Artificial intelligence – fuelled by big data – and blockchain tech, are some of the technologies that could impact our world, according to Sarwant Singh, senior parter at Frost & Sullivan. Speaking at the Global Community of Growth, Innovation and Leadership (GIL Europe) conference, held in London today, Singh discussed mega trends in the technological world in an attempt to examine their implications on businesses and societies. "I believe we are now entering the cognitive area," said Singh in reference to artificial intelligence, adding: "We'll move towards super intelligence [in the future]. It is not available today". By super intelligence, Singh was referring to the possibility that computers may eventually be able to function similarly to the human brain.

Chicks born with a bit of quail brain spliced in. Rats with their brains synced to create a mind-meld computer. For two days in June, some of neuroscience's most extraordinary feats were debated over coffee and vegetarian food at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science in Philadelphia. The idea wasn't to celebrate these accomplishments but to examine them. Martha Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, assembled a group of scientists, philosophers and policy-makers to discuss the moral implications for the animals involved.

If you've read our introduction to Python, you already know that it's one of the most widely used programming languages today, celebrated for its efficiency and code readability. As a programming language for data science, Python represents a compromise between R, which is heavily focused on data analysis and visualization, and Java, which forms the backbone of many large-scale applications. This flexibility means that Python can act as a single tool that brings together your entire workflow. Python is often the choice for developers who need to apply statistical techniques or data analysis in their work, or for data scientists whose tasks need to be integrated with web apps or production environments. Its combination of machine learning libraries and flexibility makes Python uniquely well-suited to developing sophisticated models and prediction engines that plug directly into production systems.

The use of MRI as a diagnostic tool for mental disorders has been a consistent goal of neuroimaging research. Despite this, the vast majority of prior work is descriptive rather than predictive. The current study examines the utility of applying support vector machine (SVM) learning to MRI measures of brain white matter in order to classify individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD). In a precisely matched group of individuals with MDD (n 25) and healthy controls (n 25), SVM learning accurately (70%) classified patients and controls across an unselected brain map of white matter fractional anisotropy values (FA). Using a feature selection approach, where maximal discriminative voxels were selected, classification accuracy increased to over 90%.

I just asked a bot to tell me how much I spent on coffee this past month. And a few moments later, it replied. Certainly, I drink an awful lot of coffee. After asking the bot for a bit more information, I can happily say I spent at least some of that nearly two hundred dollars on chopped fruit and the occasional pastry. The bot didn't actually explain this, but it did give me list all payments to coffee shops, which made things clear.

Hay Newman continues, "ALPHA was developed by aerospace engineer Nick Ernest, a recent doctoral graduate of University of Cincinnati whose company Psibernetix works with the Air Force Research Laboratory. ALPHA has been victorious in numerous simulated battles against top fighter pilots, including a series in October against retired United States Air Force Colonel Gene Lee. Lee told University of Cincinnati Magazine that: 'It seemed to be aware of my intentions and reacting instantly to my changes in flight and my missile deployment. It knew how to defeat the shot I was taking. It moved instantly between defensive and offensive actions as needed.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, may never simulate human intelligence, but it's still better at some tasks than humans are. Disconcertingly, one of those tasks is "blowing other humans out of the sky." And not only can this AI outfly a human, it can do it on a computer anybody can pick up at Best Buy. The University of Cincinnati has been building an AI named Alpha to improve military drones. The idea is not to teach the drone how to operate completely on its own, but rather to research how AI could improve them.

Ask Apple's Siri digital assistant if she's evil, and she'll respond curtly, "Not really." Repeat a famous line from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," in which a computer on a spaceship kills nearly all the human crew, and Siri groans. And who can blame her? We humans have a morbid fascination with machines rising up to wipe us out or to enslave us as cocooned, flesh-and-blood battery packs. You can see that vision of the future streaming over Netflix whenever you want.

As a result, Arcas and his team are now able to teach these machines how to express their perceptions in ways of which we would've never thought possible. Many today might even deny that computers are able to be creative, claiming that only humans are uniquely capable of such. Though, as Arcas noted in his talk, "perception and creativity are by no means uniquely human. We start to have computer models that can do exactly these sorts of things. And that ought to be unsurprising; the brain is computational."

Two years ago, VLC-maker VideoLan rolled out a version of its popular open source media player for the Windows Store. Now the group is back with a new beta version of VLC for the Windows Store built on the universal Windows platform (UWP) for Windows 10. Even better, the app actually takes advantage of the UWP to bring VLC to multiple Windows 10 device types, including PCs, tablets, Windows 10 Mobile, and even the HoloLens augmented reality headset. As if that wasn't enough, the UWP version of VLC is coming to the Xbox One later this summer once Microsoft opens up the console to third-party UWP apps. The powerful, beloved VLC seems like a perfect showcase for what's possible with UWP on the Xbox One, and a great fit for your TV.