Whether we have been in a tech bubble or not is frankly not that interesting. What is interesting is that the foundation for innovation is as strong as we've ever seen and entrepreneurs are bringing the future to reality at an amazing pace. Here are a few of my predictions for what we'll see in 2016: So far most conversations around self-driving cars focus on personal vehicles. It's unlikely we'll take a fully autonomous car for our daily commute for quite a few years, but commercial trucking will see self-driving vehicles emerge far sooner. One company, Peloton, is already making this a reality.

And I immediately think they will die irrelevant.

Hackathon[3]: "New Realities" examined what's real in the shrinking gap between our physical and digital lives. In terms of existing and emerging technology, reality is whatever we are capable of. We can talk to our TV with Siri, live inside a game with Oculus Rift or travel anywhere through Google Street View. There's never been a time of more reality-challenging innovation, as our Hackathon[3] teams demonstrated in a quick-turn all-or-nothing competition built on the latest forms of what's possible.] "Knack," the winning project, made sales empathy a reality. Knack is a product that demonstrates how artificial intelligence and organic intelligence empower a sales force to sell to the person and not to the script.

Madeline MacDonald says she was an 18-year-old freshman at Brigham Young University when she was sexually assaulted by a man she met on an online dating site. She reported the crime to the school's Title IX office. That same day, she says, BYU's honor code office received a copy of the report, triggering an investigation into whether MacDonald had violated the Mormon school's strict code of behavior, which bans premarital sex and drinking, among other things. Now MacDonald is among many students and others, including a Utah prosecutor, who are questioning BYU's practice of investigating accusers, saying it could discourage women from reporting sexual violence and hinder criminal cases. Tens of thousands have signed an online petition calling on the university to give victims immunity from honor code violations committed in the lead-up to a sexual assault.

The new microscope features something called "photonic time stretch". Essentially, the microscope takes pictures of blood cells with the help of flashing lasers. Alongside optics that boost clarity within images, the new microscope can track information not possible in the past. Then, the AI uses deep learning to distinguish the difference between healthy and cancer riddled white blood cells.

The great irony is that AI technology being honed and implemented right now could actually help increase diversity within the field itself, as tech companies leverage machine learning programs to pinpoint unconscious gender bias in the workplace. A slate of machine learning programs on the market utilize data and algorithms to spot diversity blind spots and help companies fill in the gaps. But eradicating bias isn't just politically correct; increasing gender diversity could change the face of AI research as well. There's a new theory floating around the engineering and computer science industries that women are far more likely to enroll and stay invested in the field if the work being produced is more societally meaningful. Programs that focus on humanistic applications for the greater good perform remarkably better where diversity is concerned: A new UC Berkeley Ph.D. program in development engineering boasted a 50 percent female enrollment rate in its inaugural 2014 class, and MIT's D-Lab, which aims to build technology to improve the lives of the impoverished, is 74 percent female.

A recent article by a Foreign-Exchange Journalist suggests the'Skynet' of Finance is not too far away. In particular, Transfer/Payments business expect to lose 28% of their business to FinTech in the next 5 years, and Banks expect to lose 24% of their business. The silver lining to this takeover could however be, the article points out, the greater emphasis on the'human touch' in key customer interfacing areas. For example, a human hand at the wheel to prevent another'flash crash' or a human interpreter of the decisions of an Artificial Intelligence made lending / investment decision. Whatever happens, we are likely to see more automation, lower costs for the customer, and smarter decision making – albeit in the near term.

Asus didn't want to be left out of the wearable tech craze with its latest Republic of Gamers desktop. The ROG GT51CA has all the trimmings you'd expect from a high-end gaming rig, including up to a 6th-generation (Skylake) Intel Core i7-6700K processor, support for an Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X graphics card, dual 512GB M.2 PCIe RAID 0 solid state drives, up to 64GB of DDR4 memory overclocked to 2,800MHz, and a multi-zone thermal solution with liquid cooling. The case is pretty slick as well, looking vaguely like an evil robot, with a special lighting mode that activates while the system is overclocked. But what really makes the ROG GT51CA stand out--for better or worse--is the included ROG Band, which you're supposed to wear on your wrist. Waving the band in front of the desktop unlocks the Shadow Drive, a hidden partition where you can stash confidential data.

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) – Scientists say they have developed a new technique for identifying cancer cells in a blood sample more accurately and faster thanks to artificial intelligence. Researchers at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA developed the technique that combines a special microscope with an artificial intelligence algorithm to identify cancerous cells. Using the new method could reduce the time and energy to diagnose cancer, allowing doctors to treat it more quickly. The new microscope is called a photonic time stretch microscope, which uses nanosecond-long pulses of light to capture images of hundreds of thousands of cells per second. Researchers say it works by taking pictures of flowing blood cells, the way a camera uses a flash.

Welcome to 2016, where you can buy flowers, book a flight and order an Uber through messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and Slack. Last week, Taco Bell and its agency, Deutsch, unveiled the TacoBot, a Siri-like version of the cashiers that take your order at its restaurants. Taco Bell built the bot for workplaces that use Slack's messaging platform to communicate internally. Now, instead of someone jotting everyone's orders on a Post-it and hoping the drive-thru attendant gets everything right, they can ask TacoBot to put in the order for them. "I've described TacoBot as your own personal Taco Bell butler," said Andy McCraw, Taco Bell's digital innovation and on-demand product manager.