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.

In March of 2016, a twenty-seven-year-old Syrian refugee named Rakan Ghebar began discussing his mental health with a counsellor. Ghebar, who has lived in Beirut since 2014, lost a number of family members to the civil war in Syria and struggles with persistent nervous anxiety. Before he fled his native country, he studied English literature at Damascus University; now, in Lebanon, he works as the vice-principal at a school for displaced Syrian children, many of whom suffer from the same difficulties as he does. When Ghebar asked the counsellor for advice, he was told to try to focus intently on the present. By devoting all of his energy to whatever he was doing, the counsellor said, no matter how trivial, he could learn to direct his attention away from his fears and worries.

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.

So, we have robot process automation (RPA) and a bunch of new jobs arising around it -- what is this oddly named thing? Leslie Willcocks, professor of technology, work, and globalization at the London School of Economics' department of management, was recently interviewed by McKinsey on what robot process automation (RPA) is, and what it will mean for administrative and back-office tasks. Not to worry about RPA taking away jobs -- it is meant to elevate roles -- and even may be a stress-reduction strategy, Willcocks explains. "The average knowledge worker employed on a back-office process has a lot of repetitive, routine tasks that are dreary and uninteresting," says Willcocks. "RPA is a type of software that mimics the activity of a human being in carrying out a task within a process. It can do repetitive stuff more quickly, accurately, and tirelessly than humans, freeing them to do other tasks requiring human strengths such as emotional intelligence, reasoning, judgment, and interaction with the customer."

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.

Otsimo provides free games for autistic children to help improve attention spans using machine learning and gamification. Autistic spectrum disorders, or ASDs, impose huge costs, both human and economic, on sufferers, their families, and the community. The human toll, in terms of care and impaired relationships, is almost impossible to quantify. Looking at the US alone, the economic expenditure last year was estimated at about $268bn. The exact causes of the pathology are still unknown, and there is no medical solution except for early and intensive education, which can at least reduce the symptoms.

At some point in the course of pregnancy, a woman is likely to suspect that the baby she is incubating has somehow hijacked her brain. New research suggests that, in some sense, she's right, and that pregnancy itself is altering her brain like no other experience she's had since adolescence. The places where a pregnant woman's brain shrinks are very specific, the research says. The structural renovations wrought by pregnancy appear to overlap almost perfectly with the brain regions that play a key role in how we understand and interpret the actions, intentions and feelings of others. And the brain of a first-time mother stays changed -- for at least two years after she has given birth, according to the new research, published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Pregnant women did not lose intellectual ground, the researchers found: as a group, their working memory and memory for words was no better or worse than before pregnancy.