IN JULY 2011 Sebastian Thrun, who among other things is a professor at Stanford, posted a short video on YouTube, announcing that he and a colleague, Peter Norvig, were making their "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" course available free online. By the time the course began in October, 160,000 people in 190 countries had signed up for it. At the same time Andrew Ng, also a Stanford professor, made one of his courses, on machine learning, available free online, for which 100,000 people enrolled. Both courses ran for ten weeks. Such online courses, with short video lectures, discussion boards for students and systems to grade their coursework automatically, became known as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

Last weekend, a drone flown by Pakistan's air force crashed just shy of four miles from an airbase in the Punjab. The drone appears to have been a Chinese-made Wing Loong. The drone, also known as the Pterodactyl, serves with the Chinese military, as well as that of Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Until this crash, Pakistan was not a known operator of the Wing Loong. The drone resembles America's iconic Predator drone, and like how the Predator begat the Reaper, there's likely an improved version in the works, which might be what Pakistan is really after.

Despite the sophistication of their products, video game publishers are just as susceptible as less technically inclined brands to finding their carefully organised media coverage turning on them. This month, the trailer for upcoming game of drones and shooting people Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare became the second most disliked video in YouTube history, while fellow online first-person shooter, Battlefield 1 became one of the 150 most liked. One reason posited for this vast discrepancy is that players have finally got bored with the glib futurism of many current military games, their fatigue at yet more satellite strikes and exoskeletons brought into sharp relief by Battlefield 1's earthy, steampunk alternate first world war. While there may be an element of truth in that, it's mostly the result of vote-brigading by rabidly contrarian posters on games forums, and demonstrates that even with rigorous planning and budgetary figures normally associated with money laundering operations, you can still be the victim of unintended consequences. Capcom, makers of the Resident Evil series, also found out that publicity can create unpredictable knock-on effects.

The Year Without a Summer is why Robert Walton is important to Frankenstein: Like the newspapers, he's concerned about surviving climate chaos. He says that in the Arctic "the sun is for ever visible; its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour. Frankenstein begins with the search for new, more habitable lands because of environmental anxieties. People did not know that the cooling trend was a temporary result of volcanic activity. Rather, they thought the summer of 1816, with its famine, social unrest, and winter eternal, was the new normal.

A university professor is heading the Japanese version of a U.S.-led movement to exonerate people who have been wrongfully charged and imprisoned using DNA testing. Mitsuyuki Inaba, 51, who is neither a lawyer nor an expert in criminal law, is a professor at Ritsumeikan University's College of Policy Science. He believes Japan's criminal justice system is rife with fundamental failures that lead to wrongful imprisonment due to the "unscientific" way in which investigations are carried out. Inaba, who specializes in cognitive science, took up the post of director at the Innocence Project Japan, which was launched in April in cooperation with lawyers and other legal experts. Similar movements have sprouted in Britain, South Africa and Taiwan.

Federal regulators just opened the skies to commercial drones, with guidelines that include more than a few caveats designed to encourage entrepreneurs while protecting everyone else. The FAA, which announced the rules today, hopes to facilitate innovative uses for the technology like bringing the Internet to remote areas while avoiding the idiocy of drones interfering with firefighting operations or delivering contraband to prisons. "We are taking a careful and deliberate approach that balances the need to deploy this new technology with the FAA's mission to protect public safety," says FAA chief Michael Huerta. The rules let anyone 16 or older who wants to make a business of flying a drone simply do so. In the past, pilots who hoped to make a buck with drones by, say, inspecting power lines, needed FAA permission, a process that could take months.

The intelligence exhibited by machine also known as Artificial Intelligence is an area that very many large technology companies are investing into these days. Apple made its mark in artificial intelligence by introducing its digital assistant Siri, google and Microsoft also followed. Social media giants; Facebook and amazon have shown indications of investing in Artificial Intelligence. The interest of these companies in this field of computer science is an indicator that Artificial Intelligence is an area that offers a lot of promise. The country has tried to use AI in some areas for example KCCA introduced the smart traffic lights at Wandegeya.

Drowning in data is a real hazard with the Internet of Things (IoT). How should decisions be made with this flood of sensor data? A hybrid approach combining human intelligence and computing power works well. People are good at making decisions that require nuance and judgement, such as identifying hate speech in online postings. Computerized analytics is better at quickly processing large volumes of data.

Soon you could be chatting with your computer about the morning news. An AI has learned to read and answer questions about a news article with unprecedented accuracy. Creating AI systems that can learn in the background from humanity's existing stores of information is one of the big goals of computer science. "Computers don't have the kind of general knowledge and common sense of how the world works [from reading] about things in novels or watch[ing] sitcoms," says Chris Manning at Stanford University. To get a step closer to this, last year, Google's DeepMind team used articles from the Daily Mail website and CNN to help train an algorithm to read and understand a short story.

The architecture includes maths capabilities that could be used by other software as part of a heterogeneous system architecture. That could include neural network software but ARM executives stressed that Bifrost is first and foremost an architecture for raster, tile-based graphics processing units (GPUs). The previous architecture – Midgard – is the one that underlies ARM's T-series Mali GPUs and has up to 16 unified shader cores and SIMD [single-instruction multiple data] instruction set architecture. Bifrost supports up to 32 unified shader cores with a scalar ISA, full hardware cache coherency and something called clause execution. The primary goal, according to Sean Ellis, GPU architect with ARM, was to achieve more performance per square millimeter of silicon and per line of "real-world" shader code. Whereas Midgard GPUs use SIMD vectorization Bifrost GPUs will use quad vectorization in which four scalar threads from a 2 by 2 pixel are executed in lock step.