But just such a change appears to be happening now. In a great wave of technological change, sensors are spreading through factories and warehouses, software is predicting the need for maintenance before a machine breaks down, power grids and loading docks are becoming intelligent, and custom-designed parts are being produced on demand. The leaders of the next industrial revolution are companies making advances in fields such as robotics, machine learning, digital fabrication (including 3D printing), the Industrial Internet, the Internet of Things (IoT), data analytics and blockchain (a system of decentralized, automated transaction verification). Because these technologies all reinforce the others' impact, they are leading to a new level of proficiency, and to new types of opportunities and challenges for business and for society at large. One key indicator is that conventional boundaries between industries are eroding. It's getting harder to tell the difference between, say, a telecommunications company and an entertainment producer, or between a retail bank and a retail store. The relationships among suppliers, producers, and consumers are also blurring, more rapidly than many business decision makers are prepared for. The foundation of business strategy has long been the classic value chain, which links together raw materials producers, manufacturers, distributors, and (in the end) consumers through a well-established commercial infrastructure characterized by a stable set of transactions. But the rise of digital technology enables individuals to connect outside the value chain and deliver more efficient, effective products and services. This will reduce the importance of economies of scale and conventional divisions of labor. Relationships among companies will be more fluid and the price and cost of goods and services more volatile than they are today.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is hot topic these days. Along with robotics and automation, depending on who you listen to AI is either the most wonderful or most disastrous development in human history. Will AI take your job away? Will it free you from boring or dangerous tasks so you can enjoy life? Will it lead to World War III or a Star Trek like Utopia?

The sea and ocean environment has long been explored using some of the most sophisticated technology tools. Today's technologies make it child's play to explore natural environments under the sea. The American Goddard Space Flight Center, which belongs to NASA, relies on machine learning to track microscopic algal growth in oceans. The microalgae, which float on the water's surface, are largely responsible for producing oxygen, an element essential for supporting life. Many underwater observations rely on advanced detection technologies.

A new technique using artificial intelligence to predict where deforestation is most likely to occur could help the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) preserve its shrinking rainforest and cut carbon emissions, researchers have said. Congo's rainforest, the world's second-largest after the Amazon, is under pressure from farms, mines, logging and infrastructure development, scientists say. Protecting forests is widely seen as one of the cheapest and most effective ways to reduce the emissions driving global warming. But conservation efforts in DRC have suffered from a lack of precise data on which areas of the country's vast territory are most at risk of losing their pristine vegetation, said Thomas Maschler, a researcher at the World Resources Institute (WRI). "We don't have fine-grain information on what is actually happening on the ground," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Deep learning (DL) is a branch of machine learning that learns multiple levels of representations from data [1, 2]. DL has been successfully applied in pattern recognition and classification tasks such as image recognition and language processing. Recently, the application of DL to physics research is rapidly growing, such as in particle physics [3-7], nuclear physics [8], and condensed matter physics [9-14]. DL is shown to be very powerful in extracting pertinent features especially for complex nonlinear systems with high-order correlations that conventional techniques are unable to tackle. This suggests that it could be utilized to unveil hidden information from the highly implicit data of heavy-ion experiments.

Using Azure, gave them an immediate global reach in a way unthinkable just a few years earlier. Their mission is to bring big data analytics to utilities and smart cities, and one of their focus areas is electric utilities and smart grids. It is a story that combines drones with intelligent software to prevent power blackouts, or as eSmart puts it "making Azure intelligence mobile". To see Connected Drone in action, please watch this video. The economic impact of blackouts is massive, and the scale of power grids is huge.

Artificial Intelligence will disrupt every industry; that seems to be pretty much accepted now. But rather than asking how, many seem to be waiting for some innovative company to invent the AI product that will solve their problem. If someone invents the solution to your problem, they also invent the solution to your competitors' problem, and you're at no greater advantage. But of more concern is that the inventor of the next disruptive AI innovation in your industry might find they are so good at solving your problem, they become your competitor. New AI tech is all very exciting.

The combination of argumentation and probability paves the way to new accounts of qualitative and quantitative uncertainty, thereby offering new theoretical and applicative opportunities. Due to a variety of interests, probabilistic argumentation is approached in the literature with different frameworks, pertaining to structured and abstract argumentation, and with respect to diverse types of uncertainty, in particular the uncertainty on the credibility of the premises, the uncertainty about which arguments to consider, and the uncertainty on the acceptance status of arguments or statements. Towards a general framework for probabilistic argumentation, we investigate a labelling-oriented framework encompassing a basic setting for rule-based argumentation and its (semi-) abstract account, along with diverse types of uncertainty. Our framework provides a systematic treatment of various kinds of uncertainty and of their relationships and allows us to retrieve (by derivation) multiple statements (sometimes assumed) or results from the literature.

Ring's second-generation video doorbell adds a quick release rechargeable battery and boosts video resolution from 720p to 1080p. It remains one of the only video doorbells that can provide its own power instead of relying on your home's existing wiring. Like the previous version we tested, we set up the Ring Video Doorbell 2 in its wireless configuration, mounting the unit in the same, somewhat awkward, location outside our front door. While much of the setup process remains the same, one key difference is the addition of a removable lithium ion battery. This means you can physically install the doorbell while waiting for the battery to charge.

An underwater robot deployed into one of Fukushima's defunct nuclear reactors discovered what appeared to be hunks of melted fuel debris. Video recorded by the robot showed "lava-like" lumps inside the submerged No. 3 reactor. The robot was sent into the reactor through a pipe meant to prevent the escape of radioactive gas, Reuters reported Thursday. Operators aimed for the machine to locate radioactive melted fuel rods in order to remove them and continue decommissioning the plant. Discovering the melted fuel would mark a major accomplishment for plant's cleanup process.