We evaluate many different architectures focusing mainly on the task of on-line deformable face tracking. In particular, we compare the following general strategies: (a) generic face detection plus generic facial landmark localisation, (b) generic model free tracking plus generic facial landmark localisation, as well as (c) hybrid approaches using state-of-the-art face detection, model free tracking and facial landmark localisation technologies. Our evaluation reveals future avenues for further research on the topic.

As the world becomes increasingly more digital, the number of passwords people have to manage is becoming a serious problem. Financial institutions need to investigate acceptable biometric alternatives for authenticating mobile banking users that balance both security and simplicity. For financial institutions, one of the primary goals of digitization is to improve the simplicity of banking. In an effort to improve the user experience, one of the stumbling blocks has been the password authentication process needed to access mobile banking. Combining the need to improve the security of accessing accounts due to increased data breaches, with a desire for greater ease of use, is a difficult balancing act.

Despite banks' simultaneous excitement and fear of artificial intelligence as perhaps one of the most transformative technologies for their business, they've been quieter about IBM's Watson. Watson is a cognitive technology and super-computer comprising AI that "learns" how to draw conclusions from data, natural language understanding – which allows it to read and understand unstructured data, like social media posts and digital photos – and a search engine that can comb through millions of data points in seconds. It holds enormous promise in the long term for banks, who hold troves of customer data they're constantly studying and using to create better customer experiences as well as improve operational efficiencies. "What a Watson could deliver to banks would be tools to ensure sales people are selling the right things to the right people at the right time," said Ryan Gilbert, a partner at Propel Ventures. "Wells Fargo probably wouldn't have an eight financial product sales challenge if it had a Watson," because Watson wouldn't have allowed such rules to be set for employees to follow.

More artificial intelligence, cheaper sensors and longer flying drones are only some of the technological advances that Kiwi farmers can look forward to on "data-driven" farms over the next 10 years. Microsoft Research principal researcher Ranveer Chandra has been in New Zealand for a week offering insights into precision agriculture and advances the United States technology company is working on to improve farming and food production. He said Kiwi farmers and their innovations could help lead world farming, but they would see more advances themselves over the next decade. Ranveer Chandra is a principal researcher for Microsoft. Farmers faced doubling food production to feed a growing population by 2050 and this would require more technological advances world-wide, he said..

One of the best features of the Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones is the Google Assistant, Google's own voice-activated assistant that competes with Apple's Siri. With today's announcement however, it looks like Google Assistant will be available on more devices starting this week. The great thing about Google Assistant is that it allows users to talk to their Pixel and Pixel XL phones in a conversational or natural way. Whether it's asking questions, making reservations and appointments, Google Assistant is can do it all. It has proven to be quite an impressive AI assistant and has even been lauded by some as even being smarter than Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana.

Current research projects show that artificial intelligence (AI) can help us solving global problems for the greater good of mankind. Despite the headlines presenting crashes involving self-driving cars, the applications of AI technology in this area could dramatically reduce injuries and deaths on the roads. Self-driving cars could also change our lifestyles. Thanks to this emerging technology, we will have more time to entertain ourselves of work during commutes. The decreased cognitive load and the increased comfort provided by shared transportation and self-driving may also affect where people choose to live.