In the past few years the wearables sector has been a hive of activity, but it feels like this year things have accelerated, particularly in the realm of health and wellness. A report by Forrester Research projected that 29 percent of Americans will use wearable devices, compared with 18 percent in 2015. It predicts that wearables sales will rise from 4.2 billion in 2015 to 9.8 billion in 2021. There has been more interest in wearables companies doing clinical validation. The AARP has been using its Project Catalyst initiative to validate the usability of connected devices and activity trackers for seniors.

A sinister threat is brewing deep inside the technology laboratories of Silicon Valley, according to Professor Stephen Hawking. Artificial Intelligence, disguised as helpful digital assistants and self-driving vehicles, is gaining a foothold, and it could one day spell the end for mankind. The world-renowned professor has warned robots could evolve faster than humans and their goals will be unpredictable. Professor Stephen Hawking (pictured) claimed AI would be difficult to stop if the appropriate safeguards are not in place. During a talk in Cannes, Google's chairman Eric Schmidt said AI will be developed for the benefit of humanity and there will be systems in place in case anything goes awry. 'We've all seen those movies,' he said.

Tomorrow's graduates will be applying for jobs working in virtual worlds and outer space, experts claim, following the release of a new report predicting career trends for the next ten years. Research conducted by a group of leading technologists, academics and industry analysts suggests that a host of new job options will become available to those graduating in less than a decade's time, including "ethical technology advocates", "sustainable power innovators" and "virtual habitat designers". Contrary to common fears that robots will render human employment worthless, the expansion of new technology will provide countless more as yet unheard of career paths, experts believe, using virtual reality environments and better connected remote office environments. Ryan Asdourian, Microsoft's Windows and Surface Lead said of the report: "While these jobs may seem like the realms of science fiction, in reality they are indicative of changes that we are already seeing today." "The job market is changing at a more rapid pace than ever before, partly because of artificial intelligence."

It doesn't look like a place to make groundbreaking discoveries that change the trajectory of society. But in these simulated, claustrophobic corridors, Demis Hassabis thinks he can lay the foundations for software that's smart enough to solve humanity's biggest problems. "Our goal's very big," says Hassabis, whose level-headed manner can mask the audacity of his ideas. He leads a team of roughly 200 computer scientists and neuroscientists at Google's DeepMind, the London-based group behind the AlphaGo software that defeated a world champion at Go in a five-game series earlier this month, setting a milestone in computing. It's supposed to be just an early checkpoint in an effort Hassabis describes as the Apollo program of artificial intelligence, aimed at "solving intelligence, and then using that to solve everything else."

From 1992 to 2001, Dan Goldin served as the longest-tenured administrator of NASA, overseeing projects like the launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavor and the redesign of the International Space Station. After leaving NASA, Goldin spent some time bouncing around and studying robotics before accepting a position as the president of Boston University in 2003. He never officially held the position, however, because the school terminated his contract a day before he was slated to start (though he still got a 1.8 million payout). And then Goldin mostly vanished from the public eye for over 10 years. Today, the 75-year-old Goldin has reemerged to reveal what he has been working on for the past decade: KnuEdge, a top-secret startup based in San Diego, with a mission to one-up Google, AMD, and Intel with the "fundamental invention" of the next-generation computer processor.

In recent years, it's been exciting watching advances in AI like IBM's Watson smashing humans at Jeopardy and Google's AlphaGo AI beating champions at the game of Go a decade earlier than expected. But the sophisticated algorithms under the hood are really the stars of the show. These powerful computing systems are fundamentally changing industries and automating a growing number of day-to-day tasks. At the same time, AI still isn't perfect, and we've seen hints of its potential dark side. Our algorithms are only as good as the data we feed them.

SAN FRANCISCO – Airlines will likely suffer more disruptions like the one that grounded about 2,000 Delta flights last week because major carriers have not invested enough to overhaul reservations systems based on technology dating to the 1960s, airline industry and technology experts have said. Airlines have spent heavily to introduce new features such as automated check-in kiosks, real-time luggage tracking and slick mobile apps. But they have avoided the steep cost of rebuilding their reservations systems from the ground up, former airline executives said. Scott Nason, former chief information officer at American Airlines Group Inc., said long-term investments in computer technology were a tough sell when he worked there. "Most airlines were on the verge of going out of business for many years, so investment of any kind had to have short payback periods," said Nason, who left American in 2009 and is now an independent consultant.

The field of study that focuses on the interactions between human language and computers is called Natural Language Processing, or NLP for short. It sits at the intersection of computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics (Wikipedia). "Nat ur al Lan guage Pro cessing is a field that cov ers com puter un der stand ing and ma nip u la tion of hu man lan guage, and it's ripe with pos sib il it ies for news gath er ing," Anthony Pesce said in Natural Language Processing in the kitchen. "You usu ally hear about it in the con text of ana lyz ing large pools of legis la tion or other doc u ment sets, at tempt ing to dis cov er pat terns or root out cor rup tion." NLP is a way for computers to analyze, understand, and derive meaning from human language in a smart and useful way.

This interview took place at the RE•WORK Deep Learning Summit in Boston, on 12-13 May 2016. Yoshua Bengio (PhD in CS, McGill University, 1991), post-docs at M.I.T. (Michael Jordan) and AT&T Bell Labs (Yann LeCun), CS professor at Université de Montréal, Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning Algorithms, NSERC Chair, CIFAR Fellow, member of NIPS foundation board and former program/general chair, co-created ICLR conference, authored two books and over 300 publications, the most cited being in the areas of deep learning, recurrent networks, probabilistic learning, natural language and manifold learning. He is among the most cited Canadian computer scientists and is or has been associate editor of the top journals in machine learning and neural networks. Get more information on the Deep Learning Book here: http://www.deeplearningbook.org

Yoshua Bengio leads one of the world's preëminent research groups developing a powerful AI technique known as deep learning. The startling capabilities that deep learning has given computers in recent years, from human-level voice recognition and image classification to basic conversational skills, have prompted warnings about the progress AI is making toward matching, or perhaps surpassing, human intelligence. Prominent figures such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have even cautioned that artificial intelligence could pose an existential threat to humanity. Musk and others are investing millions of dollars in researching the potential dangers of AI, as well as possible solutions. But the direst statements sound overblown to many of the people who are actually developing the technology.