Human susceptibility to epidemics of misinformation and disease has grown manyfold as the world we inhabit keeps getting smaller due to increased access to online information and soaring global mobility. Social media platforms have changed the way we consume information [Schmidt et al., 2017], and more and more people find their news through social media [Newman et al., 2015]. Following the 2016 presidential election in the United States, there have been investigations into the spread of false stories, or "fake news" on social media, and based on web browsing data, archives of fact-checking websites, and results from an online survey, a recent study found that social media were an important source of election news [Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017]. While ascertainment of social network structures is generally difficult using traditional survey-based approaches, such as name generators, which are survey questions designed to solicit information about friends and acquaintances of a subject, online platforms readily capture the structure of large-scale social networks, therefore making them well suited to study spread of information whether accurate or not. Further, although the transmission mechanisms are very different, the spread of information in online systems has many similarities to the spread of infectious diseases among hosts in a population. From a mathematical and statistical point of view, one can therefore investigate the spread of pathogens and the spread of information in the same framework as long as the network structure accurately captures the transmission pathways and the spreading process is parametrized appropriately. In this paper, we consider a simple susceptible-infected (SI) process and a more complex spreading process on a fixed and known network structure. This spreading process may be conceptualized as propagating either a pathogen or a piece of information. We focus on addressing two distinct questions that are relevant in both settings: (1) How to infer the unknown parameters associated with the spreading process?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the use of an algorithm which monitors patients' vitals to help predict sudden death from heart attacks or respiratory failure. The algorithm, named the Wave Clinical Platform, was developed by medical technology company ExcelMedical. The platform senses subtle changes in vitals and sends alerts up to six hours before a potentially lethal event could occur. The algorithm monitors patients continuously, a feat that is frankly impossible for human medical professionals to realistically accomplish. Resources in the healthcare industry are stretched thin, especially where staffing is concerned. Speaking to Digital Trends, ExcelMedical's Chief Strategy Officer Mary Baum said, "We do not have enough physicians or nurses, and we have an aging population who are sicker and who need more resources and services."

Elon Musk is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has plans to colonize Mars, and thinks AI may turn humans into its pets. But beyond the hype and his enormous net worth and Twitter presence, here's how Musk's companies are actually taking on ... virtually every industry. Elon Musk thinks and acts on a larger, more cosmic scale than we're accustomed to from entrepreneurs. Elon Musk has become a household name synonymous with the future. Whether he's working on electric vehicles (Tesla) or sending rockets into space (SpaceX), his larger-than-life reputation attracts its fair share of hero-worship. Musk can get a hundred breathless reporters to write about him and his companies with little more than a concept drawing and a tweet. His main projects take on almost every major industry and global problem conceivable, and imagine a disruptive fundamental rewiring of that space or sector. Whether he can deliver on his vast promises is often beside the point. And Musk himself is more than happy to feed into this hype machine. We've decided to take a different kind of look into the Musk ecosystem. Rather than assess Elon Musk and his companies on promises and hype, we wanted to look at the ways in which his companies are or are not transforming the industries in which they live -- with numbers, hard evidence, and concrete demonstrations of disruption. Read on for a deep dive into just how the money, invention, and ingenuity of Elon Musk and his companies are transforming these vital industries. First with SolarCity and now with Tesla, eliminating our dependence on fossil fuels and instead drawing energy from the "giant fusion reactor in the sky" aka the sun has been one of Musk's priorities for more than a decade. SolarCity, his first attempt to make solar power mainstream and ubiquitous, was at the forefront of the early 2000s "solar gold rush." In some ways it was a failure, but it remains important to understand its trajectory to understand how Musk and Tesla plan to take on the problem of renewable energy. SolarCity grew to become the country's largest provider of residential solar, then suffered some very public financial problems before being purchased by Musk's other company, Tesla, for $2 billion. That 2016 acquisition was controversial, with many observers calling it a "thinly veiled bailout." And yet Tesla's continuation of SolarCity's work has helped make a stronger case for solar than SolarCity was ever able to make on its own. Elon Musk originally suggested the concept for the company that became SolarCity to his cousins, Peter and Lyndon Rive, in 2004. The concept for SolarCity emerged out of a simple realization: the clock was running low on fossil fuels. The need for a replacement was emerging fast. "If they started now," as Men's Journal reports Musk telling Lyndon in 2004, "They might rule the market."

