One of the more surprising companies to show up in the AI Winners portfolio was Monsanto (NYSE: MON). Our models indicate that Monsanto stands out from its peer group in embracing deep learning technologies. The research is growing that deep learning platforms in general, and Google's Tensorflow in particular, could be transformative in computational biology. Computational biology, sometimes referred to as bioinformatics, is the science of using biological data to develop algorithms and relations among various biological systems. Since the dawn of modern agriculture, scientists have been experimenting with the manipulation of species through breeding techniques (which leads to the GMO debate).

Born and raised in India, Abe Ittycheriah, has had a fairly cosmopolitan upbringing. He's also lived in Mexico City and St. Johns in Newfoundland; he went to high school in New Mexico and did his PhD in Electrical Engineering at Rutgers University in New Jersey. While Abe confesses that he isn't multilingual, he is fluent in computer languages such as C, Perl, and others. Today, with almost 20 years of service under his belt at IBM Research working on speech, question answering, and machine translation technologies, he's part of a team using computer language skills to help teach Watson Korean, having also schooled Watson in Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Arabic. How does Watson expand its dictionary of foreign languages?

A robot capable of thinking for itself is set to be scrapped after it escaped from a high-tech lab for a second time. The Promobot IR77 has been fitted with artificial intelligence meaning that it learns from its experiences and its surroundings, although the programmers had not expected it to yearn for freedom. They say that despite reprogramming it twice, the robot continues to attempt to escape and they are now considering scrapping it. The other robots which have been created from the same series are well-behaved, and have not been escaping, say the team. Promobot IR77 made headlines last week when he escaped but ran out of battery in the middle of the street after 45 minutes in the city of Perm in central Russia's Perm Krai region.

Back in May, I mentioned that ROSS Intelligence, based on IBM's Watson platform, had announced that Baker & Hostetler had agreed to license ROSS Intelligence's artificial intelligence legal research product, ROSS. The firm will use ROSS in its Bankruptcy, Restructuring and Creditors' Rights team. Latham will be using ROSS to streamline their research. As is customary, ROSS is not described as a "robot attorney" but as a complement to the firm attorneys which empowers them. I suspect that is currently quite true, but doubt that it will remain that way.

The steam that keeps New Yorkers warm through the winter rolls through a labyrinth of pipes and tubes that is a nightmare to inspect. About eight times a year, Con Edison engineers don protective gear and crawl through the boilers that keep the largest steam system in the world running, to ensure everything is tip-top. You shouldn't have a fear of heights or enclosed spaces," says senior engineer Seth Flash. Beyond claustrophobia, boilers are dangerous. Ten stories high and capable of producing 1.2 million pounds of steam an hour, they feature components so tall that engineers erect scaffolding to get up close.

The'World of Warcraft' video game was a generation game that was like a symbol in China. Every single Post-80's person played this game, and have been waiting for this movie for almost 10 years! In only 5 days it made 1 billion RMB, a new record in China. It was funny because on social media you could see the emotional reactions from the Post-80's people and a battle between the other generations. As you know everything happens so fast in China that you can see huge differences in the behavior of the different generations (Post-80's, Post-90's millennials etc.).

Paris, France/Vianen, Netherlands, June 22, 2016 --The post-app era has started including a shift from apps to conversation, from apps to messaging platforms and from app-stores to bot-stores, all triggered by machine intelligence, also known as artificial intelligence. The end of apps is the beginning of doing everything on messaging platforms. This is described in the new report from SogetiLabs, The Bot Effect: Friending a Brand. "The fact that machines are now (more and more) capable of understanding natural language like voice and speech, and talk back is something that we've seen happening in science fiction movies. Now fiction becomes a fact. Due to better hardware, new neuromorphic chips and Big Data, these machines are able to learn and improve. The impact of this shift in possibilities has implications for businesses and human beings, for efficiency and psychology", concludes Menno van Doorn, Director of SogetiLabs, and co-author of the new report on the topic of Machine Intelligence.

A new proposal from the European Parliament calls for working robots to be classified as "electronic persons," and for their owners to pay social security on their behalf. The draft motion, published online this month, aims to address the new challenges that Europe's robotic workforce will present as robot technology becomes more pervasive and intelligent. The proposal says growing automation will require new frameworks for taxation and legal liability, but as Reuters reports, it faces opposition from some robotics companies. The rise in automation and artificial intelligence has raised concerns in Europe and elsewhere over economic effects, including unemployment, inequality, and social security systems. The proposal aims to address those concerns with a legal framework that would consider "that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations."

Complex interdependencies between applications and computing environments can make whitelist-based security nearly impossible to enforce in practice, a Cisco executive has argued as the company debuts a data-centre analytics platform that utilises machine-learning techniques to model and predict the security impact of configuration and application changes. Those changes can wreak havoc with conventional security models built around blacklists that are difficult to keep up to date as the environment changes, vice president of product marketing Rajeev Bhardwaj told CSO Australia as the company debuted a Tetration Analytics platform that surveils the data centre to monitor data flows and application interactions. While many data-centre operators preferred to operate on a zero-trust, whitelist-based security model, that had been difficult to accomplish because of changing interdependencies within the "black box" of the data centre, Bhardwaj said. "The data centre of today has multiple layers of complexity from compute, network, and storage infrastructure as well as virtualisation, firewalls, load balancers and customer applications," he explained. "If something goes wrong it's extremely hard to find out what happened: you look at the black box and don't know which application is talking with which applications, which ports are open, which applications are protected with a firewall."

Looking back is much easier than looking forward - when Management Today published its first issue in 1966, Britain was debating decimalisation, the average weekly wage was 14 and workers were enjoying a'golden age' of employment and easy-to-find jobs. As our Future of Work special report has demonstrated, we've come a long way since then, but it's safe to say that the changes over the next 50 years will be ever more profound. Of course, no one can predict them with any accuracy - the future is not a mere extrapolation of the past. But each year CEBR, one of the UK's leading economics consultancies, predicts where the British economy will rank in 15 years' time. As things stand, it forecasts that in 2031 the UK will be the world's sixth biggest economy with a GDP of 4.7bn (compared to 3bn now), and that it could even overtake the German and Japanese economies during the 2040s.