Innovative mobile apps married to increasingly powerful artificial intelligence (A.I.) are rapidly getting smarter -- making them even more helpful for users. These kinds of apps, showcased at VentureBeat's two-day MobileBeat conference here this week, are designed to anticipate user needs. Who knew, for example, that you can use your smartphone to simplify the process of getting a green card to enter the United States or to streamline corporate travel? The program is based on a bot that walks users through a series of simple questions that, when answered, generates a package of documents you can file with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to complete the application process. "When I came to this country, I needed a visa urgently, but it took a month," said Visibot's co-founder and chief operating officer, Andrey Ziniviev.

From crop dusting to package delivery, commercial drones are about to become a part of everyday life. "Just in the last 18 months, we've registered twice as many unmanned aircraft (as) we registered all aircraft from the previous 100 years," said Earl Lawrence, director of the Federal Aviation Administration's Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Office. To safely integrate the vast numbers of new unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) into the nation's airspace, the FAA is relying on a group of 23 research institutions led by Mississippi State University. The Alliance for System Safety of UAS through Research Excellence (ASSURE) is conducting in-depth studies on virtually every aspect of drone operations, including air traffic control, pilot certification and crash avoidance. "What happens when a drone hits a wing or a windshield or any other part of the aircraft is (one) of our key questions," Lawrence said.

Like every other industry sector, project management is being transformed by new technologies, such as big data, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). "Large projects generate huge amounts of complex data that needs to be analysed and monitored to create valuable insights and predictions about a project's progress. Fed with the right data, AI systems could accurately produce information on budgets or estimated time frames in real time, something that even the most experienced human project managers could never do." In a recent survey of project managers by AXELOS, a UK government and Capita joint venture, 57 per cent expect AI and machine-learning to have a profound impact on project management, with 59 per cent believing that as automation increases, daily routine tasks of project management will no longer be a burden on them.

Corrosive acids such as those used in last night's attacks in London can be found and purchased online within minutes. Googling "sulphuric acid", for instance, instantly brings up a row of products, most of which cost less than £10, that sits right across the top of the page. One of the first search results is described as a "high strength" product that should be "handled with extreme care as [it] can cause severe burns". The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

When Afghan 10th-grader Fatemeh Qaderian learned that her girls' robotics team had been denied visas to attend an international competition in Washington -- despite applying twice -- the 14-year-old said she "lost hope." "We worked hard and spent a lot of time," said Qaderian, who flew back and forth with her teammates from their hometown in western Afghanistan to apply at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. "I called my parents and told them what happened, and they were upset, too." Those emotions morphed into elation as Qaderian and her teammates boarded a plane at Kabul International Airport on Friday morning en route to next week's competition, having been granted visas thanks to last-minute intervention by the Trump administration. "It's impossible to express how excited I am," Qaderian said.

The University of Agder invites applications for a full-time permanent position as Professor at the Department of Information and Communication Technology, Faculty of Engineering and Science. The position is currently located in Grimstad, Norway. The starting date is negotiable. The primary aim of this position is to strengthen the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR), to be hosted by the Department of ICT. The vision of CAIR is to provide an attractive environment for cutting-edge research on artificial intelligence (AI), focusing particularly on machine learning.

Nasa has announced it can't afford to land humans on Mars. The space agency has discussed plans for landing people on the red planet for some time, but it doesn't look possible right now. While it may still be able to fly astronauts to Mars, entry and landing is an entirely different matter. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Have you ever imagined yourself living in a city where everything seems to be magical, where public services have great quality, where you know the best time you can go to your office or school avoiding traffic, and where the city itself talks to you and supports you in your daily activities? Well, this city is already under development, thanks to the revolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques that makes a city to understand its situation in real time, and to act to change something that is going wrong, without a person to take a decision for it. Welcome to the world of Cognitive Cities. According to the United Nations, the world will be predominantly urban by 2050, when more than 60% of the people will live in cities. That's mainly because it is in cities that the opportunities of good jobs, education, health and social interactions are. When people share a space with efficient resources and services to enable their daily activities, no matter these activities are, they can live better and can expect a better future for themselves and their beloveds.

Fukuoka Mayor Soichiro Takashima hopes to make his city a living laboratory for such cutting-edge technology. About 70 percent of the city will be covered by the LoRaWAN network this fiscal year, setting a wide testing ground for future services. True, it's difficult to find a place to test these technologies in a real-life environment as it often requires social infrastructure and the removal of legal restrictions. The city of Fukuoka also carried out two drone tests last November and December between the city center and Nokonoshima Island in the middle of Hakata Bay, about 2.5 km offshore.

An update from the Wild Wild West of fake news technologies: A team of computer scientists have figured out how to make words come out of the mouth of former President Barack Obama -- on video -- by using artificial intelligence. If you've been on the Internet at any point in the last year, there's a good chance you've come across fake news articles. Well, soon enough we may see a wellspring of fake news videos. As a team out of the University of Washington explains in a new paper entitled "Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Sync from Audio," they've made several fake videos of President Obama. Take for example, a time that he discussed the Pulse nightclub shooter and said "the investigation is ongoing, but we know that the killer was an angry and disturbed individual who took in extremist information and propaganda over the Internet." Obama did in fact say these words.