SYS-CON Events announced today that HTBase will exhibit at SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. HTBase (Gartner 2016 Cool Vendor) delivers a Composable IT infrastructure solution architected for agility and increased efficiency. It turns compute, storage, and fabric into fluid pools of resources that are easily composed and re-composed to meet each application's needs. With HTBase, companies can quickly provision resources and deploy unique, mission-critical, self-designed solutions to add-onto or create any type of infrastructure as per the business requirement. HTBase is the first company to enable a true multi-cloud strategy, enabling organizations to automate movement of data and workloads between private and public clouds.

The AI XPRIZE is a 4-year, $5M competition that challenges teams globally to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful AI technologies to tackle the world's grand challenges. Currently, there are 148 teams in 22 countries competing for the prize, which will be awarded in 2020 on the TED Global stage.

Automation and robots are already a major part of most manufacturers, ranging from car factories to electronics production. But soon, smarter robots could significantly shake up the market for manufacturers. In a new report from Loup Ventures, the venture capital firm predicts that a smarter sub-series of robots could increasingly become a more popular option for manufacturers. Compared to the larger single-purpose robots that are commonly used in fields like automotive assembly, Loup argues that smarter robots, which the report calls co-bots, will be used by more factories over time. These types of robots are defined by their ability to use motion and force-detection sensors to analyze their surroundings and work alongside humans.

If humans walked like robots, engineers already would have perfected zero-effort, mechanically-assisted walking. But what about people who bounce on their toes, power walkers, those who sashay? Habits, diseases, and disabilities can affect someone's gait in unique ways. An idealized exoskeleton needs to be both easily accessible and personalized. The Chipotle of exoskeletons doesn't quite exist yet.

I learned machine learning through competing in Kaggle competitions. I entered my first competitions in 2011, with almost no data science knowledge. I soon ended up in fifth place out of a hundred or so in a stock trading competition. Over the next year, I won several competitions on automated essay scoring and bond price prediction, and placed well in others. Kaggle competitions require a unique blend of skill, luck, and teamwork to win.

Nasa is giving its Curiosity rover more autonomy on its lonely mission across the desolate surface of Mars. Curiosity is normally piloted remotely by humans, but signals can take as long as 24 minutes to get from Earth to Mars. Nasa has decided to allow Curiosity's autonomous systems, which are used to pick out rocks to fire lasers at, more control to streamline missions. Since May 2016, AEGIS accurately selected desired targets over 2.5 km (1.5 miles) of unexplored Martian terrain 94 per cent of the time (left chart), compared to the 24 per cent (right chart) expected without the software. Curiosity's AEGIS software, or Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science, is used to direct and fire Curiosity's ChemCam instrument.

Space agencies and private companies alike have ramped up efforts to bring humans further than ever before. But, according to a series of new studies, robots may be the ones leading the way in future space endeavours. Scientists say humans in orbit could operate robotic systems down at the surface by relying on telepresence, enabling virtual exploration – and, some even say artificially intelligent probes could learn to carry out missions almost entirely on their own. By deploying astronauts to a planet's orbit, such as Mars, humans could control the instruments down below in real-time. And, this would allow them to essentially use a'robotic surrogate' – meaning the researchers could experience the surface environment virtually Curiosity is normally piloted remotely by humans, but signals can take up to 24 minutes to get from Earth to Mars. Nasa has decided to allow Curiosity's autonomous systems, which are used to pick out rocks to fire lasers at, more control to streamline missions.

A leading economist has inadvertently caused a storm by saying he preferred the voice on the iPhone Siri virtual assistant to be male because he felt that made it more trustworthy. Nobel prize laureate Sir Christopher Pissarides's comments at a conference in Norway attracted fierce criticism. He told the BBC he apologised for upsetting people and his comment was meant to be "light-hearted". "It's a mistake and I'm sorry, but the audience was laughing." Sir Christopher was part of an all-male panel taking part in a Q&A audience discussion at the Starmus Festival in Trondheim about the future of humanity.

Many marketers anticipate that technologies like augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) will affect their business in the next 12 months, more so than a year prior. That's according to a study by marketing and advertising services firm NewBase (formerly Publicitas International), which polled 1,019 marketers worldwide and asked them which types of technologies they plan to prioritize over the next 12 months. Respondents chose their top 5. In 2017, 30% of respondents planned to prioritize AI in the next 12 months. A year prior, only 13% of respondents said the same.

A persisting question in biology asks whether nature or nurture represents the primary determinant of biological variation among individuals of the same species. "Both," explains Levin as he describes the complex interaction of the two elements in a living being. "If we use an analogy comparing biological processes to a computational system, DNA specifies the hardware, and electrical transmission among cells is akin to the software. Electrical impulses are not only occurring in the brain; they are transmitted among cells throughout the body. DNA determines the expression of electrically-active proteins in cells, but an individual organism's electrical dynamics are unique and based on external factors as well as internal ones. In nature, living cells are programmed to perform computations and make decisions about patterning, healing, and regeneration of the body. If we can tap into those regulatory algorithms using mathematical models, we may find ways in the future to re-program cancer cells, and induce regenerative repair - as we are already doing in some animal model systems. We see our research as an important step toward a better understanding of these processes, hopefully enabling other scientists to expand on our findings toward biomedical applications."