I'd love to talk more about Flowcast, but I'm still not able to shake the image of you making a robotic submarine run by San Diego poolside (laughs). As a STEM enthusiast, I have been in awe of IBM Watson's capabilities. And I feel it's an honor to be talking to someone who has contributed to its capabilities. Winnie: Flowcast came about with my friend and co-founder Ken So. We met back when I was at MIT and he was doing his MBA at Berkeley.

I think that having a so much great resources available can sometimes be both a blessing and a curse. It's great that we have so many tools and sources of information to choose from, but to make best use of it -- and our time -- it is really important to actually "choose" and keep "focused." I don't want to say that many resources are "redundant," since "redundant" has a somewhat negative ring to it. However, there are many different books, tools, and courses that cover essentially the same thing, although, the scope and style may be a bit different. So, instead of adding everything that we stumble upon to our reading lists, I'd say that it makes more sense to be absolutely clear about personal goals first ("What skills do I need to learn to solve problem X?," "Do I really to learn this new, shiny tool X instead of Y?").

This piece, written by MWD Advisors' lead analysts Angela Ashenden, Neil Ward-Dutton and Craig Wentworth, provides an overview of the key trends we see organisations facing in 2017 (and beyond). If you're in a technology leadership role, you should be exploring how these trends will impact the ways you plan, design, deliver and support services and capabilities. At MWD Advisors, our research program is focused, at a high level, on how digital technology changes work. The core of our scope of research is the systems and platforms organisations use to share knowledge, make decisions and co-ordinate work; we look at how new technologies are changing the picture, and what distinguishes successful organisations that reap the benefits of new technologies from those that struggle to drive meaningful change. The three trends we outline below are fundamentally changing the relationship between technology and business.

It is done by various possible people such as investment managers, wealth managers, financial advisers and even accountants. Since just a few years a range of new fintechs hit the market with so-called robo-advisers or automated financial advice tools. They have been popping up (and keep popping up) in no time and some already even dissapeared. It will be hard for robo-adviser startups to scale; differentiating their services is key. Robo-advisers, essentially software tools driven by artificial intelligence and crunching loads of data, are predicted to be an important growing category of fintech.

Academic scientists devote their lives to research, often toiling away on problems that few people outside their discipline fully understand. Perhaps some are driven by pure curiosity or competition, while others have a personal interest in the topic at hand. For Shirley Pepke, a genomics researcher based in Los Angeles, the urgency to find answers comes from her own instinct for survival. Since 2014, she has been working on a tool capable of tailoring ovarian cancer treatment to each patient using genomics data and a machine learning algorithm. The first subject in this DIY precision medicine project was Pepke herself, who was diagnosed with stage IIIC ovarian cancer in September 2013.

The new, hippest technology product comes in innovative packaging, is very expensive and comes with an advertising campaign that boasts of how its obsessive engineering makes it the best in the world. Casper is the company at the forefront of a technology (and marketing) revolution that's seeing perhaps one of the most domestic and boring of products – bedding – become this year's must-have tech product. And that's entirely on purpose: the company is being advertised on tech podcasts, and promotes its mattresses with the kind of fun marketing that would usually be reserved for a phone or a computer. It hasn't come easily, and it hasn't been as much of a trick as it might seem. Instead, the company says that it really is a tech company – and that it has the product to prove it.

AI for short -- has already changed the way businesses operate. Its role in streamlining manufacturing and production is well-known. But AI is also transforming the way companies interact with customers. That's good news since the ability to consistently deliver an excellent customer experience is critical for companies in today's hyper-competitive economy. There are some incredibly exciting developments on the horizon as the IoT expands and AI tools become more advanced.

You won't be surprised to learn that blockchain, still five to ten years from mainstream adoption, nears the peak of the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2016. With its ability to store multiple bank transactions in one centralized ledger, accessible by all parties and regulated by a decentralized network, blockchain will have a transformational impact on business. While bitcoin steals the show as the only proven blockchain, the term blockchain has grown to encapsulate nearly two dozen distributed-ledger products with more than two dozen offerings in the market, thus the hype. Right now, blockchain is gaining traction because it holds the promise to transform industry operating models. It is also one example of an enabling technology of the platform revolution trend, one of the three trends along with transparently immersive experiences and perceptual smart machine age highlighted in the Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2016.

Techies are tackling food waste with artificial intelligence through an app that learns the fruit and veg storage habits of it users. The EatBy kitchen management and grocery list app automatically suggests how long fruit, veg and frozen items will stay fresh for and then reminds you to use them up before they go off. The clever bit, according to the developers, is that the app learns the storage habits of individual users. "Not everyone's kitchen is the same, and different food storage environments effect shelf life," said EatBy App's co-founder Steffan Lewis. "EatBy App addresses this problem by learning as it's used over time." He added: "Artificial Intelligence does not need to be scary.

Robots are taking over your job…and there's nothing you can do. By Amro Zakaria Abdu Human advancement throughout history can largely be credited to our ability to invent machines that increase our productivity and efficiency. Those tools allowed us to overcome the physical limitations of the human body and that of the animals we used, and as a result, territories were conquered, societies reshaped, and the dream of economic prosperity became a reality for millions. At the turn of the 19th century, the U.S. was a nation of farmers--39 percent of the population earned their livelihood through farming. The tractor was then introduced, resulting in profound changes such as the total replacement of work animals, consolidation of farms as seen in the increase in the average farm size from 60 to 200 hectares by the 1940's. Furthermore, the percentage of the population working in farming dropped to under 2 percent by the end of the century.