An insider's guide to the business and future of connected technology". Then on BioTech Nation, how much do we know about the clinical trials behind drugs approved by the FDA? JENNIFER MILLER, the Founder and President of Bioethics, International and a professor at NYU Medical School, talks about the Good Pharma Scorecard.

Gordon Bell will never forget what I look like. He'll never forget what I sound like, either. Actually, he'll never forget a single detail about me. That's because when I first met the affable 72-year-old computer scientist at the offices of Microsoft Research Labs, in Redmond, Washington, he was carefully recording my every move. He had a tiny bug-eyed camera around his neck, and a small audio recorder at his elbow. As we chatted about various topics--Australian jazz musicians, his futuristic cell phone, the Seattle area's gorgeous weather--Bell's gear quietly logged my every gesture and all my blathering small talk, snapping a picture every 60 seconds. Back at his office, his computer had carefully archived every document related to me: all the email I'd sent him, copies of my articles he'd read, pages he'd surfed on my blog. "Oh, I've got everything," Bell said cheerily. And when I saw him the next day, down in his cramped personal office in San Francisco, he offered to give me a glimpse of the memories he'd collected. He plunked down in front of his computer, pulled up a browser, typed in "Clive Fast Company," and there they were: Hundreds of pictures of the meeting scrolled by on his screen, and the sound of our day-old conversation filled the room. It was a deeply strange feeling. My random chitchat is being preserved? He nodded, pointing to a mundane Dell computer parked beneath his desk. Because I'm not the only thing Gordon Bell will never forget. His goal is never to forget anything.

It has been dubbed the Robo-Olympics, and will see the world's most advanced robots go head to series in a series of ever more challenging events. Twenty five of the top robotics organizations in the world are competing for $3.5 million in prizes, and will take on a gruelling simulated disaster-response course during the two day contest. Robots will try to complete a series of challenge tasks selected by DARPA for their relevance to disaster response. The robots will start in a vehicle, drive to a simulated disaster building, and then they'll have to open doors, walk on rubble, and use tools. There will be a surprise task waiting for the robots at the end - which turned out to be turning a valve.

I teach one of the world's most popular MOOCs (massive online open courses), "Learning How to Learn," with neuroscientist Terrence J. Sejnowski, the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. The course draws on neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and education to explain how our brains absorb and process information, so we can all be better students. Since it launched on the website Coursera in August of 2014, nearly 1 million students from over 200 countries have enrolled in our class. We've had cardiologists, engineers, lawyers, linguists, 12-year-olds, and war refugees in Sudan take the course. We get emails like this one that recently arrived: "I'll keep it short. I've recently completed your MOOC and it has already changed my life in ways you cannot imagine. I just turned 29, am in the middle of a career change to computer science, and I've never been more excited to learn."

NEW YORK, June 6 Ray Bradbury, a giant of American literature who helped popularize science fiction with poetic, cerebral works such as "The Martian Chronicles," died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. Bradbury brought not only futuristic vision but literary sensibilities to his more than 500 works published including "Fahrenheit 451," a classic dystopian novel about book censorship in a future society, and other favorites such as "The Illustrated Man" and "Something Wicked This Way Comes." Bradbury died peacefully, last night, in Los Angeles, after a long illness," said a spokesman for his publisher, HarperCollins, on Wednesday. As a science fiction writer, Bradbury said he did not want to predict the future -- but sometimes wanted to prevent it. Such was the case with "Fahrenheit 451," a book published in 1953 about a totalitarian, anti-intellectual society where banned books are burned by "firemen." The title refers to the temperature at which paper ignites. The novel, which Bradbury wrote on a rented typewriter at the UCLA library, featured a world that might sound familiar to 21st century readers -- wall-sized interactive televisions, earpiece communication systems, omnipresent advertising and political correctness. "In science fiction, we dream," he told The New York Times. "In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities ... to tackle any number of problems, we must imagine the future, including the new technologies that are required ... "Science fiction is also a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present."

