In 2010, a group of students and faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University in Doha, Qatar, introduced their campus to Hala, the latest in a line of what the school termed "roboceptionists." Consisting of a truncated torso and an LCD screen featuring a blue-skinned female CGI head, Hala was designed to provide students and visitors with instructions, directions, and anecdotes in either formal Arabic or American English. In addition to educating visitors about Qatar, Hala's purpose was to explore human-robot interaction (HRI) in a multicultural setting. The population of Doha is a demographic mosaic; the city is primarily inhabited by expatriates from all over the world (most of whom speak Arabic and/or English). Because of this relative diversity, Hala interacted with visitors from a slew of countries, using features like natural language understanding and facial expressions to conduct, in Carnegie Mellon's words, "culturally appropriate" exchanges.

How big should data be to be called'big'? Big data talk usually centers around those four V's: We say that data is big if it has volume, variety, velocity and veracity. It means a lot and lot of data; much, much more data than what a single server's disk can hold. That means not just numbers (Tendulkar's test and ODI scores), but also text (all that prose and poetry in praise of Tendulkar), video (Tendulkar's straight drive) and audio (Tendulkar exclaiming "Ailaa!"). Data on the trajectory of a launch vehicle, data on the growing spread of the Ebola virus, data about how rapidly some song is going viral on the Internet. Data that is valid, accurate, verifiable, not manipulated and trustworthy. What do you do with all this big data? You use this data to find associations, insights or connections.

RE•WORK will host it's annual East Coast events on Deep Learning and the Internet of Things in Boston on 12 & 13 May. Over 300 machine learning and IoT enthusiasts and experts will come together to hear keynote presentations, panel discussions, fireside chats and to explore the startup showcase area. The Deep Learning Summit brings together leaders from industry, academia and startups to explore advances in deep learning methods and techniques, as well as their business applications in areas including finance, manufacturing, healthcare & transportation. Professor Bengio is also Head of the Machine Learning Laboratory, Co-director of the CIFAR Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception program, and editor of many prestigious machine learning publications. Daniel's work has been reported on in The Times, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC News, New Scientist and Forbes magazine.

China has unveiled its first interactive robot - which can chat away to humans and even take orders from iCloud. The incredibly life-like robot has taken three years to build and was proudly showed off recently. As this astonishing video shows, she can hold conversations with humans and at one point even responds to a camera being pushed close to her face. As a member of the media holds the camera, she says: "The photo taken from that angle with make my face look bigger". When the researcher says "hello" to the robot, she replies: "Yes, my lord, what can I do for you."

You have ten seconds to comply, or you're in for a shock. Rolling straight out of a dystopian future where robots keep humans in check, a Chinese university has developed a riot control machine to keep the peace. The robot, which resembles one of Dr Who's infamous Daleks, can keep rioters in check with a nifty electric shock and could enable people to call for help or press an SOS button to call for police. Robotics experts from Beijing's National Defense University unveiled their crime fighting creation at the Chongqing Hi-Tech Fair (pictured). The team claims the robot is is a breakthrough and could play a key role in the future of China's attempts to crush terrorism and public dissent Its makers said the AnBot is a breakthrough in low cost robotics and surveillance and could play a key role in the future of China's attempts to crush terrorism and public dissent.

OSAKA – Nintendo Co. said Wednesday its group net profit fell 60.6 percent in the 2015 business year ended last month to 16.51 billion ( 139.5 million), bruised by the yen's appreciation against major currencies and languid portable game sales. With nearly three-quarters of the video game maker's sales coming from overseas markets, the strong yen saw the company take an 18.36 billion hit in foreign exchange losses, denting its net profit figure. The video game maker's operating profit grew 32.7 percent to 32.88 billion on sales of 504.46 billion, down 8.2 percent. In addition to the currency woes, sales of software for the Nintendo 3DS portable console shrank as the company failed to follow up on fiscal 2014's major hit games. In the year ended March 31, hardware sales of the 3DS totaled 6.79 million units, down from 8.73 million units the previous year, while sales of the Wii U console came to 3.26 million units, down from 3.38 million units.

Now, who on earth is Jia Jia? Does she sound like a Chinese? But not human, though she is human-like. She is a realistic-looking robot, or the robot goddess, who took three years to get created. She is part of the amazing robot industry that is continuously working on robotic products.

But the more articles I read on the topic, the more annoyed I get. It's taken me so long to figure out why! Conversations, writes WIRED, can do things traditional GUIs can't. Matt Hartman equates the surge in text-driven apps as a kind of "hidden homescreen". TechCrunch says "forget apps, now bots take over". The creator of Fin thinks it's a new paradigm all apps will move to. Dharmesh Shah wonders whether the rise of conversational UI will be the downfall of designers. Design, says Emmet Connolly at Intercom is a conversation. Benedict Evans prophecized that the new lay of the land is "all messaging expands until it includes software." "People don't want apps for every single business that you interact with," says David Marcus, head of Facebook Messenger, "…just have a message within a nicely designed bubble … [that's a] much nicer experience than an app." Under his charge, Facebook Messenger has tested this approach, building integrations with high profile partners as well as opening up a bot API. We've even seen avant-garde attempts at taking this idea to its extreme, like Quartz's latest app, which presents the news as a conversation, or the game Lifeline. Apps like Mailtime even promise to save us from our emails by turning them into chats. I guess I might be partially to blame for this, with a few pieces citing a section in a 2014 piece of mine that I literally titled "Chats as Universal UI."

Every time 3-year-old Seif wears his new prosthetic legs, the toddler puts up a fight. He has already made peace with walking on his stumps, but there is no dodging his daily rehabilitation session at a prosthetic clinic in southern Turkey. In a small clinic in the dusty border town of Reyhanli, dozens of wounded Syrians stream per month come to be fitted with prosthetic limbs, their best shot at restoring a semblance of a normal life. Treatment at the clinic is free and only for Syrian civilians and fighters who have lost body parts in the Syrian conflict. Workers at the clinic manufacture prosthetic body parts while patients are in therapy.