Amazon is eager to get more bright minds working on voice technology, so it's expanding the Alexa Fellowship program to 14 more universities, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Texas A&M and Cambridge. The fellowships are financed through Amazon's $200 million Alexa Fund. Other schools joining the roster include University of Texas at Austin, Dartmouth, Arizona State and the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad, India. The latest additions take the number of schools in the program to 18, joining the previous quartet of Carnegie Mellon, University of Southern California, Johns Hopkins and Waterloo. The program comprises two different fellowships: Alexa Graduate Fellowship and Alexa Innovation Fellowship.

"Video games have not only helped the music industry survive, but thrive on entirely new levels," Steve Schnur tells me. As the worldwide executive and president of music at game publisher EA, his team – many of whom have been professional musicians and singer/songwriters – work with some of the biggest music acts in the world, licensing music for video game series like Fifa, Madden NFL, Need for Speed and NHL. Since the 90s, when licensed music became prevalent in games, series such as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Grand Theft Auto and Wipeout have become just as well-known for their soundtracks as they are for their gameplay. For millions of people, video games have been a way to discover new favourite bands or dive into other musical genres. And because people discover this music while playing a game they love, they develop a strong emotional attachment to it.

English-speaking artificial intelligence (AI) robots will be helping out in some 500 Japanese classrooms from next year as the country seeks to improve its English skills, particularly among children and teachers. The education ministry is planning a pilot project costing around 250 million yen (US$227,000) to improve Japanese students' notoriously weak oral and written English, an official said. "AI robots already on the market have various functions. For example, they can check the pronunciation of each student's English, which is difficult for teachers to do," said the official in charge of international education, who asked not to be named. AI robots "are just one example of the trial and we are planning other measures" such as using tablet apps and having online lessons with native speakers, he said.

Most of the telepresence robots that you can buy are appealing because they offer you some sort of mobile agency--like, the ability to remotely drive yourself around. Robots like these are great if you want to, say, find yourself an elephant, but not all that great if you want to help other people out through collaborative tasks that require physical interaction. Collaboration, especially instruction, often depends on the physical act of one person showing another person how to do something, and even if your telepresence robot has an arm or two, it may not be at all intuitive for a remote user have effective direct interactions. At Keio University in Japan, roboticists have developed a new kind of telepresence robot that's designed to (as literally as possible) allow you to remotely inhabit the body of someone else in order to assist them with manipulation tasks. The Keio researchers call their system Fusion, and it lives on someone's back, allowing you to peak over their shoulder and use a second pair of arms to either show them how tasks are done, or even to physically move their limbs for them.

Donald Trump has a lot more to worry about than just Robert Mueller. That much has been clear since April, when details began to emerge from public court filings regarding the FBI raid on Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a number of criminal charges, including some stemming from his work for Trump. Instead, it was carried out by FBI agents acting in coordination with Robert S. Khuzami, a deputy U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. Mueller had referred the Cohen case to Khuzami's office, but that was as far as his involvement apparently went. As I wrote at the time, the distribution of the investigation to a second office served to "potentially inoculate [it] from Trump's attacks against Mueller and potential meddling in the broader Russia investigation." Samuel W. Buell, the former lead Enron prosecutor, told me that would make it much more difficult to kill the investigation with a Saturday Night Massacre–style firing spree.

When engineers or designers want to test the aerodynamic properties of the newly designed shape of a car, airplane, or other object, they would normally model the flow of air around the object by having a computer solve a complex set of equations–a procedure that usually takes hours or even an entire day. Nobuyuki Umetani from Autodesk research (now at the University of Tokyo) and Bernd Bickel from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) have now significantly sped up this process, making streamlines and parameters available in real-time. Their method, which is the first to use machine learning to model flow around continuously editable 3D objects, will be presented at this year's prestigious SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver, where IST Austria researchers are involved in a total of five presentations. Machine learning can make extremely time-consuming methods a lot faster. Before, the computation of the aerodynamic properties of cars usually took a day.

The vast majority of interactive AIs (chatbots, conversational interfaces etcetera) operate on the principle of conversation trees – making them functional but uninspiring to interact with. In most cases, the programmer defines questions and a list of possible responses that the AI can return – in a similar way that Alexa Skills and Google Home Actions are built. These chatbot programs then use natural language processing to parse consumer responses, determine the nearest applicable answer they are programmed with and return this. However, the future of customer interaction will require AIs to rise above conversation trees and become at least a little more human. In order to fulfil their apparent destiny and render the human-staffed customer service department obsolete, they will need to be able to parse intent and emotion as well as meaning.

Ten years after the debut of Devil May Cry 4, Nero is back in the driver's seat and he's never looked better. It's not just the haircut, either -- Devil May Cry 5 runs on the RE Engine built for Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, and Capcom's goal is to build a photorealistic game filled with gooey demons, witty one-liners and flashy combos. The title's first hands-on demo at Gamescom 2018 highlights these exact elements and wraps all of it up in an ichor-crusted, gorgeous package. Devil May Cry 4 was the first game in the franchise to star Nero, a reluctant ally to series protagonist Dante. Nero is a human with a smattering of supernatural abilities, including a demon-powered arm named Devil Bringer.

Google is trying to get rid of the "10,000 steps" target amid claims it could actually hold people back from getting more fit. Many fitness trackers use the goal as a way of motivating people to get moving: 10,000 steps is an achievable but significant target for people as they try and get fitter. But the new version of the company's health app drops that target and instead encourages people to fill rings in ways that allow them to better track their physical activity. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

In this time-lapse, Intel breaks its own Guinness World Record for the most drones flown simultaneously, and they look pretty cool while doing it. IBM has been granted a patent for a coffee drone. These diagrams are part of the application the company filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The barista handing you your cup of coffee might one day be a drone. IBM has secured a patent for a coffee drone that not only flies around public spaces to deliver cups of brew but also predicts which people need caffeine pick-me-ups.