This Tech Stock forecast is designed and based on stock picking strategies for investors and analysts who need predictions for the 10 best tech stocks for the whole Technology Industry (See Industry Package). Package Name: Tech Stocks Forecast Length: 1 Year (10/08/2015 – 10/08/2016) I Know First Average: 40.11% The top performing stock for the long position of the 1 year period was NeoPhotonics Corp. (NPTN), which yielded a return of 125.38%. Additionally Ebix, Inc. (EBIX), and Alpha Pro Tech, Ltd. (APT) yielded returns of 122.65% and 59.53%, respectively. The average return for I Know First's 1 year long position was 40.11%, providing investors with a 33.14% premium above the S&P 500's return of 6.97%.

Amazon has announced the Alexa Prize, an annual university competition dedicated to accelerating the field of conversational artificial intelligence (AI). The goal of the inaugural competition is to build a "socialbot" on Alexa that will converse with people about popular topics and news events. The team with the highest-performing socialbot will win a 500,000 prize. Additionally, a prize of 1 million will be awarded to the winning team's university if their socialbot achieves the grand challenge of conversing coherently and engagingly with humans for 20 minutes. Teams of university students can submit applications now and the contest will conclude at AWS re:invent in November 2017, where the winners will be announced.

Google just debuted a digital assistant, which it hopes to place inside smartphones, watches, cars and every other imaginable internet-connected device. It's already hit a snag. The Alphabet division launched new smartphones last week with the artificially intelligent assistant deeply embedded. It also rolled out a speaker with the feature at its core and announced plans to let other companies tie their apps and services to the assistant. A day later, Samsung, which just announced it was ending production of its problematic Galaxy Note 7 smartphones, said it was acquiring Viv Labs, a startup building its own AI voice-based assistant.

As technology rapidly progresses, some proponents of artificial intelligence believe that it will help solve complex social challenges and offer immortality via virtual humans. But AI's critics are sounding the alarm, going so far as to call its development an "existential threat" to mankind. Is this the stuff of science fiction? Could the "Terminator" become reality, or will these fears prevent the next technological revolution?

DeepMind, an AI research lab acquired by Google for 400 million in 2014, has provided an update on how its DeepMind Health unit is doing. The London-based company told Business Insider on Tuesday that it has doubled the size of its team from 20 to 40 since launching in February this year, hiring several big names in the AI world along the way. New hires include security and privacy expert Ben Laurie, who is the founding director of the Apache Software Foundation, a director at the Open Rights Group, and a veteran Google software engineer, and former CIO Tony Corkett, who helped the NHS to digitise X-rays. Former Google Maps team leader Andrew Eland has been brought in to head up DeepMind Health's engineering efforts, while Will Cavendish, a former civil servant that worked on NHS online booking and prescription services, has joined as strategy lead. Elsewhere, ex-GE Healthcare executive Cathy Harris has been appointed as DeepMind Health's product lead.

In the beginning, the whole coding scene consisted of one woman. In the 1800s, the story goes, an aristocrat named Ada Lovelace was studying maths with inventor Charles Babbage, who had built a machine that could perform calculations – what we'd call a computer. Lovelace came up with a series of commands for the machine: the first computer program. Now, in celebration of this, the second Tuesday of every October is Ada Lovelace Day. It's not surprising that this has spiralled to become the most symbolic day for women working in science, maths and engineering, with Lovelace a figurehead for ongoing attempts to close a worrying gender gap in those fields.

Charlie Rose has had a storied career in journalism. After interviewing the who's-who of international celebrities, Rose pivoted last night from world leaders and entertainment stars to'Sophia' a smart AI in a humanoid robot shell. The interview detailed just how far we've come, and how far we've yet to come in the field of robotics. Created by David Hansen, of Hanson Robotics in Hong Kong, Sophia is a robot modeled after its creator's wife, with a few shades of Audrey Hepburn. The lifelike creation features realistic skin and facial movement and at times, even showed subtle hints at humanity.

What do Siri and machine translation have in common? They both produce strange, sometimes ridiculous language that leave us shaking our heads with confusion. Here at IVANNOVATION we frequently use Siri as well as Google's dictation function to get our work done. Siri instantly adds items to our to do lists, adds events to our calendars, and tells us answers to important questions like, "Siri, how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" (Ask Siri yourself.) Likewise, Google dictation helps us avoid the ruthless onslaught of carpal tunnel syndrome by typing up our articles and emails for us.

In his 2003 book, Being No One, Thomas Metzinger contends there is no such thing as a "self." Rather, the self is a kind of transparent information-processing system. "You don't see it," he writes. "But you see with it." Metzinger has given a good amount of thought to the nature of our subjective experience--and how best to study it.

IBM just made another major step toward getting its Watson supercomputer into hospitals around the world. Siemens and IBM Watson Health are teaming up in something they're calling a five-year "global strategic alliance" to bring Watson to population health -- a concept that's aimed at improving the health of people in an entire community, not just those in the hospital needing immediate care. The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the partnership. Siemens is a German industrial company which, in addition to a healthcare branch (dubbed Siemens Healthineers), also works in energy and transportation. The partnership basically just gives Watson a chance to reach out to a lot more people who provide healthcare, as according to Siemens, the company is involved in more than 70% of "critical clinical decisions" thanks to Siemens instruments.