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."

By the end of this article, you'll understand how Numerai is using advances in cryptography like homomorphic encryption to allow for open participation in the problem of stock market efficiency. Over the last few years, machine learning algorithms solved big problems in computer vision. One such problem was getting an algorithm to learn how to recognize handwritten digits in the MNIST dataset. Everyone writes digits differently, so the problem was difficult for computers to grasp. When the dataset first became available in 1998, machine learning algorithms for computer vision were not very accurate.

Data analytics firm Orbital Insight is partnering with the World Bank to test technology that could help measure global poverty using satellite imagery and artificial intelligence. The new partnership will test the use of AI to supplement these surveys and increase the accuracy of poverty data. Orbital said its AI software will analyze satellite images to see if characteristics such as building height and rooftop material can effectively indicate wealth. The pilot study will be conducted in Sri Lanka. If successful, the World Bank hopes to scale it worldwide.

AI is coming for your paintbrush too… A new iOS app, called Prisma, is using deep learning algorithms to turn smartphone photos into stylized artworks based on different artwork/graphical styles. Snap or choose your photo, select an'art filter' to be applied and then wait as the app works its algorithmic magic -- returning your stylized image in a matter of seconds, along with options to share it to your social networks. So if you've ever wanted your bedroom to resemble a rotoscope animation, or your selfie to have shades of manga, or your hopeless sketching skills not to hold back your yearning to create a web comic then Prisma is definitely the app for you… Prisma was launched only last week but has already garnered some 1.6 million downloads, CEO and co-founder Alexey Moiseenkov tells TechCrunch, on the phone from Moscow where the team is currently based. The key to this early growth is clearly the app's prominently placed social share function, which prompts users to post to Instagram as soon as they receive their processed shot. And just this week the Facebook-owned photo-sharing behemoth revealed it had more than doubled its monthly active users over the past two years -- reaching a whopping 500 million MAUs.

Learned experts in the field of science and technology have had predicted how'Artificial Intelligence' may take over the world. On close heels, a Russian robot appears to have'escaped' the research lab in which it was housed. Do you know what's more weird? It is the second time the bot has tried to flee the lab in just a span of two weeks, according to news reports. Engineers at the Russian lab reprogrammed the intelligent machine, dubbed Promobot IR77, after last week's incident, but the robot recently made a second escape attempt, The Mirror reported. Reportedly, in its first effort to flee last week, the robot almost made 50 meters into the street before it got'partially paralyzed' due to power exhaustion.