Every day new travel sites and apps are launched that promise to make trip planning easier. Some do and some don't. Here are two free tools optimized for smartphones that I tested and really liked: Lonely Planet's free Guides app for iOS and Android, and Destinations on Google, which makes it easy to aggregate information for your next travel adventure. The app includes more than 35 free importable guides to international and U.S. destinations, from Bangkok to London and Boston to San Francisco. I tested New York, Kyoto and Vancouver.

Until now, medicine has been a prestigious and often extremely lucrative career choice. But with intelligent machines now used to diagnose diseases, in the near future, will we need as many doctors as we have now? Are we going to see significant medical unemployment in the coming decade? Dr Saxon Smith, president of the Australian Medical Association NSW branch, said in a report late last year that the most common concerns he hears from doctors-in-training and medical students are, "what is the future of medicine?" The answers, he said, continue to elude him.

A new Federal Government report has outlined the future of Australia's workforce and revealed growing demand for professionals in STEM industries. The report by CSIRO and the Australian Computer Society, titled Tomorrow's Digitally Enabled Workforce, identified six megatrends. The trends include continued advances in automation and artificial intelligence; jobs will be more flexible and agile due to digital technology; a requirement for entrepreneurial skills; and an increase in skills and education requirements for many professions. While the report found that 44% of Australian jobs would be impacted by these changes, Andrew Johnson, CEO of the Australian Computer Society and one of the report's authors, said there are numerous opportunities for engineers. 'The intent of this report is to look at a 15- to 20-year timeframe.

San Francisco-based startup Fove has developed eye-tracking for virtual reality -- that kernel of technology many feel is key for the illusion of becoming immersed in a setting. Or use a death stare to shoot down virtual spaceships. Watch a movie of a forest or a room and be able to look around wherever you want. "It allows you to go inside the world that's behind the display," said Yuka Kojima, Fove's co-founder and a rare female chief executive in male-dominated Japan Inc. Fove, which comes from "fovea," the part of the eye with the sharpest vision, from "field of view," and the word's similarity with "love," has devised a way to use tiny infrared sensors inside headset goggles to monitor the movements of a wearer's pupils. It's a small company, founded in 2014, with offices in Tokyo, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and employing just 17 people.

The World Science Festival Brisbane's'Shared Space Bots' performance demonstrations at Queensland University of Technology used pint-sized, futuristic floor robots to reveal research into the technologies that will allow humans to communicate with driverless cars, and allowed audience members a chance to'test drive' the systems safely. Shared Space Bots were demonstrated by internationally acclaimed technologist Christopher Lindinger from Austrian R&D company Ars Electronica Futurelab. They have been developed as part of the ongoing research cooperation between Mercedes-Benz and Ars Electronica Futurelab on the topic of future mobility.

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Lawrence Wintermeyer, CEO of Innovate Finance, expects to see more innovators trying to tap into the unbanked and unrepresented consumer market. He said: "The firm Pockit, for example, gives customers an account and card that they can use to manage their money and make payments. Users can deposit money into their account at thousands of locations across the UK or have their salaries or benefits paid into their account. Pockit users also get cash back deals on the high street and online." So-called "challenger banks" are popping up and Monese is the latest to make waves.

This week my audience greatly appreciated the Motherboard post "Joke-Telling Robots Are the Final Frontier of Artificial Intelligence", so I decided to spend a few words on humor and artificial intelligence. Why allowing an artificial intelligence to joke is important? I like the honest way Bloomberg asks for the same question in a post which is now 4 years old, but is still a good read: Can a computer be taught to be funny? It doesn't seem nearly as important an endeavor as getting computers to identify malignant tumors or prevent airplanes from crashing, but being able to model humor is a key problem in attempting to model human thought. As Motherboard explains "Some specialists even see humor as the final frontier for artificial intelligence, because it requires mastery of sophisticated functions like self-awareness, empathy, spontaneity, and linguistic subtlety."

Domino's latest "deliveryman" stands three feet tall and doesn't need to be tipped. It has ferried pizzas in Brisbane at a top speed of 12 mph, and the company's Australian master franchise said it's excited for what could come next. "We have a relentless passion to push the boundaries of what's possible with pizza delivery," said Michael Gillespie, chief digital officer for Domino's in Australia. "As we get further, it's not hard to believe that we might have a store with a couple of [robots] that are doing deliveries." Domino's has started using a robotic cart named DRU, which stands for Domino's Robotic Unit, to deliver its offerings.

Drone images accumulate much faster than they can be analyzed. Researchers have developed a new approach that combines crowdsourcing and machine learning to speed up the process. Who would win in a real-life game of "Where's Waldo," humans or computers? A recent study suggests that when speed and accuracy are critical, an approach combing both human and machine intelligence would take the prize. With drones being used to monitor everything natural disaster sites, pollution, or wildlife populations, analyzing drone images in real-time has become a critically important big data challenge. Publishing in the journal Big Data, researchers, including Stéphane Joost from EPFL, present a new approach to rapidly interpret aerial images taken by camera drones that combines human crowdsourcing and machine learning.