When it comes to drone technology, the focus in India is mainly on either amateur photography drones or military applications of drones in India. But between these two ends of the spectrum, lies the whole gamut of drone technology. The drone startup sector is nascent in India and is still to make its mark. But its prospects are promising and under the right policies and an able vision, drones can contribute a lot to Indian economy as well as help in solving many social and ecological problems. The fast-adoption of drone technology would give added advantage to India particularly in the sector of agriculture.

Retro-gaming continues to be hot as we head into mid-2018. Over the last year, Nintendo has had great success with the NES and SNES Classic machines, the Atari VCS has inched closer to an official release, and numerous devices like the C64-Mini have either been announced or released. Anecdotally, I also had significant interest in a couple of Amiga and Commodore 64 related emulation articles I wrote over at HotHardware. News hit today, however, that another classic from video gaming's past is about to be revived – the Intellivision game console. In a press release that went out a few hours ago, Intellivision Entertainment announced that industry veteran Tommy Tallarico has been named President of the company.

Their conversation focuses on Watson Services for Core ML, which allows developers to build Watson Machine Learning models in the cloud and deploy applications on Apple iOS devices. IBM Watson Services allows developers to build applications and let Watson do the heavy lifting when it comes to AI and Machine Learning. Watson Studio--with its simple steps and drag-and-drop features--allows developers to create models without being Machine Learning experts. Sridhar discusses how this enables users, developers, and businesses to build better applications. The bottom line is that putting Watson in your pocket is a big deal.

The Pittsburgh renaissance has been covered in many places, including in this column. One area of the tech boom in Pittsburgh that I had not covered is the investor community. Pittsburgh-based Innovation Works is one of the country's top seed investors, and CB Insights ranks it as America's most active investor in robotics. The company's mission is "to introduce, connect, support and expand the startup & entrepreneurial ecosystem within Southwestern Pennsylvania, making our region a center for innovative startups and tech investors from around the country." Innovation Works' portfolio includes companies in the robotics, artificial intelligence, medical devices, retail technologies, and enterprise software fields, among others.

Policy debates over how to solve problems around access to family doctors, wait times for elective surgery, home care, transfer to long-term care, tracking the over-prescription of opioids and many other serious health dilemmas facing Canadians rarely consider the role artificial intelligence (AI) can and will play in offering solutions. But the potential to realize the benefits of AI requires a proactive policy strategy that is geared to the future rather than a reactive approach, constantly focused on managing current crises. This means solutions for tomorrow rather than today and also will require parsing out how to recognize, trade and access the commodity that drives the "gig economy" – data. The Fraser Institute warned that in the next decade Canada's doctor shortage will only worsen, largely because of an increase in the number retiring physicians that will not be replaced fast enough by new or foreign trained doctors. The Canadian Institute for Health Information found that although wait times are improving for hip surgery, they are getting worse for cataract surgery and are remaining constant for a number of other procedures.

In promoting his 10-year tax plan, Malcolm Turnbull suggested people want governments to undertake "long term planning". However, a new research paper out this week from the IMF highlights how economies could be set for a major shake-up in the future and how sticking with the belief that better wages for workers comes from reducing company tax in order to spur capital investment is a rather wishful proposition. Economics research papers generally are not known for their optimism, but the IMF paper titled "Should We Fear the Robot Revolution? This research goes very much to the heart of primary political debate in this country about jobs, equality and the role of government. When Malcolm Turnbull took over the prime ministership he loved to talk about how it was the most exciting time to be alive – innovation was on the rise, agility was all the go! But for many workers it is a rather worrying time. In the past decade since the global financial crisis real wages have stalled, underemployment has risen, wage growth has plummeted, businesses have sought to move away from enterprise bargaining, and the growth areas have been mostly in lower-paid services sectors such as social care. And underneath all that is the feeling – perhaps overstated – that we are soon in danger of being replaced by robots. The IMF paper on the topic notes that there are essentially two camps on this issue – the first is optimistic and believes that, as in the past, greater automation will see some jobs lost, but the demand for many jobs – especially those "that place a premium on creativity, flexibility, and abstract reasoning" – will grow and overall the economy is better off. The other side of the coin are those who note these are not your grandparents' robots we're talking about. These are robots that make use of AI in order to do work previously believed to be non-automatable precisely because it was seen as creative, flexible, or needing abstract reasoning. The paper considered a range of scenarios – from the more traditional one where robots replace only low skilled work to where robots are able to replicate a range of work and then a final one where robots "can do anything". And the results are not good for workers. Essentially the shift sees national income move from labour to capital – as the returns from investing in robots to do work previously done by people increase. They note that "the most common arguments for technology optimism do not stand up to scrutiny". Even in scenarios that fit with the more optimistic view of automation, the paper concludes that "automation is very good for growth and very bad for equality". The authors suggest that "in scenarios where the traditional technology disappears and robots take over the automatable sector, the economy either ascends to a virtuous circle of ongoing endogenous growth or descends into a death spiral of perpetual contraction.

Have you ever wanted to have a real conversation with a chatbot and not just shout basic commands at it? Well now you can with Hugging Face, a social AI chatbot that has meaningful conversation with users. The concept was developed by focusing on how social and entertainment use cases can be applied to machine learning. As computers are getting smarter and more teenagers spend time online, social AI is gaining serious attention. The potential use cases of social AI are endless- not just for entertainment – but also for business.

Europe is ahead in the digital game, says Tata's Consultancy Services COO. But businesses and governments will need to utilise Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to improve services and the quality of life of customers. N. Ganapathy Subramaniam is the Chief Operating Officer of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), an Indian multinational IT service, consulting and business solutions company headquartered in Mumbai. He spoke to EURACTIV's Alexandra Brzozowski on the sidelines of the European Business Summit in Brussels. How could digital economy improve business and public-sector performance?

Provided by AFP Your next job interview may be with this... You have a telephone interview for your dream job, and you're feeling nervous. You make yourself a cup of tea as you wait for the phone to ring, and you count to three before picking up. Now imagine that your interviewer is a robot named Vera. Russian startup Stafory co-founder Alexei Kostarev says Robot Vera, which his company developed, is driven by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.

More and more people are talking about the new economy, and in particular, the role played by robots. As jobs are being eliminated and replaced by robots, governments are losing tax money. There are discussions as to whether robots should be taxed. Most people think of robots as machines with arms and legs: this is the most visible part of artificial intelligence. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg.