Professor Stephen Hawking isn't afraid to state his opinion bluntly and honestly. He has publicly expressed his fears about the future of artificial intelligence (AI), the need for a new Space Age, the serious realities of global warming, how we might reach another Solar System, and that, as a species, humans must leave Earth in order to survive. Hawking has previously stated that our time on Earth is limited to 100 years, after originally estimating 1,000 years. But, in a new announcement in a video presentation this past Sunday, November 5th at the Tencent Web Summit in Beijing, he gave the human species less than 600 years before we will need to leave Earth, according to the British newspaper The Sun. Earlier in the year, Hawking said that: "We are running out of space and the only places to go to are other worlds. It is time to explore other solar systems. Spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth."

According to Medcrave, in a smart city, an AI Platform tracks citizen's habits, activities, and behavioral characteristics. Data and products can be personalised to meet and anticipate each user's unique and changing needs. Each citizen will have one's own digital personal assistant. Artificial intelligence can help governments handle their regulations monitoring by creating a natural language processing system to read through the legalities of regulations and reassemble the words into a set of computer-understandable rules. As per Digit, in the recent times, IBM Watson has been partnering with Indian Government to bring Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the daily lives of its people.

Uber is setting its sights on the skies with UberAir. Uber announced it will bring flying cars to Dallas and now Los Angeles by 2020. SAN FRANCISCO -- Uber has a host of issues to contend with, from remaking its corporate culture to battling unfriendly cities. But the ride-hailing company is nonetheless forging ahead with plans to make a Blade Runner vision of transportation -- self-flying cars-- a reality by 2020. Uber chief product officer Jeff Holden planned to announce at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon Wednesday that Los Angeles will join Dallas as the first two cities to host the company's proposed network of flying vehicles.

Post offices are often at the forefront of new technology, as developing efficient systems for delivering mail is essential for keeping costs down for users. Computer systems, in particular, hold tremendous potential for scanning and routing mail, allowing post offices to lower costs. Accenture has released a report, entitled "The New Delivery Paradigm," that examines 25 post offices through Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific. For an average post and parcel industry, the analysis reveals that $500 million per year in value is possible through investment in advanced digital technologies. Increased competition and lower demand for mail is placing pressure on many post offices, but new investment could help cut costs, particularly when it comes to handling the so-called "last mile" of delivery.

When you think of artificial intelligence, the field of botany probably isn't uppermost in your mind. When you picture settings for cutting-edge computational research, century-old museums may not top the list. And yet, a just-published article in the Biodiversity Data Journal shows that some of the most exciting and portentous innovation in machine learning is taking place at none other than the National Herbarium of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The paper, which demonstrates that digital neural networks are capable of distinguishing between two similar families of plants with rates of accuracy well over 90 percent, implies all sorts of mouth-watering possibilities for scientists and academics going forward. The study relies on software grounded in "deep learning" algorithms, which allow computer programs to accrue experience in much the same way human experts do, upping their game each time they run.

Dr. Sumeet Dua is currently an upchurch endowed associate professor and the coordinator of IT research at Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, USA. He received his PhD in computer science from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His areas of expertise include data mining, image processing and computational decision support, pattern recognition, data warehousing, biomedical informatics, and heterogeneous distributed data integration. The National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), the Air Force Office of Sponsored Research (AFOSR), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Louisiana Board of Regents (LA-BoR) have funded his research with over $2.8 million. He frequently serves as a study section member (expert panelist) for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and panelist for the National Science Foundation (NSF)/CISE Directorate.

PARIS – Sheep learned to recognize Barack Obama after seeing his photo a few dozen times, says a study that suggested our four-legged friends may be smarter than we think. The former U.S. president was one of four celebrities used in a test of the woolly creatures' face-recognition skills, along with Harry Potter actress Emma Watson, British TV host Fiona Bruce and American actor Jake Gyllenhaal, the research team said. "We chose these people because there were lots of images of each person available online, both front-on and taken at different angles," said study co-author Jennifer Morton of the University of Cambridge. "We also chose them because we were sure that our sheep had never met them in person." Morton and a team trained eight sheep to recognize the faces from a frontal photo of each of them.

This week, The Forbes School of Business and Technology at Ashford University in San Diego hosted a'thought leadership' summit. Forbes CEO Steve Forbes keynoted, and the school invited executives, military leaders, and select Forbes contributors. I was honored to receive such an invitation, so I attended in order to cover the event for the Forbes.com The topics covered many areas of interest to executives, including leadership, capital allocation, human resources, technology, and marketing. From my perspective focusing on digital transformation – essentially, stories of disruption in the enterprise – I sought out such stories at the event.

Today, Amazon and the Max Planck Society announced that they intend to enter into a strategic collaboration to promote research in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Amazon plans to build an Amazon Research Center adjacent to the campus of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tuebingen. As part of the Cyber Valley initiative, the new center intends to bring together international key players from science and industry to concentrate their research activities in the field of AI. Amazon plans to invest 1.25 million Euro over the coming years to fund research groups in Tuebingen's Cyber Valley tech initiative. Cyber Valley was launched in December 2016 and focuses on AI research, such as robotics, machine learning and computer vision.

Amidst all the talk about how artificial intelligence (AI) is threatening society with great harm--beginning with taking over human-held jobs and then, eventually, becoming more intelligent and taking over the entire world--some experts believe that AI shouldn't be feared. Foremost among these experts is Google's director of engineering and notable "future teller" Ray Kurzweil, who has said time and again that the technological singularity won't necessarily go down as expected. Kurzweil discussed the future of AI at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, D.C. on Friday. And, while he agreed with Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk who warned of the potential "existential risks" a super-intelligent AI could bring, Kurzweil said that humanity would be able to overcome these "difficult episodes," if they ever actually happen. He continued by noting that scientific and technological advancements always come with inherent risks and that AI should not be considered any more (or less) of a threat.