One of the persistent concerns about Indian innovation is whether, with our relatively poor position in R & D, we are falling behind the curve. It has definitely been true in the information technology sector: Indian companies that have done well have done so, not based on technological breakthroughs but on offering low-cost engineering services. There's nothing wrong with cost arbitrage, of course, and several globally competitive Indian companies have made fortunes for thousands of employees. But if you look at the landscape of Indian'unicorns', there is little that is not a replication of already-proven business models. That is, business innovation, rather than technological innovation. Examples like Zomato, Flipkart, and OlaCabs come to mind.

Me: Will it rain in NYC next week? Bot: It will be cloudy later today in New York, NY. Thanks to high-profile launches by Facebook and Microsoft, public attention has been focused on dumb message bots that answer basic requests such as "What's the weather?" But if messaging is the new platform and conversation the new UI, we are going to need smarter bots. Not bots that only give you information, but bots that know about you and help you do important things.

What do you do when you have 43bn ( 30bn) in your back pocket? Why, you buy companies like there's no tomorrow. A couple of years ago, Google decided that it needed to get into robotics, so it went shopping for robotics companies. It picked up eight, all for the search giant's equivalent of small change. What the hell was a search company doing getting involved in this business? Now we know: it didn't have a clue From the mainstream media's point of view, the most interesting of these acquisitions was Boston Dynamics, an east coast firm that specialised in making robots with legs.

The claim that nearly half of all US jobs are at risk of being automated has been repeated many times. But is it that straightforward? Gavin Kelly offers some facts that moderate the claim. He concludes that although the impact of evolving technology on jobs is currently impossible to predict, there are other, very real issues we should fret about: decreasing productivity levels, stagnant wages, and poor skills. We are said to live in an increasingly'post-fact' world but it remains the case that an eye-catching statistic can gain its own momentum and shape public debate regardless of its providence or even its author's original intent. So it is on the question of the rise of the robots and the future of work.

If artificial intelligence goes off the rails, which many philosophers and tech entrepreneurs seem to think is likely, it could result in rampant activity beyond human control. So some researchers think it's important to develop systems to "interrupt" AI programs, and to ensure the AI can't develop a way to prevent those interruptions. A study, conducted in 2014 by Google-owned AI lab DeepMind and the University of Oxford, sought to create a framework for handing control of AI programs over to human beings. In other words, a "big red button" to keep the software in check. "If such an agent is operating in real-time under human supervision, now and then it may be necessary for a human operator to press the big red button to prevent the agent from continuing a harmful sequence of actions -- harmful either for the agent or for the environment -- and lead the agent into a safer situation," reads the team's paper, titled "Safely Interruptible Agents" and published online with the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

About a year ago, I wrote an article introducing the concept of optimizing road trips using a combination of genetic algorithms and Google Maps. During that time, I've given some thought to how I could make that algorithm more useful to folks looking to plan their summer road trips. One thought that struck me was that the road trips I created before were quite grandiose--spanning entire states or even most of Europe--such that only people who had some savings and were able to take a month off of work could even hope to go on one of the trips. In reality, most of us have budgetary constraints on our road trips: we can only spend so much money, or we only have so much time off before we have to get back to work. In this article, I'm going to expand on the idea of optimizing road trips by introducing multi-objective Pareto optimization to the algorithm.

A new investment fund by a Vancouver-based venture capital group and an alliance of robotics professionals in the Netherlands plan to invest 100 million ( 113.6 million) into robo-startups around the world, according to a joint statement this past week. The RoboValley Fund, named after the RoboValley Innovation Hub located near the Hague leading the charge, will likely focus on seed and early stage funding. RoboValley touts 170 members from a variety of AI and robotics-related disciplines and is based out of the Delft University of Technology. The investment strategy will be managed and led by Chrysalix Venture Capital. According to Markets and Markets, the industrial robotics market is predicted to reach a value of nearly 80 billion by 2022.

Move over, humans; the emulations are coming and our world is going to get really weird. The book tries to discern how the world will change when it becomes possible to upload human minds into computational substrates. Hanson argues that three supporting technologies are required to achieve this: fast, cheap computers; fast, cheap brain scanners; and detailed and effective models of brain cells. Once all three become available later this century, it will be possible to scan a human brain and emulate it on computer hardware. At that point we'll enter the Age of Emulation--or the Age of Em, for short.

Most people would agree that we, generally, have two "dimensions" to us. That is, an immaterial dimension where our mental states and thought occurs, and a material dimension in which we possess a physical body. Lee Sedol is a perfect example, in that we see him execute actions on and interact with the Go board physically using strategies/plans developed in his mind. René Descartes would agree with this sentiment because he was a dualist, and believed that the mind and body are two equally real substances that causally affect each other in a rendition denoted "Cartesian dualism". The difference between the two substances is that the mind is a private mode of thought extended in an intangible realm, whereas the body is public and subject to the laws of the physical realm.

Wise.io, the leading provider of machine learning applications to help enterprises provide better customer experience, today announced its selection as a "Cool Vendor." This prestigious designation by Gartner, Inc., the global independent information technology research and advisory company, appeared in its recently issued report entitled "Cool Vendors in CRM Customer Service and Support, 2016." The report provides customer service business buyers a view of five innovative vendors with applications to deliver a superior customer service experience and/or reduce operational costs. A key finding from the report notes that "organizations seek innovations to enhance the traditional tools used in customer service functions." One recommendation to those organizations is to evaluate "machine-learning technologies" that can work seamlessly within an existing omnichannel digital contact center to automate responses to customer inquiries and bring this ever growing volume of interactions under control.