IN A 2016 survey commissioned by software giant Microsoft, the company discovered that business leaders in Singapore are showing urgency in embracing the "Fourth Industrial Revolution", defined as the use of technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), advanced data analytics, and mixed reality, all powered by cloud computing. Three quarters of business leaders believe that they need to transform to a digital business to enable future growth. In just a few short years, both artificial intelligence and machine learning have become more efficient and accessible by more people. Jordi Ribas, Microsoft's corporate vice president in charge of AI products, said when people think of AI, they often think of high-tech, visible products like robots or AI-powered vehicles. What many people don't realise, Mr Ribas said, is that AI also is having a tangible impact on most people's lives through products like search or Microsoft's Office 365 productivity suite of apps.

Embrace by Empatica is a smart watch for epilepsy management to identify convulsive seizures and send alerts to caregivers. Empatica, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, received FDA clearance for a wristworn device that uses machine learning to alert people with epilepsy and their caregivers of a convulsive seizure and track their duration and frequency. Epilepsy affects a least 2.2 million people, according to data from the Epilepsy Foundation. Empatica's Emrace device assesses multiple indicators of a seizure, including electrodermal activity, a signal associated with fight or flight response that's used by stress researchers to quantify physiological changes related to sympathetic nervous system activity, the company statement noted. In a clinical trial of the device, 135 patients across multiple sites resided at epilepsy monitoring units with continuous monitoring with video-EEG and simultaneously wore an Empatica device.

As if SpaceX's successful Falcon Heavy launch wasn't impressive enough, the firm managed to complete another remarkable feat as the megarocket blasted off to Mars. Stunning video from today's launch shows the twin boosters returning to Cape Canaveral in a synchronized landing. The massive rocket launched at 3:45 p.m. ET, carrying Elon Musk's cherry red Tesla roadster on board. Just over three minutes into the launch, the side boosters detached from the rocket and launch operators confirmed the rocket was on the right trajectory. After shedding from the core section of the rocket, the two reusable side boosters landed seamlessly back on Earth about eight minutes into the launch.

If you've been in Silicon Valley, Pittsburgh, Boston, San Francisco, or any of the other cities where autonomous cars are crawling the streets in a 21st century version of drivers ed, maybe you've wondered: What's up with that overgrown gumdrop-looking spinning thing on the roof? That, dear carbon-based life form, is lidar, perhaps the most important piece of hardware in the race to unlock self-driving cars for everybody. Lidar works much like radar, but instead of sending out radio waves it emits pulses of infrared light--aka lasers invisible to the human eye--and measures how long they take to come back after hitting nearby objects. It does this millions of times a second, then compiles the results into a so-called point cloud, which works like a 3-D map of the world in real time--a map so detailed it can be used not just to spot objects but to identify them. Once it can identify objects, the car's computer can predict how they will behave, and thus how it should drive.

Artificial intelligence healthcare technology company Medopad has just landed $28 million in a Series A funding round with lead investments from China's NWS Holdings. But the company announced that its goal is to raise $120 million in the next few months. This funding comes after Medopad struck a series of 15 trade deals with Chinese firms, collectively worth more than $140 million (100 million pounds). Medopad was a member of the trade delegation that the UK recently sent to Beijing and Shanghai. "We now have several amazing strategic investors in the business, which is a great achievement for us as we gear for significant growth and scale our business," Dan Vahdat, CEO of Medopad, said in a statement.

It will take Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster about six months to drive all the way to Mars, after his company SpaceX fired the electric car into space Feb. 6 during its Falcon Heavy rocket's maiden launch. But for those who can't take the anticipation, there is a way to check in on the car and the dummy astronaut in its driver's seat. Musk shared a link to a SpaceX stream that cycles through camera views of the Tesla sports car as it floats through space and shows the vehicle's progress on its journey to Mars. Falcon Heavy became the largest functional rocket in the world upon its successful launch this week, after months of delays. In addition to the Roadster, with astronaut Starman aboard, the rocket was also carrying science-fiction author Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and a toy version of the electric car, among other items.

Various technologies at Microsoft that began transforming the lives of individuals and communities in India last year will gain further momentum in 2018, the company's President Anant Maheshwari said on Tuesday. In a mission statement, Maheshwari said he is proud to play a role in the transformation of India's core pillars of education, health care, agriculture and governance, among others. Today, about 25 per cent students drop out from grade 10 to grade 11. "We have partnered with Andhra Pradesh government to see how machine learning can help educators foresee signs of a student being on the risk of dropping out and take preventive action. In 2017, the government expanded the rollout of the programme to all 13 districts in the state," Maheshwari said. Microsoft has also initiated "Project Sangam" that aims to upskill the workforce to prepare it for jobs that exist now and in the future.

If the fragmented media environment is a sick patient, machine learning may be the cure. That was the proposition Andrew Heyward, visiting scholar from MIT's Media Laboratory and former president of CBS News, outlined in his presentation, "Can Robots Solve Your PR Problems?" at the New York offices of agency Makovsky on Feb. 6. Heyward and his colleagues at MIT Media Lab's Laboratory for Social Machines are studying artificial intelligence solutions to modern plights of the PR practitioner: fake news, polarization, the public's lack of faith in journalism and short attention spans, to name a few. Heyward's group uses machine learning algorithms as their primary tool to map and track the overall health of the public sphere. And soon, PR pros may be able to use those AI insights to make better decisions--whether they're managing a crisis or planning a national campaign. Here are four PR applications of AI and machine learning shared by Heyward.

In theory, the only technology capable of hacking a system run by artificial intelligence is another, more powerful AI system. That's one reason why the U.S. Army incorporated a powerful AI capabilities into its drone systems that is expected to provide the ultimate cybersecurity -- at least, for now. "It's an arms race," said Walter O'Brien, CEO of Scorpion Computer Services, whose AI system runs and protects the Army's UAV operations. "Now I have an AI protecting the data center, and now the enemy would have to have an AI to attack my AI, and now it's which AI is smarter."

"The sensationalist coverage these stories receive isn't very helpful and obscures the main issues," author Chris Middleton told Sputnik. "We're not talking about C-3P0 sitting at your desk, we're talking about smart devices, industrial machines, drones, autonomous vehicles, plus software that automates technology." Accountancy firm PwC analysed 200,000 jobs across 29 countries and suggests the first wave of job losses will begin in the early 2020s. "When you look at financial services, a lot of jobs are relatively routine jobs such as data analysis," said PwC chief economist John Hawksworth who suggests the closure of bank branches is indicative of the current situation. Around six and eight percent of positions in the financial sector could be lost because "a lot of jobs are relatively routine jobs such as data analysis," he said.