The world has been changing literally before our eyes. The pandemic, which represented the opening salvo to our entrance into the fourth Industrial Revolution, triggered a wave of disruptive transformation, of which we are only scratching the surface. The integration of newly instrumented physical, biological and digital worlds has given rise to an unprecedented number of'big bang disruptions,' the breadth and depth of which will herald the transformation of entire systems, creating and destroying product lines, markets and ecosystems. We are also entering the third wave of artificial intelligence (AI). In this era, we imbue human perception capabilities onto virtual assistants that deliver personalized experiences spanning multiple worlds.

A thin, replaceable skin that allows robots to "feel" could help in the construction of the metaverse, the proposed virtual future of the internet being developed by Meta (formerly Facebook) and others. The skin, jointly developed by Meta and Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, combines a rubbery plastic less than 3 millimetres thick and studded with magnetic particles with an artificial intelligence to calibrate its sense of touch. "If you look at how AI has advanced, we've made huge advances in computer vision and sound," says Abhinav Gupta at Meta AI Research. "But conspicuously, touch has been missing from this advancement." When the skin touches a surface, the plastic deforms and alters the magnetic field created by the embedded particles.

The Latest: On Tuesday November 6, Greg Clark, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, announced that the national funding agency UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) will invest GBP50mn (USD64mn) in five new AI centres under Wave 2 of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund as part of the Data to Early Diagnosis and Precision Medicine initiative. Each centre will receive GBP10mn (USD12.8mn) in public funding augmented by investment from commercial partners, including Canon, GE Healthcare, Philips, Roche Diagnostics and Siemens. The investment marks a significant step in delivering on a major commitment in the Life Sciences Sector Deal agreed in December 2017, following publication of Sir John Bell's Life Sciences Industrial Strategy in August 2017. Implications: The AI centres will partner doctors and academics with leading medical device companies and innovative start-ups to develop new AI-based applications to improve early diagnosis of diseases, including cancer and cardiovascular diseases. As well as enhancing patient treatment, the initiative aims to achieve cost reductions for the NHS and free up resources for direct patient care.

More and more articles are appearing on Artificial Intelligence (AI, machine learning, (or deep learning), and many writers talk about AI, machine learning and data science without differentiation, as if these terms were broadly interchangeable. Let us start by describing Artificial Intelligence as the implementation of intelligent agents. According to Peter Norvig and Stuart Russel, an intelligent agent is an autonomous entity capable of perceiving its environment via sensors, of interacting with it using actuators (in other words, interacting with its environment), capable of learning, analysing, using knowledge, and taking decisions. Historically, the first AIs were not actually "learning". At best they used heuristic functions combined with rules engines.

"Legislation to enable the future development of the UK's first commercial spaceports." The new law would form part of the Modern Transport Bill. The UK's desire to build a spaceport on British shores isn't new, however. In the summer of 2014, the government revealed eight locations that it was considering for the landmark project. Six of these were in Scotland, leaving Wales and England with one apiece.