Brandman University is taking a new approach to adult education, focusing on student competencies and work experience rather than transcripts when deciding which students to admit and when they graduate. Brandman already is working with companies, including Walmart and Discover, to offer employee-education programs. The Irvine, California-based nonprofit university accepts subject matter expertise and experience as course credit, making it easier for working adults to earn college degrees and advance their careers. At most conventional colleges, students must fulfill prerequisite courses to earn admission and a set of required courses to earn a degree. Under the Brandman approach, if an applicant has, say, a 20-year career in finance but no formal coursework in finance, "she can now test out of many course requirements, simply by proving her mastery through standard assessments, writing samples, even work projects," says the university's chief financial officer.

Being a child of the 1960s, I was enamored of Star Trek. Among the many future wonders to behold? Computers that could conduct an informed conversation with humans. Fast forward to the present day, and we're getting accustomed to intelligent assistants in our homes and on our phones. Better yet, intelligent assistants are now poised to show their value in the workplace.

The trash truck rumbles down the street, and its cameras pour video into the city's data lake. An AI-powered application mines that image data looking for graffiti--and advises whether to dispatch a fully equipped paint crew or a squad with just soap and brushes. Meanwhile, cameras on other city vehicles could feed the same data lake so another application detects piles of trash that should be collected. That information is used by an application to send the right clean-up squad. Citizens, too, can get into the act, by sending cell phone pictures of graffiti or litter to the city for AI-driven processing.

The trash truck rumbles down the street, and its cameras pour video into the city's data lake. An AI-powered application mines that image data looking for graffiti--and advises whether to dispatch a fully equipped paint crew or a squad with just soap and brushes. Meanwhile, cameras on other city vehicles could feed the same data lake so another application detects piles of trash that should be collected. That information is used by an application to send the right clean-up squad. Citizens, too, can get into the act, by sending cell phone pictures of graffiti or litter to the city for AI-driven processing.

Larry Ellison, Oracle's cofounder, executive chairman, and chief technology officer, has said Oracle's new autonomous database ranks among "the most important things we've ever done." So how is this autonomous database playing in the real world? Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service has been available since March. I talked with five database users at this year's Collaborate 18 about their reaction to the technology and where they see this broader autonomous computing push going: Jim Czuprynski: What Do You Need DBAs For Now? After plying the trade as a database administrator for 20 years, Jim Czuprynski considers himself a DBA's DBA.

SEOUL--People don't want robots just to work for them. They want robots to talk and play with them, too. Look at the recent Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, for an example of this work-and-play dynamic. More than 30 robots from a startup called FutureRobot were on hand at the games to answer visitors' questions in Korean, Chinese, English, or Japanese. With a friendly avatar face and a large touchscreen on a cylindrical body, the robots offered directions to different sporting venues, provided schedules for every event, and more.

Automation has already transformed industries in which complexity and performance demands must meet the challenges of scarcer resources, narrower profit margins, and expanding product volumes. Now the state of the art is beginning to move to autonomous technologies: driverless vehicles, self-tuning databases, adaptive robots, and the like. While automation involves programming a system to perform specific tasks, autonomous systems are programmed to perform automated tasks, accommodate for variation, and self-correct or self-learn with little or no human intervention. Which industries are ahead of the autonomous curve? These five industries stand out.

Cloud database, analytics, application development, middleware, and other platform services have already shown they deliver vast time, quality, and cost improvements compared with traditional IT approaches. But those cloud services are essentially "dumb"--they know very little about their context or intended use. Specialized human skills are still required to put them to work effectively. But a new generation of smart (or autonomous) platform services is redefining this familiar equation. Such services use machine learning to better understand their context and intended use, requiring far less human skill.

"Why doesn't software manage itself?" That's the question his team asked about seven years ago, Oracle president Thomas Kurian told journalists at a recent briefing at the company's headquarters in Redwood Shores, California. In 2018, the answer is now "It does," in the form of Oracle's autonomous cloud services. Earlier this year, Oracle launched the world's first autonomous data warehouse and pledged to add self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing capabilities across its cloud platform services. Now, three more autonomous services have come on line: Oracle Autonomous Analytics Cloud, Oracle Autonomous Integration Cloud, and Oracle Autonomous Visual Builder Cloud.

It's a frustration many sales reps know: You're talking to a new customer about a product, and she tells you she already owns it. Or you've reached a critical point on a deal, and you don't know exactly what to do next. The underlying problem is that most sales teams are still stuck with arcane sales tools. Instead of working as trusted and knowledgeable advisors, they spend time manually extracting data from multiple systems and chasing leads that have little probability of closing. They don't have the tools to find or navigate through valuable customer information that could make them much more effective at selling--and that could make customers much more likely to buy. As more companies embrace digital technology, as well as artificial and adaptive intelligence (AI), a better, more productive day is on the horizon, says Michael Richter, product management director for Oracle Sales Cloud.