The Milky Way is on a collision course with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. But no need to revise your will -- the two star systems won't meet for around 4 billion years. "At some point in every galaxy's life, it'll undergo one of these mergers," said William Pearson, Ph.D. student at the Netherlands Institute for Space Research and the University of Groningen, Netherlands. "It's part of our understanding of how we think the universe works. These galaxies tend to find and crash into each other."

Billions of birds in North America make the trek south each fall, migrating in pursuit of warmer winter temperatures. Many of these migratory birds fly under the cover of night, making it challenging for birdwatchers and ornithologists to observe them and track long-term trends. But the need to monitor avian population levels is critical. Recent research estimates that the number of birds in North America has fallen by 3 billion in the past 50 years, impacted by climate change, habitat loss, hunting and pesticides. Spring migration has declined by 14 percent in the last decade.

Developer Kevin Kim lived through Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and saw the deep impact the storm had on close friends -- not only on physical belongings and health, but on their mental well-being. One of Kim's friends, for example, had a tree crash through his roof, and though no one was physically hurt, dealing with the insurance and finances after the storm took a heavy toll on his friend. The experience spurred Kim and his teammates -- Christopher McKinney, Sunjae Shim, Tony Park, and Xuelong Mu -- to join forces and create Healios, an online platform that uses a conversational interface and AI to help connect those who need mental healthcare with the right case worker. The team's solution has been named a top-five finalist in the Call for Code 2019 Global Challenge. "There are a lot of stressors that are being constantly inundated with needs that pop out of nowhere, that they never had to deal with," Kim said.

In the very near future, you may visit your doctor and receive a drug therapy that was customized just for you based on your DNA, metabolism, and lifestyle. Advances in key technologies, including decoding the human genome (DNA), artificial intelligence (AI), and health information, are the catalysts for the rapidly accelerating field of personalized medicine. Navid Alipour, JD (Moderator) Co-founder and Managing Partner, Analytics Ventures Navid Alipour is Co-founder and Managing Partner at Analytics Ventures, a Venture Formation Fund focused on starting new ventures with artificial intelligence and machine learning at their core. Prior to co-founding Analytics Ventures, he founded La Costa Investment Group, making investments in startups nationally. Through the founding of multiple Artificial Intelligence(AI) based companies like CureMetrix and CureMatch, Navid is a long-time entrepreneur in the AI space, and looks to address the need between angel investors and big venture capital funds.

Kevin Warwick is Emeritus Professor at Reading and Coventry Universities. Prior to that he was Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research) at Coventry University, England. His main research areas are artificial intelligence, biomedical systems, robotics and cyborgs. Due to his research as a self-experimenter he is frequently referred to as the world's first Cyborg. Kevin was born in Coventry, UK and left school to join British Telecom.

I will explore this paper in detail and see how ICT aligns with TIE. ICT claims that every process that is a positive non-trivial information closure (NTIC) has consciousness. Furthermore, ICT claims that the level of consciousness is related to the degree of NTIC. ICT observes that humans do not consciously access information processing at every scale.

What might be the key to chatbots or voice-enabled assistants that respond in more natural, human-like ways? Researchers at Rasa, a Berlin, Germany-based startup developing a standard infrastructure layer for conversational AI, believe selective attention might play an outsized role. In a preprint paper published this week on Arxiv.org, "Conversational AI assistants promise to help users achieve a task through natural language. Interpreting simple instructions like please turn on the lights is relatively straightforward, but to handle more complex tasks these systems must be able to engage in multi-turn conversations," wrote the coauthors.

Much has been said about data being the new oil that will fuel businesses in the future. But the reality is that it's not about the amount of data that organizations have access to, but how effective their decisions are based on that data. Therefore, data alone will not be the new oil, rather intelligence will fuel the digital economy, and organizations that can create intelligent business processes to deliver contextualized and consent-based experiences will win in this new data-driven world. As intelligence (and technology in general) increasingly underpins future business models, there is a big question around the role of IT moving forward. The CIO needs to be part of boardroom discussions driving decision-making around the broader business (and digital) strategy.

The session was moderated by Pranjal Sharma, Author, Kranti Nation: India and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Cisco has established a partnership with blockchain firm SingularityNET to explore decentralised artificial intelligence. The partners are specifically looking at artificial general intelligence (AGI) technologies which aim to replicate the complex tasks of which humans are capable. AGI is considered a step above standard AI because it aims to add human-like reasoning capabilities in uncertain scenarios. Such processing will enable AGIs to do things like solve puzzles and make plans which are beyond that of today's AIs. "The scale of the AGI deployments needed by a partner like Cisco is going to be tremendous, and we are working hard to make sure our AGI tools and our blockchain-based platform is up to the task."