NIIT, a global leader in skills and talent development, today launched a course in Web App Development with MEAN Stack under the DigiNxt Series. The company has recently ventured into Digital Transformation to offer pioneering programs to young aspirants wishing to enter the digital services industry, as well as to IT professionals wishing to reskill themselves for the new digital world. The cutting-edge program will use the student-centred pedagogy of project-based learning to help them carve a successful career in the emerging digital era. Some of the famous web applications like LinkedIn, Netflix, Uber, Paypal, etc. have been built using MEAN Stack. AngularJS, Node.js (MEAN) represents a group of open source technologies which are known to synergize well together, thereby empowering students to launch their own web and mobile apps.

After great promise in the 1960s that machines would soon think like humans, progress stalled for decades. Only in the past 10 years or so has research picked up, and now there are several popular products on the market that do a decent job of at least recognizing spoken speech. For Björn Schuller, full professor and head of the chair of Complex and Intelligent Systems at the University of Passau, Germany, who grew up watching Knight Rider--a television show about a car that could talk--this is the fulfillment of a childhood fantasy. Schuller is a World Economic Forum Young Scientist who will speak at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China, from June 26 to 28.He recently spoke about the possibility of machines soon tuning in to human language quirks, behavior and emotion. How did you get interested in machine intelligence and speech recognition?

Fast reactions can help you drive defensively and avoid collisions. Many of the autonomous features in cars have reactive ability, such as adaptive cruise-control systems that adjust speed by sensing the distance from and the speed of the vehicle ahead. Toyota Motors wants its cars to go beyond reaction to prediction and evasion. To accomplish those more complex functions, Toyota is going to rely heavily on artificial intelligence, according to Reuters. Like Ford and Honda, Toyota is investing heavily in AI and robotics to improve safety and performance in the fast-approaching world of self-driving cars.

Artificial Intelligence has been discussed for a long time and often inappropriately: some say that it represents a great opportunity, while others say it could be the biggest threat to humanity. But many do not even know what it is exactly. Perhaps because it is a discipline by poorly defined contours, debated among scientists and philosophers, which presents theoretical and practical aspects as well as ethical. We can generally define the AI as a computer's ability to perform typical functions and reasoning of the human mind: according to this definition it is clear that today we already are surrounded by examples of AI, for example Google. The search engine of Mountain View, in fact, no longer shows just lists of links, but also direct answers to various questions (try typing "obama birth date" or "David Beckham's wife" and see the results).

A school in London is set to become the first in Britain to welcome a robot teacher when it opens in September. The humanoid robot, known as Pepper, will be used in classrooms at the London Design and Engineering University Technical College, to help teach pupils about cutting-edge robotics. It will be the first instance of an educational robot being used in a UK classroom. Claims made by an expert in artificial intelligence predict that in less than five years, office jobs will disappear completely to the point where machines will replace humans. The idea that robots will one day be able to do all low-skilled jobs is not new, but Andrew Anderson from UK artificial intelligence company, Celaton, said the pace of advance is much faster than originally thought.

If the University of Hairy Nipples' Fighting Areolas want to play on blue turf, then by cracky, go to town: It had all come a long, long, long way from 1993, when EA launched a college football series minus the rights to school names and logos (Michigan vs. BYU could be simulated as'Ann Arbor' vs. 'Provo') to mirror its successful Madden franchise, even slapping the name of another iconic Bay Area coach, Bill Walsh -- then about to wrap up his second tenure at Stanford University -- on the title. Within a few years, the series had dropped the Walsh name but added collegiate licensing, exploding in the summer of 1995 with 108 schools, conference logos and real bowl names (Fiesta, Orange, Rose and Sugar). It's dead -- technically on a hiatus -- now, a run of more than 20 summers slammed shut in 2013 not by consumer disinterest but legal entanglement. Because even if EA couldn't use players' names, as it violated the NCAA's rules regarding amateurism, programmers were inclined to approximate with every school the real-life attributes, from both a skill and physique standpoint, of its star players in any given season: You knew who they were. They knew who they were. If even if you didn't, the game eventually featured a customizer with sliders that accounted for the most precise of details and free downloadable fan-generated rosters that did all of the naming work for you. A lot of folks got rich off NCAA Football, of course, save for the players whom the game wasn't really (wink) trying (wink) to (wink) emulate (wink). Enter Ed O'Bannon and his legal team, and ne'er the twain; rather than wrestle with how to compensate its student-athletes going forward, the SEC, Big Ten and Pac-12 conferences, three of the so-called Power 5 leagues, forbade the use of their trademarks after the summer of 2013, and EA pulled the plug. And that's the Catch-22: Even thought we know it was wrong, we still miss it.

The Amazon Echo is an unlikely hit. After all, the world's largest online retailer hasn't always won its bets on hardware. And a gadget that relies solely on voice? Yet Amazon has by one estimate sold some 3 million of the squat cylinders since the Echo launched in November, 2014. The company doesn't share sales data, but it did say Alexa, the voice-activated software that powers Echo, is active in millions of places, including smartphone apps and other Amazon gadgets.

NEW YORK – Here in the United States, the horrific shooting at a night club in Orlando, Florida, that killed 49 people has intensified the debate once again over the extent leaders must go to fight terrorism and gun violence. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, the contrasting responses of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and their attacks on one another suggest that a mud-slinging showdown between the two would-be national leaders is on track. And a world away, in the Philippines, the rhetoric surrounding the battle against terrorists and criminals is equally sensational. The one-time student of U.S. democracy has recently elected a leader of its own in political incorrectness. Who would have thought a man who vowed to kill criminals and grant himself a presidential pardon, who boasts of being a womanizer, has joked about wanting to rape a missionary and talked of the killing of journalists, would win a popular election and become head of state. Such is the dramatic turn of events in the Philippines, a nation shaped by centuries of Spanish and then by decades of American colonial rule.

Kai Brunner is principal designer for continuous delivery enterprise software at Electric Cloud. Murphy's Law decrees: "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." For any of us whose livelihood depends on our labor, things going wrong could mean: "Anything that can be automated, will be automated." Our labor or skill in exchange for pay has undoubtedly caused us to seek security in the notion that we'll be forever needed. And yet time has shown that our ingenuity for efficiency orchestrates our removal from all forms of repetitive tasks.

Indian Angel Network (IAN), Indian angel investor network, announced undisclosed investment in Gurgaon-based Staqu, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) focused research startup working in automated image understanding technology. The funding will be used to further build and democratize technology and strengthen the team. Staqu, founded in 2015, comprises of researchers and engineers as a part of its core team. Atul Rai, co-founder and CEO said, "We plan to invest this round to expand the computational strength of our VGrep Lab (AI research lab at Staqu) and fuel it with clusters of GPUs and other technical resources. Currently, we are applying our research to solve pressing problems in the e-commerce sector. In the near future, we are planning on use it to address issues across other market segments, too. Throughout the funding process, our ideas were constantly cross-questioned, which helped us set a clear vision and goals."