In March 2004, when René Koiter was 19, his twin brother Michel came down with a fever. René and Michel were students in the Netherlands--Michel at the Utrecht School of the Arts, René at the University of Utrecht--and they were doing freelance design work for Blizzard Entertainment, a video game developer about to launch its marquee franchise: World of Warcraft. Michel's fever wasn't supposed to be fatal. Michel was young and healthy--he and René were regulars at their local Taekwondo center. But a few days later, Michel's heart started failing, and René and their father rushed to the hospital to save him.

Fortnite players will finally be able to play with friends on other consoles, after a major U-turn by Sony. The company said that it will finally be rolling out the cross-play feature, initially as a test, following intense anger from users. Players had long been crying out for such features, which are enabled on just about every other platform. But Sony said it would not allow them, and even appeared to suggest that it was doing so because PlayStation offered the best experience. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Events We'll be opening the doors at MCubed in just over two weeks time, but there's still time to grab your space at The Register and Heise's hype-free exploration of machine learning, AI and data science. After that, our range of conference sessions will take you from AI fundamentals and the required maths, to tips and tricks with key tools and methodologies such as TensorFlow, Keras, and Lime. The emphasis throughout is on how businesses and other real world organisations can implement and benefit from AI and machine learning, and we have examples from organisations such as Deutsche Bahn, the Ordnance Survey, and the UK's TTP. Our speakers will use their practical experience to explain neural networks, reinforcement learning, mobile machine learning, and much much more. We'll show you how to make your AI projects more efficient, show what happens when DevOps meets machine learning, and steer you away from vendor lock-in.

Starting September 2019 in the European Union, a large portion of online payments greater than €30 (currently about $35) will require multifactor authentication. Consumers will need to use two of three things to verify transactions: something they know, like a password; something they have, like a digital device, perhaps a USB token, that identifies them; or something they are: biometric data. Proofs based on physical characteristics, like fingerprints and faces, are slowly becoming more common. This legislation will likely cause them to surge. Most consumers using biometrics will likely do so on their phones, many of which already have technology that payment-service providers will use to verify payments--such as Apple Inc.'s Touch ID fingerprint sensors or Face ID facial-recognition software on its iPhones.

Gone are the days when banks and credit unions could compete on product or price. Today, the best way to differentiate a brand is through hyper-personalized financial recommendations driven by data and advanced decision tools. Subscribe to The Financial Brand via email for FREE!According to the WSJ, the number of branches in the U.S. are declining at the fastest pace on record. Although that may be understandable given a shifting preference for digital banking, this is coupled with findings by J.D. Power that fully digital bank customers are the least satisfied – even Millennials. Is this because digital banking apps are poorly designed or because digital banking consumers are more demanding … or both?

At the industry's main professional drone event, InterDrone (Las Vegas, USA, Sept. 5-7, 2018), Parrot, the leading European drone group, presented two new professional drone platforms: senseFly eBee X and Parrot ANAFI Work. Designed by teams of engineers in Paris and Switzerland, brought together within Parrot Business Solutions, the two new professional drone platforms have further strengthened the Group's range of solutions for the business market. Both complementary and differentiating, the eBee X and ANAFI Work provide precision data to work more efficiently, reduce professional risks and costs, and make decisions based on detailed precision information. Far more than just a drone, eBee X is a solution designed to optimize operator efficiency and minimize risk when collecting data. Its High-Precision on Demand (RTK/PPK) feature delivers absolute accuracy of down to 3 cm (1.2 in), without ground control points.

At turns lively and yearning, the traditional folk musics of Ireland and Britain have made their mark around the world. Now these perennially popular forms of music are helping computers learn to become a new kind of partner in music creation. A machine learning system overseen by a researcher in Sweden has produced 100,000 new folk tunes to date, generating a diverse range of reactions from folk musicians and the public. Some of the music can even be heard on a newly-released album by an Irish folk group. Bob Sturm, associate professor of computer science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, says that the main idea of the project was to train computer models on folk music, so that they appear to have some musical intelligence, and then to "devise methods to unravel what they are actually doing," he says.

While Americans still wrangle their overgrown lawns by pushing or riding a lawnmower, many Europeans have handed off that responsibility to robots. These beefy, Roomba-like mowers loop their way around a yard, keeping grass trim and neat. To many of their users, the bots are endearing. Their owners give them names or cover them in decals of ladybugs or bumblebees. But the sentimentality only goes so far, because these blades-on-wheels have also been slicing up something other than grass: hedgehogs.

Technology is designed to improve and streamline every facet of life, and that inevitably includes areas most people would never even think about. A random issue for many, perhaps, but for the agriculture industry, a new development in this field is a big deal. Researchers from Cambridge University have developed the first robotic lettuce leaf peeling system, which not only demonstrates advances in automation, but addresses increasing food and labor demands. After harvesting, lettuces must have their outer layers removed. This is a time-consuming, menial task currently performed by farm workers, whose man power is better used elsewhere.