Everyone now is learning, or claiming to learn, Deep Learning (DL), the only field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that went viral. Paid and free DL courses count 100,000s of students of all ages. Too many startups and products are named "deep-something", just as buzzword: very few are using DL really. Most ignore that DL is the 1% of the Machine Learning (ML) field, and that ML is the 1% of the AI field. Remaining 99% is what's used in practice for most tasks.

Six-year-old Jamil starts school on September 11. There will be no ISIS fighters in his first grade class in Ulm, Germany, but Jamil, haunted by nightmares, is still fighting the ISIS demons. The boy's ordeal began in northern Iraq on August 3, 2015. Then four-years-old, he was one of many Yazidis captured by ISIS, crammed into a bus, and taken to Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, then under ISIS control. The Yazidi people are an ancient, non-Muslim religious community regarded by radical Islamists as infidels worthy of death.

If you've been hankering for a chance to play with Google Assistant but don't own an Android phone, Google Home or hate the Allo messaging app, we have good news: Google announced today that the standalone Assistant app has begun rolling out for iOS in the UK, Germany and France, following its US debut back in May. The app lets you converse with Google's AI using your voice, which means you'll likely ask it to answer your questions or use it interact with your smart home devices. Assistant can interact with smart lighting and thermostats, as well as handling calls, sending messages, setting reminders and calendar events, playing music (albeit via YouTube) and directing you home. Google says the app is designed to operate on devices running iOS 9.1 and above, which should cover the majority of iPhone and iPad users. As we noted in our recent Google Home breakdown, Assistant utilises Google's search smarts, so it can help you find what you want faster.

Fake news is both a problem for curators of user-submitted content and for ad-placement platforms. In April, Germany stated that it would fine social media €50 million for not taking down fake news. Facebook had more engagements on fake news stories during the US election than real news. Google lost millions of dollars as brands pulled ads over concerns of them appearing next to fake news and hate speech. This is why we are releasing newsbox.

WHEN the first printed books with illustrations started to appear in the 1470s in the German city of Augsburg, wood engravers rose up in protest. Worried about their jobs, they literally stopped the presses. In fact, their skills turned out to be in higher demand than before: somebody had to illustrate the growing number of books. Fears about the impact of technology on jobs have resurfaced periodically ever since. The latest bout of anxiety concerns the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI).

Development of the technology has already started elsewhere in Europe and the United States. In April 2016, semi-autonomous trucks drove from factories in Sweden and Germany to the Dutch port of Rotterdam in early trials.

Bee-based maths is helping teach swarms of drones to find weeds, while robotic mowers keep hedgerows in shape. 'We observe the behaviour of bees. We gain knowledge of how the bees solve problems and with this we obtain rules of interaction that can be adapted to tell us how the robot swarms should work together,' said Vito Trianni at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council. Honeybees, for example, run on an algorithm to allow them to choose the best nest site, even though no bee knows the full picture. Trianni runs an EU-funded research project known as SAGA, which is using the power of robotic groupthink to keep crops weed free.

Self-driving lorries are to be trialled on England's motorways despite experts' fears they could put safety at risk. Up to three wirelessly connected HGVs will move in convoy, with acceleration and braking controlled by the lead vehicle. The scheme is expected to be tried on major roads next year for environmental reasons. Driving in close convoy could see the front lorry push air out of the way, making the other vehicles more efficient and lowering their emissions. But the AA warned a'platoon' of HGVs could obscure road signs for motorists and block access to slip roads.

Convoys of semi-autonomous trucks are expected to be tested on public roads in the UK before the end of next year, the government announced today. The Department for Transport and Highways England have rustled up £8.1 million in funding between them to pass on to the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL), the independent organisation that'll conduct the trials. TRL will start with simulation studies and driver training before moving onto a test track and finally, public roads by the end of 2018. Platooning, as it's known, is one of the simpler ways of harnessing self-driving technology. While the truck at the front of a convoy remains under human control, trailing vehicles follow its lead autonomously.

More than 100 of the world's top robotics experts wrote a letter to the United Nations recently calling for a ban on the development of "killer robots" and warning of a new arms race. But are their fears really justified? Entire regiments of unmanned tanks; drones that can spot an insurgent in a crowd of civilians; and weapons controlled by computerised "brains" that learn like we do, are all among the "smart" tech being unleashed by an arms industry many believe is now entering a "third revolution in warfare". "In every sphere of the battlefield - in the air, on the sea, under the sea or on the land - the military around the world are now demonstrating prototype autonomous weapons," says Toby Walsh, professor of artificial intelligence at Sydney's New South Wales University. "New technologies like deep learning are helping drive this revolution. The tech space is clearly leading the charge, and the military is playing catch-up."