Researchers recently demonstrated how an informatics-based adaptive design strategy, tightly coupled to experiments, can accelerate the discovery of new materials with targeted properties, according to a recent paper published in Nature Communications. "What we've done is show that, starting with a relatively small data set of well-controlled experiments, it is possible to iteratively guide subsequent experiments toward finding the material with the desired target," said Turab Lookman, a physicist and materials scientist in the Physics of Condensed Matter and Complex Systems group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Lookman is the principal investigator of the research project. "Finding new materials has traditionally been guided by intuition and trial and error," said Lookman."But with increasing chemical complexity, the combination possibilities become too large for trial-and-error approaches to be practical." To address this, Lookman, along with his colleagues at Los Alamos and the State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials in China, employed machine learning to speed up the process. They developed a framework that uses uncertainties to iteratively guide the next experiments to be performed in search of a shape-memory alloy with very low thermal hysteresis (or dissipation).

The news and information ecosystem is in the midst of change -- again. Mobile-first consumption is on the rise, smart homes are becoming mainstream and connected cars will soon take over the roads of major cities around the world. Smart devices will require "smart content." It's only a matter of time before artificial intelligence becomes the backbone of the media industry of the future. Today, most people find information via search or social.

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The creators of Siri, Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer debuted their next-gen AI, Viv yesterday at Disrupt NY 2016. Viv is designed to be an open platform that allows developers to create apps, which expand the AIs reach of possibility. We talked about the backstory behind Siri and Viv last week; now the AI has been showcased and you can watch it in action below. Viv connects with third-party applications and recognizes the way humans talk, creating an open artificial intelligence that can complete complex tasks from booking your restaurant reservation to sending your friend money for the drinks she bought you last night. The creators of Siri and Viv see AI tech becoming a broad umbrella under which all the separate apps and services we use can come together seamlessly.

Then you might have a hard time getting those right swipes. For almost two months, dating app Bumble has been letting users put special election filters onto their profile to let potential matches know where they stand on the political spectrum. Aside from Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz (who has since dropped out of the race), as well as the overarching Democratic or Republican filters, the options also include fictional candidates like Frank Underwood from "House of Cards," Kanye West and, naturally, pizza. For users who couldn't care less about the election, there was also a #IDGAF filter. Bumble offered its 5 million users the option to choose from these 10 filters, and though using them was not required, the company told The Huffington Post that 1.8 million filters were swiped on daily.

SeaDrone, the underwater robot coming out of a new company founded by two Stanford AI lab veterans, is aiming to make fish farming a lot easier--particularly for smaller aquaculture operations--by making underwater inspection cheaper and easier. The ocean ROV's story is not an unusual one for Silicon Valley: two Stanford students meet over a lab bench, get an idea that something they'd been tinkering around with for their themselves could be turned into a product and the basis of a company. It's a story Silicon Valley loves. Eduardo Moreno met Shuyun Chung in the Stanford AI lab in 2013. Moreno, in the thick of his studies for a master's degree in mechanical engineering, was working on underwater robot hardware in collaboration with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

I recently enjoyed the opportunity to give the final plenary talk at the World Future Society's annual conference in San Francisco. The event featured marvelous speakers like Steve Jurvetson, one of the world's top venture capitalists, John Hagel of Deloitte, Brian David Johnson of Intel and top futurist Paul Saffo. It was an honor to get the chance to speak about "AI, Robotics and the Future of Work" in California, home to the most amazing innovations being made to advance our best and brightest future. Digital engineers and digital storytellers and the entrepreneurs who stand behind them are the primary movers continually shaping the possibilities for who we can be now and who we might become, imagining, inspiring and building the global future. It can't be taken lightly.

Belgian prime minster Charles Michel's recent drive to promote the country as a positive place for investment is understandable after recent terrorist activity in Brussels, but it seems he may have missed an opportunity. Right on his doorstep, in the northern Belgium coastal town of Oostende, he has a company programming and selling robotsthat help humans dance, sing and learn new skills. The global robotics market is expected to be worth 1.5bn ( 1bn) by 2019 and although currently dominated by projections for industrial robots, demand for business and consumer robotics is expected to grow seven times faster than in manufacturing. "Belgium is Belgium," says Tommy Deblieck, co-founder of QBMT Solutions, the company behind the Zora social robot. "The government has a digital agenda and we said: 'What about robotics?' The only answer we got was: 'Oops, we forgot about that.'"

Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer created the artificial intelligence behind Siri, Apple's iconic digital assistant, and one of the first modern apps to capably handle natural language queries on a smartphone. Today the pair showed off their newest creation, Viv, a next generation AI assistant that they have been developing in stealth mode for the last four years. The goal was to create a better version of Siri, one that connected to a multitude of services, instead of routinely shuffling queries off to a basic web search. During a 20-minute demo onstage at Disrupt NYC, Viv flawlessly handled a number of complex requests, not just in terms of comprehension, but by connecting with third-party merchants to purchase goods and book reservations. Viv's approach is much closer to Amazon's Alexa or Facebook's Messenger bots, offering the ability to connect with third-party merchants and vendors so that it can execute on requests to purchase goods or book reservations.

No one knew what to make of the Amazon Echo when it first debuted. Originally described as a Siri-like, tube-shaped home assistant, how could this glorified speaker be more useful than similar phone features? But in its year-plus of existence, the Echo has been quietly taking over households everywhere. Amazon hasn't released official sales information, but we can deduce the device has experienced some success based on more than Alec Baldwin's endorsement. According to Slice Intelligence, the Echo's sales grew an average of 342 percent during Q3 and Q4 of 2015.