Globally, thematic investing has tripled over the past five years to around $40.76 billion, per Morningstar Inc. This is steadily taking over the investment world, largely due to the introduction of theme-based funds and also for its long-term and easy-to-comprehend approach. Thematic investing requires investment in companies that can benefit from the technological, demographic and environmental changes (read: Top ETF Areas for 2020). Let's take a look at some of the themes that are currently in vogue. We are living in an era that is largely dominated by AI applications and technological advancements.

If you ever have some moments of spare time, in which you really don't know what to do…, well: then what about chatting some minutes with a bot? And I believe, actually it is! But… there is also a reasonable motivation for doing it. I think that we human beings should talk from time to time with these programs, just to verify if it is really true that they are becoming more "intelligent" as time goes by. One of the world's best chatbots (or maybe even the best at all) is Mitsuku. Its creators present this conversational AI as 18-year girl on their website https://www.pandorabots.com/mitsuku/, The last time I chatted with her was about one year ago.

EU member states need to turn their declarations of intent about international cooperation on technological sovereignty into real projects. According to Kai-Fu Li, former president of Google China, Europe has little chance of winning even the "bronze medal" in the global race to develop artificial intelligence (AI). Although this sounds like a harsh judgment, there seems to be widespread agreement among analysts, commentators, and policymakers that Europe is missing the boat on technological innovation in general and AI in particular. Excessive regulation, a business environment ill-suited to start-ups, a lack of investment – the list of grievances is long. But, while these concerns are not completely unfounded, they are somewhat self-flagellating.

The U.S. is experiencing a chronic shortage of medical professionals. Of course, this includes physicians. But psychiatrists will also be in scant supply. In five years, the U.S.'s supply of psychiatrists will be 15,600 short of the demand from patients, according to a 2017 study from the National Council for Behavioral Health. Although the technology is relatively new, AI applications have already been implemented in medical settings to help diagnose diseases, clarify treatment plans, and study radiology images.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way since its humble beginnings. Once thought to be a technology that would struggle to find its place in the real world, it is now all around us. It can influence the ads we see, the purchases we make and the television we watch. It's also fast becoming firmly embedded in our working lives -- particularly in the world of cyber security. The Capgemini Research Institute recently found that one in five organisations used AI cyber security pre-2019, with almost two-thirds planning to implement it by 2020.

Many of us are fascinated by science fiction pop-culture. Be it movies like Star Wars and Star Trek or Marvel and DC characters, we all have grown up watching them. And in the process, we loved the futuristic plot lines that were riddled with subjects like artificial intelligence, robotics, automation, quantum physics, and many more, that explained the existence of the universe. While many are fortunate to pursue such technical subjects in real life, it remains a distant dream for children from lower economic backgrounds. Fourteen-year-old Ravi Patel from Pune is one of them, whose father couldn't support his dreams to get him a better education, as he earns a meagre Rs 15,000 salary to take care of his entire family.

What is the top pain point for business executives? Gartner, the world's largest IT research firm, gives a clear answer: demand volatility. Too many factors from weather fluctuations to posts by social media influencers -- impact buyers, causing them to frequently change their minds. Worse still, things reshaping customer intentions happen quite unexpectedly. Think, for instance, of the teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg. Her refusal to fly for environmental reasons kick-started the "flight shame" movement, that caused a five-percent decrease in air passenger numbers in Sweden.

In what might only be perceived as a win for Facebook, OpenAI today announced that it will migrate to the social network's PyTorch machine learning framework in future projects, eschewing Google's long-in-the-tooth TensorFlow platform. OpenAI is the San Francisco-based AI research firm cofounded by CTO Greg Brockman, chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and others, with backing from luminaries like LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman. In a blog post, the company cited PyTorch's efficiency, scalability, and adoption as the reasons for its decision. "Going forward we'll primarily use PyTorch as our deep learning framework but sometimes use other ones when there's a specific technical reason to do so," said the company in a statement. "We're … excited to be joining a rapidly-growing developer community, including organizations like Facebook and Microsoft, in pushing scale and performance on [graphics cards]." OpenAI says that many of its teams have already migrated their work to PyTorch and that they'll contribute to the PyTorch community in the coming months.

TED Talks are influential videos from expert speakers in a variety of verticals. TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics -- from business to technology to global issues -- in more than 110 languages. TED is building a clearinghouse of free knowledge from the world's top thinkers, and their library of videos is expansive and rapidly growing. Solutions Review has curated this list of AI and machine learning TED talks to watch if you are a practitioner in the field. Talks were selected based on relevance, ability to add business value, and individual speaker expertise.

A multi-university team of researchers from Japan recently used the world's fastest astrophysics-simulation supercomputers to develop an AI system capable of predicting the structure of the universe itself. The scientists hope that in doing so they'll unlock the mysteries surrounding dark matter and dark energy. Dubbed "Dark Emulator," the AI system parses gigantic troves of astrophysics data and uses the information to build simulations of our universe. It taps into a massive database full of information gleaned from special telescopes and compares current data with what scientists expect based on theories surrounding the universe's origin. The simulation basically attempts to demonstrate what the universe might look like, including its edges, based on the big bang theory and the subsequent rapid expansion that continues to take place.