The Ying Ao sink foundry in southern China's Guangdong province does not look like a factory of the future. The sign over the entrance is faded; inside, the floor is greasy with patches of mud, and a thick metal dust -- the by-product of the stainless-steel polishing process -- clogs the air. Guangdong is the growth engine of China's manufacturing industry, generating 615bn in exports last year -- more than a quarter of the country's total. In this part of the province, the standard wage for workers is about Rmb4,000 ( 600) per month. Ying Ao, which manufactures sinks destined for the kitchens of Europe and the US, has to pay double that, according to deputy manager Chen Conghan, because conditions in the factory are so unpleasant. So, four years ago, the company started buying machines to replace the ever more costly humans. Nine robots now do the job of 140 full-time workers.

If you were in the audience for Oussama Khatib's IROS keynote in Hamburg last year, you may remember him talking about this crazy thing: We, of course, cornered Oussama immediately afterwards, because humanoid robotic submarine what?! It turned out that OceanOne, as it was called, was involved in a top secret (or something) project in collaboration with the French, which has (now that it's over and wasn't a disaster) been un-topsecretified so we can finally, finally tell you about it. Originally, OceanOne was not an archaeological robot--it was conceptualized by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia as a way of monitoring deep coral reefs in the Red Sea. Christian Voolstra, assistant professor of marine science at KAUST's Red Sea Research Center, explained where the idea came from in an interview last year: Currently people use a so-called ROV (remote operated vehicle), which is a little submarine with two robotic arms and very limited dexterity. Using the ROV to examine delicate coral colonies proved to be troublesome.

The Chinese dissident artist, Ai Weiwei said that he will release a documentary film next year on the refugee crisis. Ai, often described as China's most high-profile artist, was speaking at a news conference in Bern to mark the opening of the "Chinese Whispers" exhibition, featuring around 150 works of contemporary Chinese artists - including Ai Weiwei artwork "Fragments"- at the Zentrum Paul Klee museum in Bern. Ai said he has spent a lot of time in refugee camps in recent months and witnessed a "very difficult situation" and decided to share his experience by making a film. "It's a documentary film, we have been shooting over 600 hours, and I've did hundred of interviews, there is all kind of people: politicians, refugees or priests or NGOs…all kind of people involved in this crisis," Weiwei told reporters. Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei looks on as he visits a migrant's makeshift camp on the Greek-Macedonian border, near the village of Idomeni, Greece, March 9, 2016.

Oussama Khatib held his breath as he swam through the wreck of La Lune, 100 meters below the Mediterranean. The flagship of King Louis XIV sank here in 1664, 20 miles off the southern coast of France, and no human had touched the ruins – or the countless treasures and artifacts the ship once carried – in the centuries since. With guidance from a team of skilled deep-sea archaeologists who had studied the site, Khatib, a professor of computer science at Stanford, spotted a grapefruit-size vase. He hovered precisely over the vase, reached out, felt its contours and weight, and stuck a finger inside to get a good grip. He swam over to a recovery basket, gently laid down the vase and shut the lid.

Image processing is a mathematically intensive operation & one of the biggest areas of research for a big data field. Image processing analytics has applications from processing a X-Ray to identifying stationary objects in a self driving car. We have collected a list of Python libraries which can help you in image processing. PIL (Python Imaging Library) supports opening, manipulating and saving the images in many file formats. It supports various image manipulations like filtering, enhancing, masking, handling transparency, additions and the like.

Stanford's five-foot "virtual diver" was originally built for studying coral reefs in the Red Sea where a delicate touch is necessary, but the depths go well beyond the range of meat-based divers. The "tail" section contains the merbot's onboard batteries, computers and array of eight thrusters, but it is the front half that looks distinctly humanoid with two eyes for stereoscopic vision and two nimble, articulated arms. Those arms are what make OceanOne ideal for fragile reef environments or priceless shipwrecks like La Lune, which sank off the coast of France over 350 years ago and hasn't been touched until now. Force sensors in each wrist transmit haptic feedback to the pilot, allowing them to feel the object's weight while staying high and dry on a dive ship. The robot's "brain" works with the tactile sensors to ensure the hands don't crush fragile objects, while the navigation system can automatically keep the body steady in turbulent seas.

It's that time of year: The most prepared of you are carboloading after weeks of training for Marathon Monday, while the least prepared are scrambling to finish your taxes. Either way, surely you'll need some breaks in the pasta and accounting. Should you take your kids to Disney's live-action/CGI remake of its beloved 1967 film "The Jungle Book"? Absolutely, says Ty Burr, who gives three stars to this movie placing "talking animals of almost tactile musculature and movement" in a lush jungle landscape; it holds up right until its overly frenetic final scenes. The jungle beasts are voiced by the likes of Ben Kingsley, Lupita Nyong'o, Bill Murray, Idris Elba, and Scarlett Johanssen, and newcomer Neel Sethi is charming as Mowgli.

Can't reach your smartphone to adjust the lighting in your home theater? Eyesight announced at the Samsung Developers Conference Wednesday that it will embed its computer-vision and deep-learning technology into Samsung's Artik 10 Internet of Things module. The companies say this will enable manufacturers to embed gesture-recognition capabilities directly into products such as smart light bulbs. It will also eliminate the need to grab your smartphone to control a device, and it will significantly reduce response time because the processing power will be on the device itself instead of a server in the cloud. Eyesight said it would demonstrate its technology at the conference by using subtle finger movements to control a set of Phillips Hue LED light bulbs.

Bay Labs Inc. launched out of stealth mode today to use deep learning to help medical professionals in developing countries interpret ultrasounds so they can better treat heart disease. The company also announced a seed round of 2.5 million led by Khosla Ventures. Deep learning experts Yann LeCun, who serves as the director of AI Research at Facebook, and Nicolas Pinto and Jack Culpepper also invested. Bay Labs founder Charles Cadieu said ultrasound imaging presented the perfect problem to be solved with deep learning because it takes years of training to learn how to read ultrasound imaging. As ultrasound devices become cheaper and cheaper, they are increasingly available but especially in developing or rural areas, there may not be people trained to properly use the device or read the images.

When British mathematician Sir Andrew J. Wiles was awarded the Abel Prize Laureate in math on 15 March for cracking a centuries-old hypothesis, a friend asked me, "Why did he get the prize, and will this solve any real-world problem?" Quoting from the statement that the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters gave to the press, I told him that 63-year-old Wiles had been given the annual award "for his stunning proof of (French mathematician Pierre de) Fermat's last theorem by way of the modularity conjecture for semi-stable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory". So let me try to simplify it a bit. Number theory--also sometimes referred to as the "queen of mathematics" or "higher arithmetic"--is a branch of pure math, devoted primarily to the study of the properties of whole numbers. Fermat--a prominent mathematician of the 17th century--contributed significantly to number theory, probability theory, analytic geometry and the early development of infinitesimal calculus. Fermat's last theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an bn cn for any integer value of n that is greater than two.