In the age of machine learning and robotics, it is not only the future of work that is in the balance. The very meaning of a career must be reimagined. I have been amazed by the number and variety of people concerned with this issue. Old friends discuss it over dinner, it's one of the first topics broached with strangers on planes, and executives raise it in the context of both their workforce and their family. Two groups feel most affected: those in the middle of their career whose work will be made redundant and for whom retraining and finding new work will be difficult.

Apple is having production issues with the upcoming iPhone X, which could further limit the number of units available at launch, according to the Wall Street Journal. The problems involve the iPhone X's most important feature: Face ID. The facial recognition technology will allow users to unlock their phone and make payments using just their face. However, two components that make up the Face ID, dubbed Juliet and Romeo, are complicating production of the device. The assembly of Romeo has taken more time than Juliet, leading to an imbalance in supply, meaning there were more Juliets and not enough Romeos, sources told the Journal. The Romeo module includes a dot projector that uses a laser to beam 30,000 infrared dots on the user's face to map their unique traits.

The ERL Emergency Robots 2017 (#ERLemergency2017) major tournament in Piombino, Italy, gathered 130 participants from 16 universities and companies from 8 European countries. Participating teams designed robots able to bring the first relief to survivors in disaster-response scenarios. The #ERLemergency2017 scenarios were inspired by the Fukushima 2011 nuclear accident. The robotics competition took place from 15-23 September 2017 at Enel's Torre del Sale, and saw sea, land and air robots collaborating. Some field repairs for team Raptors @ERLrobotleague #ERLemergency while teams Oubot and Raptors continue air and sea operations.

Roboticists worldwide are spending an obscene amount of time and effort trying to teach large humanoid robots how to not fall over. We rejoice every time there is even the smallest incremental bit of progress towards success, because not falling over is super hard, especially if you want your robot to be doing something useful. And even though some large humanoid robots can occasionally survive falling over, most of them don't enjoy it very much. Led by Kei Okada and Masayuki Inaba, a team from the University of Tokyo and Kawasaki Heavy Industries is working on their own life-sized humanoid robot, and they've come up with a new strategy for not worrying about falls: not worrying about falls. Instead, they've built their robot from the ground up with an armored structure that makes it totally okay with falling over and getting right back up again. The concept behind Robust Humanoid Robot (RHP2) is, as the title of the paper suggests, that it should be able to work for a long time in hazardous situations like "a disaster site, a fire site or a wet environment."

Once relegated to the realms of fantasy and cheesy special effects, today Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made its presence felt in various aspects of our daily lives. It's the invisible way in which an app tells us how our favourite tennis star will fare on a grass court; it's in the software that tells our investment managers which fund will have the best returns, and advises our doctor on what the optimum course of treatment would be based on our medical history. It's also in the technology on our phones that recognises and "obeys" our voice commands, and gives smart aleck answers when pushed to do impossible tasks, such as make a sandwich. Giving further insights into how cognitive systems will redefine the future of technology was Seema Kumar, Country Leader, Developer Ecosystems Group IBM India/SA, on Day 1 of TechSparks 2017. To offer some perspective on the developments in AI vis-à-vis businesses, Kumar quoted a recent global C-Suite study conducted by IBM where over 3,000 CXOs across 90 countries and 20 different industries were polled.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Taica will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place on Oct 31 - Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. ANSeeN are the measurement electronics maker for X-ray and Gamma-ray and Neutron measurement equipment such as spectrometers, pulse shape analyzer, and CdTe-FPD. JETRO and prefectures of Japan (Nagano, Shizuoka, Okayama, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, Oita) will present more than twenty cutting-edge technology companies for partnership opportunity with U.S. businesses. Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday's debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy.

The success of last year's NES Classic Edition clearly took Nintendo by surprise. The company was completely incapable of meeting demand, leaving many people unable to buy what became the must-have gift of the holiday season. Now Nintendo has given its SNES the Classic Edition treatment and promises it's going to build way more than it did last year. Having grown up with the SNES (OK, we had a Sega Genesis and my best friend had SNES), it's easy to assume that everyone knows what it is and why people are so excited that it's back. After dominating the 8-bit era with the NES, Nintendo came late to the party with its sequel. The SNES launched in '90 in Japan, '91 in the US and '92 in the UK. The Genesis had a two-year head start in almost every country, but Nintendo's second-generation home console was worth the wait.

Hoaxes and trickery are almost as old as human history. When the Roman Republic first conquered the Italian peninsula between 500-200 BC, it was known to send fake refugees into enemy cities to "[subvert] the enemy from within." "Pope Joan" was believed to be a woman who allegedly tricked her way into become pope in the Middle Ages by pretending to be a man -- but the entire story is now viewed as fake, a fictional yarn spun centuries after her purported reign. "Vortigern and Rowena," a play that debuted in 1798, was initially touted as a lost work of William Shakespeare -- but was in fact a forgery created by William Henry Ireland. And in the 1980s, the Soviet Union attempted to damage the United States' reputation and sow discord among its allies by spreading the myth that American scientists had created AIDS in a military laboratory, in an "active measures" disinformation campaign called "Operation INFEKTION."

There has been a lot of hullabaloo over artificial intelligence and how it would change the world in the course of the next few years. People Matters and Microsoft India organized a roundtable which discussed key ideas on artificial intelligence and how it is impacting workplaces today. This article attempts to capture some of those key ideas and present to you in a simplified format. Despite all the discussions that have been undertaken in many of the public spheres, there is still a lot of confusion about what exactly can artificial intelligence do for you. First, for any system to become intelligent, it will capture data, analyze it, learn from the frequent interactions with the user, and then intelligently respond to the situation.

The Explanation Explorer is a visual interface to explore similarly explained data items. Having a trained machine learning model it is possible to create explanations for data items by probing model inputs. The visual analytics interface groups similar explanations together and provides an interactive way of exploring the significants and quantity of those explanations in a given data set, i.e., a validation data set. You can find a live demo here which uses the example data set below. A Workflow for Visual Diagnostics of Binary Classifiers using Instance-Level Explanations; Josua Krause, Aritra Dasgupta, Jordan Swartz, Yindalon Aphinyanaphongs, Enrico Bertini; To be published at IEEE VAST 2017.