Agriculture, especially that related to the production of grains, has started for decades a process of professionalization, modernization and development of new technologies that has led the activity to a level of efficiency never seen before. That is why the design of a roadmap for crops and the correct adoption of the tools becomes the great difference between having a successful campaign or paying the consequences of errors in production. Too many are these variables that must be taken into account: genetics, the technological package used, planning to cope with the climate and the machinery used, among others. This last point is the main one when it comes to ensuring efficiency in the work and maximizing the productivity of a field. Thus, the metalworking industry dedicated to agriculture is positioned as one of the keys for the producer and technological development and research to maximize its functions leads companies to offer increasingly innovative machinery.

Big data analytics and artificial intelligence are poised to revolutionize the field of healthcare in the coming years given the abundance of data and powerful algorithms. Currently, the U.S., China and the EU are all competing for dominance in the field, investing significant resources into human capital, infrastructure as well as into laws balancing the usability and protection of data. In the current decade, the European Commission seeks to attract €20 billion of investment per year in order to remain competitive in the global market. Artificial intelligence might evoke ideas of self-driving cars, algorithms beating the best players in chess, or a dystopic future of autonomous robots making us obsolete. Only recently, Google's AlphaGo beat the best player in the game of Go, where the possible number of moves is greater than the number of atoms in the universe.

The early waves of artificial intelligence are already lapping at the shores of local TV news. For now, AI is largely confined to the realm of metadata and closed captioning among larger, international media companies, according to Ethan Dreilinger, solutions engineer for Watson Media and IBM Cloud Video. But the next wave could see more AI functionality -- and affordability -- soon enough. Dreilinger told NAB Show attendees here on Sunday that Watson's primary role at present is retrieving metadata within a media organization's video -- essentially a search and discovery operation. Say, for instance, tags have been misspelled in videos long languishing in a media company's asset management system.