Machine ethics offers an alternative solution for artificial intelligence (AI) safety governance. In order to mitigate risks in human-robot interactions, robots will have to comply with humanity's ethical and legal norms, once they've merged into our daily life with highly autonomous capability. In terms of technical challenges, there are still many open questions in machine ethics. For example, what is deontic logic and how can it be used for improving AI safety? How do we fashion the knowledge representation for ethical robots? These are all significant questions for us to investigate. In this interview, we invite Prof. Ronald C. Arkin to share his insights on robot ethics, with a focus on its technical aspects.

Apache Spark is a lightning-fast framework for distributed computing that combines speed, scalability, in-memory processing, and fault tolerance with sophisticated analytics – perfect for dealing with massive datasets. This eBook takes you on a tour of Spark's powerful API; helps you create your first Spark program in Scala, Java, and Python; and gives detailed examples of real-world machine learning models from recommender systems to dimensionality reduction. You'll also learn about advanced topics like working with online machine learning and model evaluation methods using Spark Streaming. This eBook is free for today only so don't miss out!

Ford is investing $1bn (£801m) over the next five years in tech startup Argo AI to help the Detroit company achieve its goal to deliver a fully autonomous vehicle by 2021, the companies announced on Friday. Pittsburgh-based Argo AI was founded last year by Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander who previously worked at Google and Uber respectively on the companies' self-driving vehicle initiatives. "We've made significant progress and are on track to achieve our goal," Ford president and CEO Mark Fields wrote in a Medium post. "At the same time, we know rapidly evolving technologies and fierce competition require us to remain flexible and open to new ways of strengthening our team." In August last year, Ford announced plans to sell fully autonomous self-driving cars, without steering wheels, for urban ride-sharing fleets by 2021.

Initiating joint attention (IJA), the behavioral instigation of coordinated focus of 2 people on an object, emerges over the first 2 years of life and supports social-communicative functioning related to the healthy development of aspects of language, empathy, and theory of mind. Deficits in IJA provide strong early indicators for autism spectrum disorder, and therapies targeting joint attention have shown tremendous promise. However, the brain systems underlying IJA in early childhood are poorly understood, due in part to significant methodological challenges in imaging localized brain function that supports social behaviors during the first 2 years of life. Herein, we show that the functional organization of the brain is intimately related to the emergence of IJA using functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging and dimensional behavioral assessments in a large semilongitudinal cohort of infants and toddlers. In particular, though functional connections spanning the brain are involved in IJA, the strongest brain-behavior associations cluster within connections between a small subset of functional brain networks; namely between the visual network and dorsal attention network and between the visual network and posterior cingulate aspects of the default mode network. These observations mark the earliest known description of how functional brain systems underlie a burgeoning fundamental social behavior, may help improve the design of targeted therapies for neurodevelopmental disorders, and, more generally, elucidate physiological mechanisms essential to healthy social behavior development. The emergence of joint attention (JA), the coordinated orienting of 2 people toward an object or event, occurs during the first 2 years of life, arguably the most dynamic and important period of early child development (Scaife and Bruner 1975). It is theorized that engaging in JA lays the foundation for prosocial cooperative behavior, from basic social-communicative functioning and language development (Premack 2004) to sophisticated forms of empathy (Mundy and Jarrold 2010) and theory of mind (Adolphs 2003). In fact, early exhibition of joint attention is strongly associated with later language ability (Morales et al. 2000; Mundy et al. 2007), and atypical development of the initiation of joint attention (IJA) is strongly indicative of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (Bruinsma et al. 2004). The neural substrates underlying IJA in early childhood are poorly understood (Barak and Feng 2016), due in part to significant methodological challenges in imaging localized brain function that supports social behaviors in children during the first 2 years of life.

The platform is providing a holistic online solution for teachers, students, and parents. Over two decades ago, Educomp set out to change the entire education system in the country. Since then, it claims to have empowered over 30 million learners and educators across over 65,000 schools. While Educomp was continuing to overhaul the education ecosystem through its smart class programmes, the top leadership in the company realised that they needed to take education beyond the conventional classrooms. Now, instead of taking students to classrooms, they had to flip the normal course and take classrooms to students, beyond boundaries.