Zoltan Istvan is many things: a journalist, a futurist and entrepreneur. Mostly, though, he's been a cheerleader for the transhumanist movement, a philosophy focused on merging humans together with technology. To live forever as a new post-human species. Istvan kicked off a presidential campaign as head of the Transhumanist Party in 2014, mostly to spread the word about the movement. We sat down to talk with him about his experience running for president, and why voters should care about the transhumanist movement. Was the process of running this campaign what you expected? My campaign has been pretty much to always spread the message around transhumanism. It was never to win, and I said that from the very beginning. What I didn't expect is that I would very quickly enter into the top 10 candidates for almost the entire two years. Just three years ago, I signed with one of the major websites that puts you together with candidates.

When robots take over the world, they may end up spouting the kind of quick-paced dialogue that makes Romance novels and thrillers the most popular genres among readers. The Guardian reports that Google has "swallowed" thousands of books to create artificial intelligence, including thrillers, romance novels, and other genres. Forster's thriller is just one of 11,000 novels that researchers including Oriol Vinyals and Andrew M Dai at Google Brain have been using to improve the technology giant's conversational style. After feeding these books into a neural network, the system was able to generate fluent, natural-sounding sentences. According to a Google spokesman – who didn't want to be named – products such as the Google app will be "much more useful if they can capture the nuance of language better".

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Business travel's future will be packed with bots, artificial intelligence and inventive customer-facing tools that make journeys more pleasurable for corporate travelers. That's what Miriam Moscovici, BCD's director of Emerging Technologies, took away from DataArt's Travel Question Time, held recently in New York City. In a video interview after the event, Moscovici--one of Travel Question Time's panelists--predicted the industry's best innovations lie ahead. BCD has been doing a lot of foundational work to capitalize on some of the "exciting stuff" that's emerging, she said. "The whole concept of journey management is a sweet spot … especially for the travel management company," Moscovici said, adding TMCs have a unique understanding of businesses' requirements and expectations around travel consumption and spending.

Advanced analytics engines will likely require significant computing power. These systems and their CPUs will differ from traditional servers. An Intel x86 or IBM architecture may be supplemented by parallel graphics processors from Nvidia or AMD, or programmable logic chips from Altera or Xilinx within these engines. Universities and cloud vendors such as Google are the primary users. Big data, security, image identification, natural language processing and virtual reality may be among the target applications.

Instagram is completely down, leaving people unable to use either its app or website. Visitors to the website see a message reading "5xx server error" and nothing else. App users will see a message saying that the app "couldn't refresh feed" – though the problem looks temporary, it isn't actually possible to get new pictures at all. It isn't clear what the source of the problem is or if it will be fixed any time soon. Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

Roboticists are putting a tremendous amount of time and effort into finding the right combination of sensors and algorithms that will keep their drones from smashing into things. It's a very difficult problem: With a few exceptions, you've got small platforms that move fast and don't have the payload capability for the kind of sensors or computers that you really need to do real-time avoidance of things like trees or powerlines. And without obstacle avoidance, how will we ever have drones that can deliver new athletic socks to our doorstep in 30 minutes or less? At the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Lab, where they've been working very very hard at getting quadrotors to fly through windows without running into them, Yash Mulgaonkar, Luis Guerrero-Bonilla, Anurag Makineni, and Professor Vijay Kumar have come up with what seems to be a much simpler solution for navigation and obstacle avoidance with swarms of small aerial robots: Give them a roll cage, and just let them run into whatever is in their way. This kind of "it'll be fine" philosophy is what you find in most small flying insects, like bees: They don't worry all that much about bumbling into stuff, or each other, they just kind of shrug it off and keep on going.

Entry Point: Data - Using Python's sci-packages to prepare data for Machine Learning tasks and other data analyses [IPython nb]

The IoT is a $410 billion opportunity just waiting for the healthcare sector and other industries to leverage their big data. It is likely that the Internet of Things, along with blockchain technology and artificial intelligence, will start to come into their own as the decade draws to a close, opening up the potential for drastic improvements in care quality, the patient experience, and providers' ability to make informed, actionable decisions.