Cisco Live 2016 kicks off next week in Las Vegas, and Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky will be in attendance. Lepofsky heads up Constellations' research into the Future of Work, focusing on collaboration software and emerging technologies that are changing the way people do their jobs. I spoke with him in advance of Cisco Live for a preview of what he's expecting at the conference, as well as an overview of current and future trends in the collaboration space. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation. CRInsights: What are your thoughts on Cisco's current big bet in collaboration software, Spark?

Wang Yuheng, who won China's'The Brain' last year, beats AIipay AI in facial recognition contest. Wang Yuheng, who is famous in China for his exceptional memory and observation skills, won against artificial intelligence (AI) robot "Mark" in a three-round facial recognition challenge. The live challenge, according to International Business Times, was a publicity stunt held by the largest digital payment service in China, Alipay. Alipay has just launched "Mark," a facial recognition AI feature for its service. Alipay invited Wang, who rose to fame after joining and winning Chinese reality television contest "The Brain" in 2014, to a face-off with Mark.

Members of the Boston Police bomb squad demonstrate a robot named "Slick" during an active shooter drill at Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. June 12, 2016. Experts say Dallas police executed an unprecedented move Friday morning, when officers used a robot-delivered bomb to engage a suspect accused of fatally shooting five police officers and injuring seven others during a protest. The shooting started toward the end of a non-violent protest over recent fatal police shootings. Police engaged in a standoff with the suspect, who was later identified as Micah Xavier Johnson, after he barricaded himself inside a parking garage. Following lengthy negotiations with the police, Johnson told officers he had planted bombs in the area.

Acquisition cost is a crucial bottleneck for seismic workflows, and low-rank formulations for data interpolation allow practitioners to `fill in' data volumes from critically subsampled data acquired in the field. Tremendous size of seismic data volumes required for seismic processing remains a major challenge for these techniques. We propose a new approach to solve residual constrained formulations for interpolation. We represent the data volume using matrix factors, and build a block-coordinate algorithm with constrained convex subproblems that are solved with a primal-dual splitting scheme. The new approach is competitive with state of the art level-set algorithms that interchange the role of objectives with constraints. We use the new algorithm to successfully interpolate a large scale 5D seismic data volume, generated from the geologically complex synthetic 3D Compass velocity model, where 80% of the data has been removed.

A significant portion of existing variable selection methods are only applicable to linear parametric models. Despite the linearity and additivity assumption, variable selection in linear regression models has been popular since 1970; refer to Akaike information criterion [AIC; Akaike (1973)]; Bayesian information criterion [BIC; Schwarz et al (1978)] and Risk inflation criterion [RIC; Foster and George (1994)]. Popular classical sparse-regression methods such as Least absolute shrinkage operator [LASSO; Tibshirani (1996); Efron et al (2004)], and related penalization methods (Fan and Li, 2001; Zou and Hastie, 2005; Zou, 2006; Zhang, 2010) have gained popularity over the last decade due to their simplicity, computational scalability and efficiency in prediction when the underlying relation between the response and the predictors can be adequately described by parametric models. Bayesian methods (Mitchell and Beauchamp, 1988; George and McCulloch, 1993, 1997) with sparsity inducing priors offers greater applicability beyond parametric models and are a convenient alternative when the underlying goal is in inference and uncertainty quantification. However, there is still a limited amount of literature which seriously considers relaxing the linearity assumption, particularly when the dimension of the predictors is high. Moreover, when the focus is on learning the interactions between the variables, parametric models are often restrictive since they require very many parameters to capture the higher-order interaction terms. 2 Smoothing based non-additive nonparametric regression methods (Lafferty and Wasser-man, 2008; Wahba, 1990; Green and Silverman, 1993; Hastie and Tibshirani, 1990) can accommodate a wide range of relationships between predictors and response leading to excellent predictive performance.

The Juno space probe is now in orbit around Jupiter, meaning space buffs around the world are eagerly awaiting whatever new data the probe sends back. One of those space buffs is science fiction author Stephen Baxter, who recently collaborated with Alastair Reynolds on the novel The Medusa Chronicles. The book is an authorized sequel to Arthur C. Clarke's famous 1971 novella "A Meeting with Medusa," about an astronaut who discovers intelligent life on Jupiter. "All this comes from Carl Sagan, the great astronomer, who hypothesized that somewhere in Jupiter's deep cloud layers … you could have a great ocean, a gaseous ocean, where gigantic creatures could live," Baxter says in Episode 211 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Baxter is well-positioned to carry on Clarke's legacy, having collaborated with Clarke on four novels, a process that was sometimes complicated by the fact that the two men lived on different continents.

The Dallas PD's actions appear to mark the first time in US history authorities have used a robot or drone armed with a bomb to kill a civilian. This comes at a time when police forces across the nation are being criticized and scrutinized for using military-style tools. After a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man, in Ferguson, Missouri, last year, riots broke out in the area and police responded with weapons, vehicles and gear intended for military use. Images of Ferguson police in military-style body armor holding assault rifles sparked a debate about the militarization of police forces across the United States. Armed robots are the latest tool to transition from the battlefield to civilian life.

Lara Croft, famed video game icon, fights her way through jungles and ruins -- all while sporting skimpy clothes or a bikini. The hypersexualization of her character isn't out of the ordinary, according to a new study that examined the history of female objectification in video games over 31 years. The trend is most prominent in male-oriented fighting games like Mortal Kombat and games rated Teen and above. "The gaming industry has faced a lot of scrutiny," Teresa Lynch, media communications researcher at Indiana University, said. "It's realizing it's marginalizing half its audience [by] making women characters pander to the male gaze."

Dallas police respond after shots were fired during a protest over recent fatal shootings by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, Thursday, July 7, 2016, in Dallas. Snipers opened fire on police officers during protests; several officers were killed, police said. Dallas police respond after shots were fired during a protest over recent fatal shootings by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, Thursday, July 7, 2016, in Dallas. Snipers opened fire on police officers during protests; several officers were killed, police said. When Dallas police used a bomb-carrying robot to kill a sniper, they also kicked off an ethical debate about technology's use as a crime-fighting weapon.

Machines that "learn" and make decisions on their own are proliferating in our daily lives via social networks and smartphones, and experts are already thinking about how we can engineer them so that they don't go rogue. So far, suggestions have ranged from "training" self-learning machines to ignore certain kinds of information that might teach them racism or sexism, to coding them with values like empathy and respect. But according to some new work from researchers at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid,as well as other schools in Spain, the US, and Australia, once an AI becomes "superintelligent"--think Ex Machina--it will be impossible to contain it. Well, the researchers use the word "incomputable" in their paper, posted on the ArXiv preprint server, which in the world of theoretical computer science is perhaps even more damning. The crux of the matter is the "halting problem" devised by Alan Turing, which holds that no algorithm is able to correctly predict whether another algorithm will run forever or whether it will eventually halt--that is, stop running.