The company has been a leader when it comes to digital technology, and it plans to keep pushing the bar higher. Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX) has led the way for not just fast-casual restaurants, but all of retail when it comes to using customer-facing technology in its stores. The company was the first major chain to integrate digital payment into its app, making it a common sight to see people pay by holding up their phones to a scanner. That happened well before payment via phone become a relatively common thing, and it forced other chains to follow. Starbucks also led the way with Mobile Order & Pay.

Artificial carries a negative connotation. Artificial somehow imitates, is fake, or is subpar. It is negative, dare I say: icky. When we think of olestra vs. pressed organic olive oil, we think artificial vs. natural. One will have you running to the bathroom, the other promotes healthy levels of cholesterol.

After three years of almost single-handedly juicing up the slow-growing economy, Janet L. Yellen and the Federal Reserve should be looking at easier days ahead. Yellen, in what will probably be her last full year as Fed chair, may finally get help from somewhere else in Washington. Tax cuts and infrastructure spending planned by President-elect Donald Trump, if backed by the Republican-controlled Congress, would lighten the load for a Fed whose easy-money policies have been the primary economic support for the nation. She is already breathing easier on the Fed's employment mandate; the jobless rate has fallen to a nine-year low of 4.6%. Inflation, too, is under control and, by all accounts, creeping toward the central bank's optimal level of 2%.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was supported by FCT (INESC-ID multiannual funding) through the PIDDAC Program funds and under project PEst-OE/EEI/LA0021/2011 and the FP7 Cooperation Work Programme: Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, and Biotechnologies, KBBE-227258 (BIOHYPO project). Quotient Bioresearch received part-funding from the European Union in the scope of BIOHYPO project. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: During the elaboration of this manuscript, Ian Morrissey and Daniel Knight were employed by Quotient Bioresearch and belonged to the BIOHYPO European project.

Baidu is demonstrating some of its most recent tech advancements in novel ways, including a partnership with KFC China (yes, the fried chicken KFC). The search giant sometimes referred to as the'Google of China' partnered with KFC to open a new "smart restaurant" in Beijing, which employs facial recognition to make recommendations about what customers might order, based on factors like their age, gender and facial expression. The restaurant also offers up augmented reality games via table stickers, but these are also deployed at 300 other KFC locations in Beijing. The facial recognition tech is unique to this one location, though Baidu has previously worked with KFC on another type of smart restaurant at a pilot location in Shanghai, where a robot customer service agent can listen for and recognize orders made by customers using natural language input. Baidu's tech in this new restaurant, however, is all about guessing what you want before you can even ask; image recognition hardware installed at the KFC will scan customer faces, seeking to infer moods, and guess other information including gender an age in order to inform their recommendation.

Artificial intelligence (AI) could take up to 47% of jobs in the next two decades according to a report by the federal government in the US. While there will be significant potential for wealth gains from increased productivity due to AI, the report also warns of threats to existing jobs. The prolonged use of AI will also bring about wage inequality between lower-skilled, less-educated workers and those with higher skills. "Effects of AI on the labour market in the near term will continue the trend that computerisation and communication innovations have driven in recent decades. Researchers' estimates on the scale of threatened jobs over the next decade will range from 9 to 47%," says the report titled Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy.

Starbucks has led the way for not just fast-casual restaurants, but all of retail when it comes to using customer-facing technology in its stores. The company was the first major chain to integrate digital payment into its app, making it a common sight to see people pay by holding up their phones to a scanner. That happened well before payment via phone become a relatively common thing, and it forced other chains to follow. Starbucks also led the way with Mobile Order & Pay. That technology allows people to skip the line, creating a better experience for regular customers while offering shorter lines for casual visitors.

Currently the world is rapidly developing robotic and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. These technologies offer enormous potential benefits, yet there are also drawbacks and dangers. Using the Ethics Center's Framework for Ethical Decision Making, we can consider some of the ethical issues involved with Robots and AI. Utilitarianism is a form of moral reasoning which emphasizes the consequences of actions. Typically it tries to maximize happiness and minimize suffering, though there are other ways to use utilitarian evaluation such as cost-benefit analysis.

Siri had a good run, but its time in the spotlight is over. Alexa has arrived, and it's way smarter than Siri. Alexa, of course, is the voice-activated "smart" assistant lurking inside the Amazon Echo, Amazon Echo Dot and Amazon Tap products. If you own one of these gadgets, you probably know the basics by now--you can ask Alexa for today's weather forecast, a daily news briefing, an oven timer or a favorite playlist. But as the Echo family of products has grown, so has the ecosystem that surrounds it.

We are all witnesses that 2016 was the year when Digital Health technologies took off and developed actively. Such rapid growth was partly due to the emergence of numerous wearable tech devices, but also due to numerous breakthroughs in other IT-related business areas. Digital health improves the quality of life, increases the lifespan, and gives people an opportunity to learn more about their lifestyles and how their bodies work. Most importantly, digital health (or, more specifically, digital healthcare) changes and improves the quality of care for patients, by enhancing the instruments for surgeons and other medical staff. Let's find out what are the main trends in health information technologies (HIT) and how will they affect the development of the sphere as a whole.