Not sure what to get for Mother's Day? Columnist Jennifer Jolly shows off great tech gifts for Mom. Amazon's Echo smart home hub has become a sleeper hit for the company. Mother's Day is coming up fast and that special gift that makes her feel all warm and fuzzy inside? Well it isn't just going to make, or buy, itself. Here are 10 of this year's most-wanted mom gadgets sure to show her how much you appreciate her, all year long.

LIKE many constructions, it started small. But now thousands of children with autism are making friends and learning social skills by playing a version of online building game Minecraft. Stuart Duncan got the idea through a popular blog he ran about his own experiences with autism as well as bringing up a son with autism. Other parents with autistic children started telling him that their kids were crazy about a game that let them explore a randomly generated wilderness. However, despite loving the game, many of the children were being bullied by other players.

How can we help millions of chronically ill patients lead healthier lives with fewer hospitalizations? Parsing through individual patient remote monitoring data doesn't seem like a scalable solution. But what if artificial intelligence could rapidly analyze this information and predict an individual's health problem, such as worsening heart failure, in time for caregivers to intervene and prevent an emergency department visit or hospital admission? That may sound like a pipe dream, yet the technology to make it happen already exists. This new "prescription" for chronically ill patients would be an algorithm -- a personalized disease model unique to each patient, based on streams of data collected from biosensors worn by patients.

Last month we heard about DRU, the Domino's delivery robot that's getting a trial run in Australia. The idea may seem silly, but some new restaurant industry numbers highlight the growing importance of food delivery in an age when consumers expect online ordering and rapid to-their-door service. As consumers get more comfortable with autonomous delivery (which is on the way, despite lots of skepticism), a restaurant industry that already uses state of the art logistics services could begin adding delivery robots to their operations in the next decade. According to information provided by 1010data, our hunger for the pies is growing. Domino's, Pizza Hut, and Papa John's combined to account for 45.1% of total food delivery sales, up from 40.3% in 2014.

The latest animated video from The School of Life gently postulates that the technology of the future will be able to read moods, detect emotional states and help humans communicate the nebulous world of feelings through the ever-advancing strides being made in artificial intelligence. One such emotional technology tool could be the yet-to-be-invented Socrates Mood Reader. Named after the world's greatest early philosopher Socrates who famously said that the first philosophical priority is to know yourself. Socrates will be a piece of wearable emotional technology that will make up for a failures of self-knowledge in real time. We imagine it as a kind of wearable life coach with the total understanding of our mental health, who we are and what we need to thrive emotionally at key moments.

Creativity is alive and well at Samsung, which is developing several cool devices in its labs, including a home companion robot called Otto. The multi-talented robot can answer questions and double as a part-time security system when needed. It is expected to be demonstrated at the Samsung Developer Conference this week in San Francisco. Functionally, Otto is similar in some ways to Amazon Echo, featuring an interactive speaker that can answer questions, order products and play music. But the robot also includes a "head" that hosts a high-definition camera and a display.

It's easy to imagine robots as job-stealing nemeses that will ultimately unseat human workers. In an interview with Computerworld Thursday, Tom Davenport, co-author of the forthcoming book Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines, made the case for seeing artificial intelligence and robotics not as a threat in the workplace but as an advantage. As more organizations begin to adopt AI and robotic systems, workers who regard these new technologies not as murderous Cylons to be feared but as tools designed to make them more productive and efficient at their own job will fare best. "I think that in many cases, we'll be working with these machines as colleagues," Davenport told Computerworld. "I think the people who prosper will be the ones who like working with machines." This is where Computerworld trotted out the obligatory eyebrow-raising statistics: The Bank of England warned about robots assuming half of all U.S. and British jobs during the coming 20 years, leaving 95 million people unemployed.

Intellectually, many of us know the health and environmental benefits of a plant-based diet, but switching over can be daunting, especially if one hasn't had too much experience with cooking vegetarian or vegan dishes, and also if the tastebuds haven't really gotten used to new flavours. That's why many people may add in some mock meats, just to ease the transition, though whether it actually tastes good and "real" enough is up for debate. Now a team of Chilean scientists is adding technology to the mix, using artificial intelligence to create smarter and better-tasting meat replacements. Founders Matias Muchnick, Karim Pichara and biochemist Isidora Silva of food-tech startup The Not Company are leveraging recent developments in deep learning algorithms to create entirely plant-based foods that are healthy for people, and won't have the huge ecological impact of meat. Muchnick, who is an engineer by training, explains the team's motivation behind their AI model, named Giuseppe: When you get behind the scenes of the food industry, you don't like what you see.

Banking giant UBS recently gathered clients, staffers and tech experts who have a passion for helping those diagnosed with autism. SAN FRANCISCO – Some autism advocates are hopeful technology, from robots to custom-programmed Google Glass, can help individuals with the complex brain condition. "Technology can lead an autistic person to contribute to society when doing so face to face is difficult," said Scott Badesch, CEO of the Autism Society, addressing 50 invited guests who were brought together by banking giant UBS' philanthropic wing here last week. Badesch and others at the gathering -- lab researchers and autism advocacy group leaders, many of whom are parents of autistic children -- have high hopes emerging technology can help those afflicted with autism spectrum disorder interact with others and more fully participate in the world. As evidence of the power of tech to help, Badesch another others pointed to a recent YouTube video called "Dillan's Voice," in which an autistic teen speaks via a text-to-voice app on a tablet.

Comet Labs has assembled a coalition of investors and corporate partners to help accelerate product and customer development cycles for fast growing robotics and machine learning companies. Startups are paired with experienced mentors and are given access to industry partners and platform technology. The fund's partners include the world's largest global manufacturing, agriculture, and healthcare companies. About Comet Labs Comet Labs is an early-stage venture capital firm associated with a 300M fund, Legend Star. They work with startups developing solutions in specific industry verticals, as well as those building enabling technologies.