With Wimbledon underway and tennis fever threatening to shove aside World Cup fever as the foremost sporting-based malady, what better way to mark the occasion with a new iteration of Mario Tennis? The Switch version of Nintendo's popular sports game sees Mario and his friends, enemies and miscellaneous together again for more inexplicable tennis action. Players can choose from the good (Mario, Luigi, Toad, Peach), the bad (Bowser, Boo, Wario) and the just plain misunderstood (Chain Chomp). You even have the rare opportunity to play as Waluigi. As with most Nintendo titles, a big question is one you'll be faced with early on: is it any good as a single player game?

Chinese researchers are working on a new handheld laser weapon capable of burning skin and clothing from up to half a mile away, according to a report. The high-powered laser rifle will be used by anti-terrorism squads in the Chinese Armed Police, the South China Morning Post reports, with prototypes of the device already being tested at the Xian Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shaanxi province. The ZKZM assault rifle causes "instant carbonisation" of human tissue, according to the researchers behind it, and will "burn through clothes in a split second. " The unnamed researcher from the Chinese Academy of Sciences added: "If the fabric is flammable, the whole person will be set on fire." While the gun is not powerful enough to kill someone, the researcher said: "The pain will be beyond endurance."

AI has an important role to play in the education industry, which also happens to be a lucrative and still–growing space. The global private tutoring market alone will be worth more than $102 billion by the end of this year, and public education offers an equally fruitful opportunity. AI-powered music tutoring app Tonara today announced the launch of its Tonaro 360 music tutoring service, along with a new music store. Throughout beta testing, music teachers reported up to a 68 percent increase in practice hours among students using Tonara 360. So how does it work?

The average worker of the future is a socially adept leader, entrepreneur, and life-long learner with transferrable technology skills, who is also happy to work in a team, suggests a new McKinsey report. Chris Middleton looks at whether organisations can really find such people. Reports about the growing IT skills gap in digitally enhanced organisations have been circulating for as long as the internet has existed as a business tool, suggesting that the supposed urgency of fixing the problem has not been an impediment to many successful organisations. However, a new report from management consultancy McKinsey suggests that the rapid introduction of automation and artificial intelligence systems within companies is changing the very nature of work itself, as technologies increasingly augment some human skills, and replace others completely. Over the next decade, this will force companies to reconsider how work is organised internally.

Nicole Camarillo was touring the Army base at Fort Meade, Maryland in early 2017 when a young captain--I'll call him Matt, due to the sensitivity of his position--crossed her path. I've got to talk to that kid, Camarillo remembers thinking. Just weeks before, she'd seen Matt deliver a presentation on a tool he was developing to counter enemy drone strikes in the Middle East. The technology, he explained, was being developed on a "shoestring budget." As executive director of talent strategy at the US Army Cyber Command, a relatively new branch of the Army, Camarillo's job is to convince top employees in Silicon Valley that they should sacrifice their stock options and six-figure salaries and apply their technological know-how in the Army instead.

Indian banks, including state-owned SBI and Bank of Baroda, have started deploying artificial intelligence (AI) in a big way to improve efficiency, detect human behaviour and reduce operational costs. State Bank of India, the India's largest lender, has SBI Intelligent Assistant (SIA) -- a smart chat assistant, evolved from the "cutting edge technology of artificial intelligence, that efficiently resolves queries of NRI customers, similar to that of a bank representative. The bank is also in the process of instituting an'Innovation Centre' that will explore how emerging technologies such as AI and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can help in making internal banking processes more efficient. Another state lender Bank of Baroda has evolved an innovative concept by setting up of hi-tech digital branch equipped with advanced gadgets like artificial intelligence robot named Baroda Brainy and Digital Lab with free Wi-Fi services. "The Indian banking industry is on a rapid digital journey and has been adopting technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning which will reshape the future.

Netradyne, a leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology focusing on driver and commercial fleet safety, today announced that its Driveri platform has been selected as the winner of the "Best AI-based Solution for Transportation" award from AI Breakthrough, an independent organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global Artificial Intelligence (AI) market today. "Netradyne's recognition by the Artificial Intelligence Awards as being the best AI-based solution for transportation reiterates our company's belief that we are driving forward the potential for AI in all aspects of the transportation space including commercial trucking and autonomous vehicles," said Sandeep Pandya, Netradyne President. "This organization recognizes cutting edge AI technology at the highest levels and to have the Driveri platform mentioned alongside so many other impactful companies such as Google, NVIDIA and IBM is a tremendous honor. We are elated by the recognition and will continue to look for innovative ways to showcase AI's unique and impactful capabilities within transportation." The mission of the AI Breakthrough Awards is to honor excellence and recognize the innovation, hard work and success in a range of AI and machine learning related categories, including AI platforms, Deep Learning, Smart Robotics, Business Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, industry specific AI applications and many more.

Around the time I turned 40, I decided to address the trifecta of concerns I had about climate change, animal rights, and my health: I went hard vegan. My doctor had been warning me to cut down on red meat, and I had also moved to a rural Japanese farming village populated by farmers growing a wide variety of veggies. After a while, the euphoria wore off and the culinary limitations of vegan food, especially when traveling, became challenging. I joined the legions of ex-vegans to become a cheating pescaterian. Five years later, the great Tohoku earthquake of 2011 hit Japan, dumping a pile of radioactive cesium-137 on top of our organic garden and shattering the wonderful organic loop we had created.

Artificial intelligence is on everyone's lips and everyone's mind. I travel the world and speak to customers, colleagues, industry analysts, partners, and reporters. Invariably, every conversation these days turns at some point to AI: the opportunities, the threats, the limitations, and the future. AI systems have been around since the 1950s. After overhyped expectations could not be met, the first AI winter set in, briefly thawed with successes of rule-based expert systems in the 1980s.

Discussions on artificial intelligence have been around for way too long. And waiting for all that work that brings results it was like waiting for a new Game of Thrones season, facing up to more speculations than actual, official spoilers. Now it's here, AI we mean.