To produce high-quality food and feed a growing world population with the given amount of arable land in a sustainable manner, we must develop new methods of sustainable farming that increase yield while minimizing chemical inputs such as fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. I and my colleagues are working on a robotics-centered approaches to address this grand challenge. My name is Andres Milioto, and I am a research assistant and Ph.D. student in robotics at the Photogrammetry and Robotics Lab (http://www.ipb.uni-bonn.de) Together with Philipp Lottes, Nived Chebrolu, and our supervisor Prof. Dr. Cyrill Stachniss we are developing an adaptable ground and aerial robots for smart farming in the context of the EC-funded project "Flourish" (http://flourish-project.eu/), where we collaborate with several other Universities and industry partners across Europe. The Flourish consortium is committed to develop new robotic methods for sustainable farming that aim at minimizing chemical inputs such as fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides in order to reduce the side-effects on our environment.

Medical and public understanding of bipolar disorder has come a long way since the days when the mental illness was called "manic depression." It is much better defined and more easily treated than it used to be, and while mental illnesses still have a certain stigma attached to them, more and more people are opening up about having bipolar disorder, hoping to break down negative perceptions. For those who suffer from the condition, diagnosis is a crucial first step. The National Institute of Mental Health notes the hurdles these people face, saying doctors may not properly identify bipolar disorder if the person appears to have psychotic symptoms like hallucinations or delusions as a result of a severe mood swing, the hallmark of the illness. That could include thinking they have special powers during a manic episode, or believing they have committed a crime during a depressive one.

A recent study has revealed that 75 percent of IT and field service decision makers believe that machines will receive better preventative healthcare than human beings by 2020, thanks to increasing use of AI. As Microsoft founder Bill Gates once said: "Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable." He may have been speaking about medicine, but the sentiment holds true across many other sectors. Technologies such as artificial intelligence [AI], analytics and the use of digital twins are playing a vital role in monitoring industrial machines to prevent critical system failures, detecting issues and scheduling maintenance before outages occur. Given that 10 percent of emergency field service work is predicted to be triggered and scheduled by AI by 2020, a new study from IT market research company Vanson Bourne, conducted on behalf of ServiceMax, has sought to gather industry opinions around increasing automation.

A new study is shedding light on the mysterious markings of zombie ants, tropical carpenter ants that take their orders from a fungus. The fungal vampire carves its way into an ant's body and compels it to crawl over and devour vegetation until it meets its fate clasped to the underside of a leaf or twig. As the grand finale, toxic spores bloom from the dead ant's head and drift to the ground below, onto more unsuspecting zombies-to-be. It hasn't been clear exactly how the fungus exerts this seeming mind control over the ant, but scientists figured that it made its way directly into the ant's brain. Now, using 3-D computer modeling and artificial intelligence to process samples, the researchers were surprised to discover that the fungus, called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis sensu lato, invades an ant's whole body and leaves the brain untouched.

The technology and development will not be limited - Europe can regulate and protect but we need to stay ahead of the game with #AI #FacialRecognition.

Amazon has reiterated its commitment to the UK by opening a new so-called Development Centre in the heart of Cambridge – three storeys of premium office space housing 400 employees dedicated to research for products from Amazon's AI-assistant Alexa to the brave new field of Prime Air drone deliveries. The new development joins Amazon's original Castle Park building in Cambridge to house an interdisciplinary team of engineers, scientists and researchers – dubbed Amazon Research Cambridge – dedicated to "pure innovation", according to Amazon's UK boss, Doug Gurr. "The UK has fantastic history of innovation, with hundreds of years at the absolute cutting edge of innovation, and that continues to be true today," said Gurr. "When picking a site for a development centre you have to start with where you find the world's best scientists, engineers and technologists. But it also has to be somewhere that people want to come and live. Cambridge is a fabulous town where people want to live and work."

Our 6th event of 2017 is now open for booking. It's open to all business owners and leaders in media and technology who have a home, business or base in Oxfordshire and want to stay near home for world-class events for a change. While Digital Transformation is the catchphrase of many boardrooms, the drag of legacy technology and entrenched providers means that many workplaces and large organisations operate in the much the same way they did ten or even twenty years ago. Today, workplace automation needs people to deliver it and is still a complex requirement. The evolution of low cost artificial intelligence (AI) technology and cloud platforms now means that organisations have the capability to'automate the automation' and replace large swathes of traditional human tasks with automated processes that evolve under their own guidance.

In this interview, Audrow Nash interviews Marco Hutter, Assistant Professor for Robotic Systems at ETH Zürich, about a quadrupedal robot designed for autonomous operation in challenging environments, called ANYmal. Here is a video showing some of the highlights of ANYmal at the ARGOS Challenge. Here is a video that shows some of the motions ANYmal is capable of. Marco Hutter is assistant professor for Robotic Systems at ETH Zürich since 2015 and Branco Weiss Fellow since 2014. Before this, he was deputy director and group leader in the field of legged robotics at the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zürich.

I've been nervously chatting to Lara on the dating platform Match.com for two minutes. She's flattered me about my age ("so young!") and she says she's going to take care of me. I like her already - but Lara is not real. She - or rather, it - is a chatbot, an artificially intelligent computer program developed to communicate with people online. The bot was launched in France in 2016 and then rolled out in the UK in April 2017, to help potential clients get started in their search for love by setting up their Match profile for them.

We consider first order gradient methods for effectively optimizing a composite objective in the form of a sum of smooth and, potentially, non-smooth functions. We present accelerated and adaptive gradient methods, called FLAG and FLARE, which can offer the best of both worlds. They can achieve the optimal convergence rate by attaining the optimal first-order oracle complexity for smooth convex optimization. Additionally, they can adaptively and non-uniformly re-scale the gradient direction to adapt to the limited curvature available and conform to the geometry of the domain. We show theoretically and empirically that, through the compounding effects of acceleration and adaptivity, FLAG and FLARE can be highly effective for many data fitting and machine learning applications.