Where appropriate, we brought back trends from previous reports, once they had hit tipping point or promised new value.We looked ahead to predict which consumer segments will be most affected by the trend, how it will evolve, and identified brands that are leading the way. They are the early adopters of new technology. Millennials – those born after 1982 – are adept at making the most of technology to create a world of difference for themselves. Technology has given them the freedom to redefine the way they work, play, shop and to take control of their daily activities. Their dependence on their smartphones and other new technologies sets their expectations for how they want to engage with brands. Generation Z – defined loosely as those born after the late 1990s – are the first true digital native generation, and are the native speakers of the digital language of computers, video games and the internet.

Humanity has a major food problem. The world's population is expected to increase significantly over the next three decades, but our capacity for food production will struggle to keep pace. Although global fertility rates are actually falling, a general increase in life expectancy will mean a steady increase in headcount during our lifetimes. One 2015 UN DESA report claims the world's population will hit 9.7 billion by 2050 – an increase of some 2.3 billion over today. Of course, a general rise in life expectancy reflects a higher standard of living for more of the world, which is cause for celebration.

SVKM's NMIMS University is all set to organise International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare on 27-28th December, 2016 at its Shirpur campus in Northern Maharashtra. The conference aims to bring together leading academic scientists, researchers and research scholars to exchange and share their experiences and research results on all aspects of Artificial Intelligence in healthcare. It also provides a premier interdisciplinary platform for researchers, practitioners and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, and concerns as well as practical challenges encountered and solutions adopted in the fields of Artificial Intelligence in healthcare, says Dr R.S. Gaud, Chairman of the conference. The conference will be inaugurated by Dr Shailendra Saraf, Vice President of Pharmacy Council of India, New Delhi. About 12 speakers from the national and international universities and research centres will deliver their scientific lectures in the two-day international conference.

Year 1999, The Matrix introduced your neighbor, your dad, and pretty much every hacky-sacking college kid in the country to the idea that the real world around us … might not be so real. In the film, our trenchcoated protagonist Neo discovers that the world as he knows it is only an illusion, piped into his brain while his body sits submerged in a gooey chemical broth. The idea that we are not really here at all -- that life is just an illusion – is as old as Plato's Allegory of the Cave. But The Matrix had that special sauce that made this mind-bending concept palatable to high schoolers shuffling around in JNCO jeans: guns, Keanu Reeves, and a soundtrack anchored by Rage Against the Machine. "Entering the Matrix" became pop-culture shorthand for the notion that technology could eventually deliver us from our mind-numbing reality and allow us to live in a faux universe of our own creation. Want to learn kung fu in seconds? Just take the red pill. A kid born in 1999 is just now old enough to rent the R-rated Matrix -- or more likely, stream it. Yet in those intervening 17 years, entering the Matrix has gone from a dystopian sci-fi dream to a waking reality. These days, a pair of $800 goggles can convince you to duck as dinosaurs shamble over you, drop the pit of your stomach as you peer off the ledge of an artificial skyscraper, and make you puke -- in real life -- after one too many loops in a computer-generated space fighter. And yup, you can freeze time and stop bullets, too.

It's been a year of change in the enterprise software market. SaaS providers are fighting to compete with one another, machine learning is becoming a reality for businesses at a larger scale, and containers are growing in popularity. Here are some of the top trends from 2016 that we'll likely still be talking about next year. As more and more companies adopt software-as-a-service products like Office 365, Slack, and Box, there is increasing pressure to collaborate for companies that compete with each another. After all, nobody wants to be stuck using a service that doesn't work with the other critical systems they have.

Satellite images, with their zoomed-out view, have a way of reducing the world's features to a series of shapes and lines. In a new project called Land Lines, artists Zach Lieberman and Matt Felsen partnered with Google's Data Arts team to create an interactive platform that lets people explore these shapes with the drag of a finger. Think of Land Lines as reverse Google image search, but for lines. Using computer vision technology, Liberman and co were able to build a tool that matches hand-drawn lines to those found in a database of more than 50,000 Google satellite images. Draw a line on your desktop or phone, and Land Lines will find a landmass, freeway, bridge, river--something--that follows the same contour.

A computer's ability to accurately identify images is a white whale for many technology companies, from Baidu to Google. One Australian startup has found a corner of the market to dominate, winning contracts with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and IP Australia for algorithms that can detect and compare logos. SEE ALSO: Airbnb is getting into the airline booking disruption game with'Flights' TrademarkVision, which has support from Australia's CEA Startup Fund, uses machine learning to support image searches that can identify similar trademarks. Having a unique trademark or logo is vital, but many intellectual property registration bodies often require outdated forms of non-visual search that make comparison difficult. Australia, for example, relies on keywords, Europe on Vienna codes and the U.S. on design codes.

WASHINGTON – Millions of dollars' worth of U.S.-supplied drones that Kiev had hoped would help in its war against Russian-backed separatists have proven ineffective against jamming and hacking, Ukrainian officials say. The 72 Raven RQ-11B Analog mini-drones were so disappointing following their arrival this summer that Natan Chazin, an advisor to Ukraine's military with deep knowledge of the country's drone program, said if it were up to him, he would return them. "From the beginning, it was the wrong decision to use these drones in our (conflict)," Chazin, an adviser to the chief of the general staff of Ukraine's armed forces, told Reuters. The hand-launched Ravens were one of the recent highlights of U.S. security assistance to Ukraine, aiming to give Kiev's military portable, light-weight, unarmed surveillance drones that were small enough to be used widely in the field. They are made by AeroVironment.

Cybercriminals are collaborating to refine their attacks and businesses must do the same by leveraging a growing body of open-source security tools, a security expert has advised as open-source machine learning puts the technology into the mainstream. Mainstream adoption of machine-learning techniques has become crucial for businesses that are being inundated with security-related data and are well past the hope of having humans – or security information and management (SIEM) platforms – keep up with the flood, Cloudera chief security architect Eddie Garcia recently told CSO Australia. "The machine learning part makes a huge difference," he said. "Whereas before SIEM technology searched for known patterns like DDoS or brute-force attacks, machine learning recognises a baseline of what normal activity is, and uses this to recognise anomalies." Machine-learning techniques exploded into the mainstream during 2016, with the launch of the Intel-Cloudera based Apache Spot platform http://spot.incubator.apache.org a turning point in the adoption of machine-learning techniques to security analytics.

You ask your smartphone virtual assistant to make an appointment for you. You receive a message alert from your bank enquiring if you made a certain transaction. You receive recommendations for music or movies or online purchases based on your past behaviour. These are all examples of Artificial Intelligence (AI) entering your daily life. There is no widely accepted definition of the term or what constitutes AI. Definitions are usually based on some variation of computerized systems or computers exhibiting behaviour or thought that is normally demonstrated by humans or requires intelligence (which itself is hard to define). It could involve rationally solving complex problems or taking appropriate actions to achieve objectives in real world circumstances.