Russian company Kalashnikov have released a robot - and it's not quite what anyone expected. 'Igorek' ('little Igor', not its official name) was revealed to the public on Monday in Moscow by the company behind the famous AK-47 gun which has sold more than 100 million units worldwide. The 13-feet (3.96m) tall, 4.5-tonne, manned robot is designed for "carrying out engineering and combat tasks", according to Kalashnikov, at the ARMY Forum. The Forum describes itself as the "world's leading exhibition of arms and military equipment, the authoritative platform for discussing innovative ideas and developments for the armed forces". For the moment, however, Igorek is completely immobile.

This article is the second part (click here for part one) in our series about the role of AI in customer support. The explores how digitization, digital self-service, and distributed digital advisors are disrupting a series of industries and creating a series of business opportunities to realize transformative value propositions, business models, services, and new revenue streams. The second-part delves further into the impact of AIOps and machine automation on a range of different careers and considers how we can prepare further for the occupational changes of the future. Many of the critical building blocks of computing -- microchip density, processing speed, storage capacity, energy efficiency, download speed, etc. -- have been improving at exponential rates over the last decade According to the authors of The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee: "We've also recently seen great progress in natural language processing, machine learning (the ability of a computer to automatically refine its methods and improve its results as it gets more data), computer vision, simultaneous localization and mapping, and many of the other fundamental challenges of the discipline." Administration tasks have evolved to largely self-service over the last few decades with technology removing the need for typing pools, copyists, and mailroom clerks.

King is moving its core data infrastructure and AI/ML platform to Google Cloud's platform, the games developer said on Wednesday. Creator of the likes of Candy Crush and Bubble Witch Saga, King has one of the largest Hadoop clusters in Europe and has decided on a move to the public cloud to prepare itself for further technology disruption, especially the onset of advanced analytics and machine learning. Earlier this month, Gigabit Magazine reported when King shared some of its secrets for adapting to the ever-moving technology landscape. "We believe that our move to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) – a transformational change for King that is already under way – will amplify our own talented engineers' efforts, allow us to focus more on differentiation – areas of effort where King needs unique capabilities not provided by the market – and reinvigorate King's reputation as one of the most innovative and future-facing tech companies in Europe," said the company in a statement. "We look forward to seeing King deliver even richer gaming experiences for players worldwide through our deep collaboration and the unique products and services Google Cloud offers game developers," added Sunil Rayan, Managing Director, Gaming, Google Cloud.

Not too long ago I made a post that simplified what AI is for people who are not so acquainted with tech. If you missed it, it's here (also a locked post). This is a step further in the discourse. There is too much hype about the future with a fully developed AI. It is said that AI will transform work as we know it.

Errol Morris feels that Thomas Kuhn saved him from a career he was not suited for--by having him thrown out of Princeton. In 1972, Kuhn was a professor of philosophy and the history of science at Princeton, and author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which gave the world the term "paradigm shift." As Morris tells the story in his recent book, The Ashtray, Kuhn was antagonized by Morris' suggestions that Kuhn was a megalomaniac and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was an assault on truth and progress. To say the least, Morris, then 24, was already the iconoclast who would go on to make some of the most original documentary films of our time. After launching the career he was suited for with The Gates of Heaven in 1978, a droll affair about pet cemeteries, Morris earned international acclaim with The Thin Blue Line, which led to the reversal of a murder conviction of a prisoner who had been on death row. In 2004, Morris won an Academy Award for The Fog of War, a dissection of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a major architect of the Vietnam War. His 2017 film, Wormwood, a miniseries on Netflix, centers on the mystery surrounding a scientist who in 1975 worked on a biological warfare program for the Army, and suspiciously fell to his death from a hotel room. The Ashtray--Morris explains the title in our interview below--is as arresting and idiosyncratic as Morris' films.

Last week, an emotional Elon Musk described how he was working so hard to keep production of the Tesla Model 3 on track that he missed his own birthday. "All night – no friends, nothing," he told the New York Times, apparently "struggling to get the words out". Musk had, he said, been working 120-hour weeks, often not leaving the factory for three or four days. When he did get home, he said, the choice was between no sleep or taking an Ambien, an insomnia drug intended for short-term use (and blamed by some of Tesla's board members for his erratic night-time tweeting). Musk has long been celebrated by the business press for his work ethic.

Was Da Vinci born in Florence? Does patient'Johnson' really have 300 heart-beats per minute? Checking the accuracy of facts is vital, for question answering, data cleaning, anomaly detection, fraud detection, and more. The emphasis is on the intuition behind each method, as well as on a practitioner's guide, highlighting the applicability of each method to each setting. A B.Sc. in computer science should suffice.

Evidence that Facebook has ambitions beyond its core business of social networking emerged this week, with technology development that stands to benefit society as a whole. Facebook has collaborated with NYU School of Medicine's Department of Radiology to launch fastMRI, a new research project that will investigate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to make magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans up to 10 times faster. If the project is successful, it will make MRI technology available to more people, expanding access to this key diagnostic tool, according to an announcement on Code, Facebook's development blog. MRI scanners provide doctors and patients with images that typically show a greater level of detail in soft tissues -- such as organs and blood vessels -- than is captured by other forms of medical imaging. But they are relatively slow, taking anywhere from 15 minutes to over an hour, compared with less than a second or up to a minute, respectively, for X-ray and CT scans.

SPACE is a leading visual arts organisation providing creative workspace, advocacy, support and promoting innovation. Established by artists in 1968, SPACE runs 20 artist studio buildings across 7 London boroughs and Colchester, providing affordable creative workspace plus support programmes, such as exhibitions, artists residencies, bursaries and training opportunities, to enable artists to be sustainable. SPACE also delivers Learning projects for schools, young people and communities neighbouring SPACE studio sites, to promote engagement with creativity and the arts. At the same time, their programme PACE's Art Technology aims to provide a testing ground and critical exchange platform for artists and thinkers, whose work engages with technology. Enabling audiences to experience and value process by placing it at the centre of practice, Art Tech wants to break down the boundaries between creative processing and developing technologies.

There is a similar product abroad in France,