You've read about cities installing smart parking meters and noise- and air-quality sensors, but are you ready to embrace the idea of a city brain? The residents of Singapore are on track to do just that. Creating a centralized dashboard view of sensors deployed across a distributed network is nothing new, but it takes on a bigger -- perhaps ominous -- meaning when deployed across a major city. Many technologically advanced cities worldwide are exploring ways to build such comprehensive digital views for managing traffic and parking, monitoring water and air quality, and offering such citizen-facing services as web-based tools for interacting with government agencies. Some smart city experts call this system approach a "city brain" or, less glamorously, a "municipal backplane."

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People in the FinTech space like to say that FinTech will disrupt financial services beyond recognition, causing mass disruption of its delivery to consumers. Artificial intelligence ("AI") will disrupt all financial services, indeed all of our society. Technically, AI is intelligence created by machines or software, sometimes called machine learning and sometimes confused with robotics. Robotics is just the robotization of something – if is has the capability to learn, then robotics can be AI. The artificial intelligence and robotics market combined was worth US$10.7 billion in 2014 and is expected to be worth US$153 billion by 2020, and to have a disruptive impact of between US$14 to US$33 trillion.

This year's STATE OF THE ARTS 2016: A.I. and for Good and Music that Transforms focuses on the power of artificial (or machine) intelligence and music to transform our lives. From personal wellbeing, to education, arts and healing, this year's event will honor both 2016 FutureVision Awardees; inventor of iWithin, Eric Shuss, and musician and composer, Ricky Kej. With fear and trepidation around the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI.) and the even more powerful thinking and learning Artificial General Intelligence (A.G.I.), we will explore a future where A.I. becomes a force for good, and helps integrate with humanity to make this world and our next worlds, a better place. The panel will discuss the evolution of AI and AGI, today's reality and tomorrow's potential for super-intelligences to positiviely help raise our consciousness and transform life as we know it. The evening will culminate in the presentation of the annual c3 FutureVision Awards preceded by a presentation and short film by FutureVision Awardee musician Ricky Kej, a Grammy-nominated composer and creator of Shanti Samsara: World Music for Environmental Consciousness.

A hotel bed will no longer just be a place to enjoy a comfortable night's sleep, as future travelers will be able to choose their own dreams before dozing off - thanks to neuro-technology Amazing photographs of horses smiling and... Have YOU been on one of Britain's ¿ghost trains¿? The... It's illegal to be drunk in charge of a cow and 36% of... Revealing the bottom of your shoes, tipping and giving the... Next year's hot destinations are KAZAKHSTAN and INVERNESS:... Amazing photographs of horses smiling and... Have YOU been on one of Britain's ¿ghost trains¿? The... It's illegal to be drunk in charge of a cow and 36% of... Revealing the bottom of your shoes, tipping and giving the... Next year's hot destinations are KAZAKHSTAN and INVERNESS:... Hotels will self-assemble and morph from one design to another based on consumer's votes Autonomous robots can be designed online before arrival and can be programmed with special talents, skills, languages and information to help make the hotel stay exceptional. Dr Canton explained: 'Let's say I was on the Amalfi coast and there was only one hotel in this little town. An entrepreneur at a high-tech start up for just one month in the summer could create a pop-up hotel.

Urban areas continue to vex the US military as tall buildings and narrow streets keep impeding troop communications and tactics. While ground soldiers have used single drones for years, DARPA believes that a whole swarm could mitigate those disadvantages, giving units more eyes and guns. Since the military is currently unable to control such swarms, DARPA is launching a new program to develop both drone-wrangling tech and the tactics they'd need to assist soldiers in urban environments. Oh, and they want video gamers to playtest the best strategies. The program, called OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET), aims to produce over a hundred tactics to be used by systems of over a hundred unmanned air and/or ground drones.

WASHINGTON – A century-old U.S. trade group on Monday pledged to work with the incoming administration to improve access to overseas markets for American companies, but also to fight against protectionism. Rufus Yerxa, head of the 300-company National Foreign Trade Council, said his organization is prepared to work with President-elect Donald Trump to improve conditions for U.S. exporters. However, he declined to be drawn into discussing some of Tump's more inflammatory statements, like threats to impose huge punitive tariffs on China and renegotiate free trade deals, saying he would wait to see what the actual policies are. "The reason I want to be optimistic is because I've seen this before, prior incoming administrations where there's a lot of dire predictions about what's going to happen, and in the end very positive things have happened," said Yerxa, a former deputy director general of the World Trade Organization. "I don't want to rule out that possibility," he told reporters. "I think we can make progress once it becomes clear to people that protectionism isn't the answer."

One of our greatest challenges in today's society is responding to the impact of technology automation. Over the last decade, technology has increasingly displaced jobs resulting in a reduction of the middle class and the widening gap of income inequality. Other factors such as offshoring play a role in job loss but the impact of technology is in full steam and there is no end in sight. My concern is that our society hasn't come to appreciate the extent of the issue and doesn't have a thoughtful plan to address it. The future of the middle class depends on our ability to comprehend the changing world technology has presented, and how we respond to close the jobs gap.

The accurate diagnosis and assessment of neurodegenerative disease and traumatic brain injuries (TBI) remain open challenges. Both cause cognitive and functional deficits due to focal axonal swellings (FAS), but it is difficult to deliver a prognosis due to our limited ability to assess damaged neurons at a cellular level in vivo. We simulate the effects of neurodegenerative disease and TBI using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as our model of cognition. We utilize biophysically relevant statistical data on FAS to damage the connections in CNNs in a functionally relevant way. We incorporate energy constraints on the brain by pruning the CNNs to be less over-engineered. Qualitatively, we demonstrate that damage leads to human-like mistakes. Our experiments also provide quantitative assessments of how accuracy is affected by various types and levels of damage. The deficit resulting from a fixed amount of damage greatly depends on which connections are randomly injured, providing intuition for why it is difficult to predict impairments. There is a large degree of subjectivity when it comes to interpreting cognitive deficits from complex systems such as the human brain. However, we provide important insight and a quantitative framework for disorders in which FAS are implicated.

A key requirement for the current generation of artificial decision-makers is that they should adapt well to changes in unexpected situations. This paper addresses the situation in which an AI for aerial dog fighting, with tunable parameters that govern its behavior, must optimize behavior with respect to an objective function that is evaluated and learned through simulations. Bayesian optimization with a Gaussian Process surrogate is used as the method for investigating the objective function. One key benefit is that during optimization, the Gaussian Process learns a global estimate of the true objective function, with predicted outcomes and a statistical measure of confidence in areas that haven't been investigated yet. Having a model of the objective function is important for being able to understand possible outcomes in the decision space; for example this is crucial for training and providing feedback to human pilots. However, standard Bayesian optimization does not perform consistently or provide an accurate Gaussian Process surrogate function for highly volatile objective functions. We treat these problems by introducing a novel sampling technique called Hybrid Repeat/Multi-point Sampling. This technique gives the AI ability to learn optimum behaviors in a highly uncertain environment. More importantly, it not only improves the reliability of the optimization, but also creates a better model of the entire objective surface. With this improved model the agent is equipped to more accurately/efficiently predict performance in unexplored scenarios.