Europe is trying to catch up to the United States and China in an artificial intelligence (AI) arms race. The European Commission announced last week that it would devote €1.5 billion to AI research funding through 2020. It also said it would present ethical guidelines for AI development by the end of the year, suggesting that Europe could become a precautionary counterweight to its global rivals as fears are raised about a lack of fairness and transparency in the quickly advancing field. The commission says it will fund basic research as well as research that could be spun off into the market, and it intends to help member states set up joint research centers across Europe. It also plans to update rules to ease the reuse of public sector information--including available research data.

Physical rehabilitation is not something that anyone does for fun. You do it grudgingly, after an illness or accident, to try and slowly drag your body back toward what it was able to do before. I've been there, and it sucks. I wasn't there for nearly as long as I should have been, however: rehab was hard and boring, so I didn't properly finish it. Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, led by Shelly Levy-Tzedek, have been experimenting with ways of making rehab a bit more engaging with the addition of a friendly robot arm.

Stephen Sudhakar, senior VP, HR and GS, Hyundai Motor India, says: "Indians are good at certain skill capabilities like die maintenance as well as manufacturing engineering. So if you have those skills, you often get to work in other Hyundai plants in the world on a project basis.'' Auto companies' involvement with academia to upscale skills includes interface at various levels. The company runs Toyota Technical Training Institute which offers a threeyear full-time training in – automobile assembly, automobile paint, automobile weld and mechatronics – to poor students. It also runs Toyota Technical Education Program in partnership with industrial and technical training institutes to impart training – general repair, automotive body repair and automotive paint repair – for technical workforce in workshops and dealerships.

The strategy will require Facebook to make progress on some of the biggest challenges in computing. During two congressional sessions last month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg referenced AI more than 30 times in explaining how the company would better police activity on its platform. The man tasked with delivering on those promises, CTO Mike Schroepfer, picked up that theme in a keynote and interview at Facebook's annual developer conference Wednesday. Schroepfer told thousands of developers and journalists that "AI is the best tool we have to keep our community safe at scale." After the congressional hearings, critics accused Zuckerberg of invoking AI to mislead people into thinking the company's challenges are simply technological.

We would like to talk to you a little bit about deep learning. Some experts are predicting the dawn of a new era, which will also lead to the development of a wholly new set of software. What do you think of such predictions? What would this software 2.0 be like? Uwe Friedrichsen: I think that right now the magic crystal ball is still very cloudy; a prognosis is still difficult to make from my point of view.

These stark images showing the heart of the Fukushima nuclear disaster zone reveal the devastation inside its destroyed reactor. The scenes were captured by a camera attached to a 50ft rod and inserted into reactor 2 at the doomed Japanese power plant, on the country's north east coast. Footage shows melted nuclear fuel attached to the pillars, walls and ceiling, as well as puddles of coolant, and debris piled up 16 to 27ins thick on the ground. Analysis of the images by the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning said the spread of debris was suggestive of several holes in the reactor floor. It is seven years since the disaster was unleashed by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. But due to the deadly dose of radiation inside Fukushima, humans have to rely on robots to explore it – and even these have been left malfunctioning and broken.

JERUSALEM – "Has" or "had"? Earlier this week the White House quietly walked back a charge that Iran maintains an active nuclear weapons program, saying it really meant that Iran had one before the 2015 nuclear agreement. A statement sent to reporters Monday by Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that a cache of Iranian documents released by Israel is "consistent with what the United States has long known: Iran has a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program." But intelligence agencies in the U.S. and overseas have stated that the 2015 nuclear deal has frozen Iran's nuclear program. The version of Sanders' statement posted to the White House website was later modified to make clear that Iran "had" such a program.

One lesson to be drawn from recent Western history might be this: Sometimes the extremists and radicals and weirdos see the world more clearly than the respectable and moderate and sane. All kinds of phenomena, starting as far back as the Iraq War and the crisis of the euro but accelerating in the age of populism, have made more sense in the light of analysis by reactionaries and radicals than as portrayed in the organs of establishment opinion. This is part of why there's been so much recent agitation over universities and op-ed pages and other forums for debate. There's a general understanding that the ideological mainstream isn't adequate to the moment, but nobody can decide whether that means we need purges or pluralism, a spirit of curiosity and conversation or a furious war against whichever side you think is evil. For those more curious than martial, one useful path through this thicket is to look at areas where extremists and eccentrics from very different worlds are talking about the same subject.

Robots aren't supposed to be any good at art, that's what differentiates them from us humans. But it looks like that might no longer be true thanks to a piece of classical music that was unveiled during Future Technology Week at the Dubai World Trade Centre. The piece, titled'Ode to Dubai', is the world's first theme song for a city composed purely by artificial intelligence. The AI, affectionately known as AIVA, reportedly used algorithms based on 30,000 symphonic music scores to create the unique composition. It mined the likes of Mozart, Beethoven and Bach, and you can definitely hear the resemblance.

Samsung Electronics knows how hard it is to look for content available on TV these days. So the South Korean tech giant has introduced a new AI system for its smart TVs that helps users find or discover content that matches their preference. Samsung took to its online newsroom Thursday to announce Universal Guide, its advanced program powered by artificial intelligence that helps with content discovery. According to Samsung, its new program will assist users in finding content, be it a TV show, movie, song or a sports channel, that fits their taste. Universal Guide is designed to give suggestions that viewers might like.