If you got excited for the Women of NASA and Saturn V rocket Lego sets, you'll dig this new offering from the building brick company from Denmark. Lego's education arm just announced two new robotic kits that can be used in the First Lego League series of robotics competitions, the Mission Moon and Into Orbit sets were designed in partnership with astronauts and space experts to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Lego league itself. The new robotics kits fit right into Lego League Jr. and Lego League Mindstorms systems, which are made to help kids explore their science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills. The Mission Moon challenge will reach over 86,000 students ages 6 to 10 from 41 countries around the globe, while the Into Orbit Challenge will offer more than 280,000 kids from age 9 to 16 in almost 90 different countries. The younger kids will build the space-themed model and use Lego's WeDo software to make it move, while the older students will design, build and code the more advanced Mindstorms robot to complete multi-step missions on a playing field.

The cloud is disrupting traditional operating models for IT departments and entire organizations. Cloudera's plan is to lead in machine learning, to disrupt in analytics, and to capitalize on customer plans to move into the cloud. It's a solid plan -- for reasons I'll explain -- but that didn't prevent investors from punishing the company on April 3, when it offered a weaker-than-expected guidance for its next quarter. Despite reporting 50-percent growth for the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2018, Cloudera's stock price subsequently plunged 40 percent. Cloudera's narrative, shared at its April 9 to April 10 analyst and influencers conference, is that it has restructured to elevate customer conversations from tech talk with the CIO to a C-suite and line-of-business sell about digital transformation. That shift, they say, could bring slower growth (albeit still double-digit) in the short term, but executives say it's a critical transition for the long term.

The US Army recently announced that it is developing the first drones that can spot and target vehicles and people using artificial intelligence (AI). This is a big step forward. Whereas current military drones are still controlled by people, this new technology will decide who to kill with almost no human involvement. Once complete, these drones will represent the ultimate militarisation of AI and trigger vast legal and ethical implications for wider society. There is a chance that warfare will move from fighting to extermination, losing any semblance of humanity in the process.

Spotify is beginning to roll out a re-design of its mobile app to select users of its free-tier service. The changes, which include more control over playlists, will allow Spotify to make its free version behave more like a Premium account in a bid to boost user numbers. The update is currently in testing and has only been rolled out to a small amount of users. The search page has had a slight overhaul, with colourful tabs indicating different genres and a glimpse at what artists are contained in each playlist. The revamped bottom bar is a new'Premium' button to allow users to easily upgrade to the premium version of the app Rumours of the mobile update were unveiled last week by Bloomberg.

A shocking video of Barack Obama has been making the rounds on the internet showing the former president calling Donald Trump a'total and complete dips***'. If you didn't know any better, you might think the video is real. In actuality, what appears to be Obama's voice is actually words spoken by'Get Out' director and writer Jordan Peele. Peele's voice and mouth were digitally inserted into the video using a sophisticated, but increasingly commonplace, technology that's powered by artificial intelligence, called'deepfakes'. The video appears to be of former president Barack Obama giving an address.

It is the cause of countless marital rows over mislaid allen keys and baffling instructions. But while trying to build Ikea furniture can ruin a weekend for many couples, the robots at least have got it sussed. Robots can build an Ikea chair in under nine minutes, mechanical engineers have discovered, after being programmed to fit the parts together perfectly. People, according to Ikea, take 10 to 15 minutes on average to build the same item of furniture. Robots can build an Ikea chair in under nine minutes, mechanical engineers have discovered, after being programmed to fit the parts together perfectly.

For the past several years, machine learning as evolved by the hyperscalers has been trickling down from on high, through frameworks and services, into enterprises. Machine learning is becoming a regular technique underpinning applications in a growing number of industries like manufacturing, energy, telecommunications and engineering, where companies see it as a way to not only reduce the costs and improve the efficiencies in their operations but also to more quickly detect patterns in and gain insights from the huge amounts of data they are generating. The goal is to making better and faster business decisions, and to make more money. We have talked a lot here at The Next Platform about the growing use of AI in research and business and have touched on its potential in the logistics industry. A report by DHL and IBM released this week indicates that while investment in AI is growing rapidly, numbers from last year showed that adoption among commercial businesses is still slow.

Should robots be given legal status? This is the question that currently occupies the AI experts, and for a good reason, a paragraph well buried in a report of the European Parliament published in January 2017, suggests that it is necessary to assign "electronic personalities" to certain robots. "The creation, over time, of a legal personality specific to robots, so that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots can be considered as electronic persons responsible for repairing any damage caused to a third party; it would be conceivable to consider as an electronic person any robot that makes autonomous decisions or that interacts independently with third parties." Translation, this recommendation suggests that autonomous robots should be held accountable, especially in the event that these machines damage the safety of people or damage property. The parties to this proposal, including builders, claim that this change is common sense.

It said the attack was first noticed at noon on March 6, when Windows computers using Windows Defender antivirus began to report a new and rapidly growing campaign. Defender began to analyse and block the attack, initially removing it from over 80,000 computers. Over the course of the next 12 hours, the malware proliferated through Russia, Turkey and Ukraine. At least 400,000 machines were infected. The attack was unusually aggressive and spread far more rapidly than typical malware outbreaks.

How does Artificial Neural Network (ANN) algorithm work?