Artificial intelligence (AI) – the ability of computers to learn human-like functions or tasks – has shown great promise. What was previously considered the sole domain of human cognition is already being leveraged successfully across many industries. Now, the technology sector is witnessing what appears to be important new advances in AI that are bringing a new wave of interest for how it might shape the future of health and healthcare. The rapid digitization of health data through the use of heath information technology (health IT) in the United States has created major opportunities in the use of AI. Innovators and experts see potential in using digital health data to improve healthcare and health outcomes from the home to the clinic to the community.

The healthcare industry is primed for artificial intelligence to reshape the delivery of medical care, according to a group of independent scientists. But the technology can only live up to its hype if AI algorithms have access to high-quality data sets. In a report (PDF) commissioned by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), an advisory group of scientists and academics known as JASON acknowledged the significant hype surrounding AI. But they also pointed to a "confluence" of forces that are likely to drive AI adoption, including frustration with legacy systems, widespread use of networked devices and the public's broader acclimation to services like Amazon that emphasize convenience. "Most importantly, the report indicates that the use of artificial intelligence in health and healthcare is promising--and doable," officials with ONC, AHRQ and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation wrote in a blog post.

The government wants to establish a leading position in Europe as a tech finance and AI leader, with the news that it will strengthen links with France in the tech and artificial intelligence sectors. The cross channel collaboration has seen both countries agree to a digital conference later this year to promote deeper integration in the digital economy. It comes as the UK undertakes a charm offensive with the French in an effort to gain its support for a positive Brexit deal. For many years now the United Kingdom has been the top country in Europe for global tech investors. Indeed, its tech firms have attracted more venture capital funding than any other European country in 2017.

There will be many people who will say it does exist and has working technologies, hardware and software. It is an interesting error in thinking to focus on closed system devices/products as to what Ubiquity (IoT3) is. Devices are used to get across the point of various types of connections and networks being accessed. But more importantly in a full implementation of the concept of Ubiquity (often described as the IoT) devices may not even be owned anymore. The ownership of devices ceases to be important if you can own your digital identity, can verify it and establish your own ecosystem of assets in Blockchain.

The Liberal Democratic Party wants to legalize professional gaming tournaments, joining a groundswell that started last summer amid speculation that video games will become an Olympic medal sport by 2024. Arcane laws meant to stop illegal gambling have prevented paid video game tournaments in the country, stunting the domestic market even as esports has become a multibillion-dollar global industry. Over the past few months, negotiations between four esports groups and the consumer protection agency have yielded a workaround to exempt professional gamers from the rules. Takeo Kawamura, a lawmaker from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's LDP, said the ruling party might be willing to go further, by amending laws to ensure people's rights to earn a living playing games. The goal, he said, is to remove impediments and make it possible to win Olympic medals someday.

He concludes with making the claim that humans probably represent the limit of vertebrate evolution. We will need to work together for the next phase in evolution, just like the unicellular organisms did when they became multicellular. All evolutionary processes are repeated patterns that look the same i.e. fractals. This gets quite interesting if we think of technology progress and adoption as a form of cultural evolution that follows a similar pattern. The AI era looks like a'zoomed out' fractal of the electricity era. We have a better ability to observe the fractal nature of cultural evolution now, because technology shifts are happening in shorter time scales following the law of accelerating returns. And it is going to get even faster.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already impacting our lives in many ways. From intelligent video curation on Alphabet's (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) YouTube and Google web search to Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) Siri personal assistant, AI is already making our lives easier. AI can also help corporations and customers fight against rapidly evolving cyberthreats. For instance, FireEye's (NASDAQ:FEYE) Helix cybersecurity platform is able to automate threat detection and prevention with the help of this emerging technology. The early adoption of AI by Alphabet, Apple, and FireEye could help them steal a march over rivals.