While the future of the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, is quite uncertain, parts of the famous healthcare reform act likely will have a lasting impact. "The transformative opportunity here is all about the reimbursement shift from fee-for-service to the accountable care model, with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services the major driver behind it," said John Sculley, chairman of the board and chief marketing officer at RxAdvance who previously served as CEO of Apple and PepsiCo. "And as we know there are hundreds of accountable care organizations out there, some operating under one definition and some under others. This is an evolving thing." Sculley is looking at this transformative opportunity in healthcare through the lens of his company RxAdvance, a vendor of a cloud-based pharmacy benefit management platform.

Leading information technology companies are rushing to create systems that use artificial intelligence to defend against cyberattacks. The goal is to commercialize AI software to detect even ingeniously designed attacks, identify the perpetrators, and quickly mount a defense. However, research is also taking place in the U.S. and elsewhere on ways to harness AI for cyberwarfare, and the trend suggests there will come a time when the battles in cyberspace pit AI against AI, leaving humans sidelined. Fujitsu Laboratories, the R&D unit of Japanese IT giant Fujitsu, has begun to develop an AI system to protect corporate information systems from cyberattack. The system would learn to recognize regular patterns of network activity so deviant behavior stands out.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, forget the scary movies about rebellious robots or the dire warnings of a dystopian world of disconnected humanity imagined by some popular writers. AI promises, rather, to change our lives in profound ways we are just beginning to experience, according to a ground-breaking survey produced by Stanford University. Stanford is taking the long view of AI, with a project called One Hundred Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100). The study, written by a panel of AI experts from multiple fields including healthcare, will continue as an ongoing activity, with periodic reports examining how AI will touch different aspects of daily life. The first of those reports, "Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030," looks into the effects that AI advancements will have on a typical North American city a little more than a decade from now.

An oil droplet guided by a wave, similar to the pilot wave model of quantum theory. There has been a lot of digital ink spilled over the recent paper on the reactionless thrust device known as the EMDrive. While it's clear that a working EM Drive would violate well established scientific theories, what isn't clear is how such a violation might be resolved. Some have argued that the thrust could be an effect of Unruh radiation, but the authors of the new paper argue instead for a variation on quantum theory known as the pilot wave model. One of the central features of quantum theory is its counter-intuitive behavior often called particle-wave duality.

If you get your news from social media, as most Americans do, you are exposed to a daily dose of hoaxes, rumors, conspiracy theories and misleading news. When it's all mixed in with reliable information from honest sources, the truth can be very hard to discern. In fact, my research team's analysis of data from Columbia University's Emergent rumor tracker suggests that this misinformation is just as likely to go viral as reliable information. Many are asking whether this onslaught of digital misinformation affected the outcome of the 2016 U.S. election. The truth is we do not know, although there are reasons to believe it is entirely possible, based on past analysis and accounts from other countries.

Autonomy is coming to warfare, and some would say it's already here. Weapon systems driven by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms will soon be making potentially deadly decisions on the battlefield. This transition is not theoretical. The immense capability of large numbers of autonomous systems represents a revolution in warfare that no country can ignore. As we march towards this reality, it is important that technology leaders and military strategists begin a discussion around the moral and legal framework within which such autonomous capabilities will be enabled.

Autonomy is coming to warfare, and some would say it's already here. Weapon systems driven by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms will soon be making potentially deadly decisions on the battlefield. This transition is not theoretical. The immense capability of large numbers of autonomous systems represents a revolution in warfare that no country can ignore. As we march towards this reality, it is important that technology leaders and military strategists begin a discussion around the moral and legal framework within which such autonomous capabilities will be enabled.

As thousands of protesters took to Los Angeles streets on the Saturday after election day, Zaina Siyed was 50 miles east in Rialto, staging her own act of resistance in a middle school gym. On a bleacher next to a row of girls in purple hijabs sat the 16-year-old from Chino Hills, a nervous coach waiting to hear the results of a robotics competition. FemSTEM, the team she had created, was made up of eight competition rookies, ages 10 to 14. She had recruited them and raised the money in an online campaign to cover all they would need to compete -- team shirts, registration fees, equipment. Getting others to love what she loved was one objective. "How does a Muslim girl who is passionate about tech encourage her sisters in the Muslim community to embrace the wonderful world of STEM?" she wrote in her pitch for donations, referring to the study of science, technology, engineering and math.

In the military world, fighter pilots have long been described as the best of the best. As Tom Wolfe famously wrote, only those with the "right stuff" can handle the job. Now, it seems, the right stuff may no longer be the sole purview of human pilots. A pilot A.I. developed by a doctoral graduate from the University of Cincinnati has shown that it can not only beat other A.I.s, but also a professional fighter pilot with decades of experience. In a series of flight combat simulations, the A.I. successfully evaded retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Gene "Geno" Lee, and shot him down every time.

A survey in 2013 by Vincent C. Müller and Nick Bostrom asked hundreds of scientists when they believe machines will achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), meaning human-level intelligence. The median years for 10, 50, and 90 percent probability of reaching AGI were 2022, 2040, and 2075, respectively. But, there are still many challenges to reaching human-level intelligence. The first is domain limitation. Today's artificial intelligence primarily applies a mathematical approach that can solve a finite set of statements for a finite set of terms described under a finite set of rules.