Your baby's first words are a critical milestone in their development - and parents focus on encouraging them with'baby talk'. But now researchers have shown the importance of sleep when it comes to an infant learning to talk. In particular, sleep helps the important process of associating meanings to words - and not just perceive them as random noise. They found that babies as young as six to eight months old were capable of the association - which until now was thought to happen later on. And this occurred as a direct result of them being put down for a midday nap, the researchers say.

Saw this story after it was tweeted by Puni Rajah – Bosch to invest 300m euros in AI, employ 100 experts from India, USA, Germany. As ever India has done great job building its native skills base. But the fact Bosch needs to look outside Germany is telling. We're seeing a lot of pressure owing to skills shortages, and companies, countries and cities everywhere are going to need to up their game to avoid brain drain. Silicon Valley is still the main place data scientists, in particular machine learning and AI specialists, are ending up. Pierre Etienne Bardin of Société Générale expressed the need to be more active in hiring and training succinctly in a recent post on data transformation as the new digital transformation.

In terms of its adoption of robo advice the US got the drop on Europe and the early arrivals at the robo advisors ball are now looking ahead at a whole raft of ways in which to engage an audience in cyberspace. Start-ups such as Wealthfront and Betterment were the pioneers in the robo advice space aiming to democratise investment by offering simple, low cost automated investment advice. More recently, big banks there including Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley have joined the fray, attracted by the ability to serve customers at a lower cost than with human wealth advisers. Whereas one of the key challenges facing the start-ups is the cost of customer acquisition, incumbents already have a large client base to market additional services to, and the advent of cyborg or hybrid advisers has breathed new life into the financial adviser sector that many feared could be wiped out by automated advice. Robo-advisers account for a small piece of the US wealth management industry, currently overseeing roughly $200 billion of client assets; however, it is predicted that figure will mushroom to $2.2 trillion by 2020, with a supportive regulatory environment and cost pressures on traditional advice.

Social and health care is one of the hotspots for the transformative application of robotics and AI. The market has particular appeal in both the UK and US, where 65 populations are set to soar over the next 20 years. So the opportunity for the sensitive application of new technologies – including humanoid care robots, tele-robotics, tele-medicine, autonomous vehicles, assistive devices, light exoskeletons, smart domestic machines, and more – is huge, given the current shortage of qualified staff. Human skeletons, musculature, and internal organs can be scanned and mapped in minute detail, as can the genome itself. So robotic-assisted microsurgery and the use of AI in disease detection, diagnosis, prevention, and cures are good applications of these technologies, which can both extend and complement human skills – as the developers intend.

The way we engage with technology is changing constantly and there's hardly a day that goes by where we don't hear about Artifical Intelligence (AI) and the'rise of machines.' While mature AI-related technologies are still in their infancy, it's a fact that workplace automation is already here across all sectors. From farming to fashion, businesses are using automation to reduce costs and pick up the pace of production. A report from PwC earlier this year claims that in the next 15 years, 30% of jobs in the UK could be affected by automation, with 46.4% of manufacturing jobs and 56.4% of storage jobs being automated by the early 2030s. Despite these high figures, PwC argues that for the most part, automation will enhance productivity, cut costs and add real value to sectors that depend on intelligent human interaction.

Have you noticed that the better you know someone, the easier it is to communicate with them? When we are particularly close, this can border on the telepathic as we start to anticipate what the other person is going to say and finish their sentences. Unconsciously, our brains are collecting, processing, storing, and recalling a huge range of verbal and nonverbal signals, then translating this learning and familiarity into actions. Of course, we're a long way from understanding – let alone replicating – the infinite complexities of the human brain. But in the simplest of terms, this is how machines can learn to interact with people.

Digitizing plant specimens is opening up a whole new world for researchers looking to mine collections from around the world. Computer algorithms trained on the images of thousands of preserved plants have learned to automatically identify species that have been pressed, dried and mounted on herbarium sheets, researchers report. The work, published in BMC Evolutionary Biology on 11 August1, is the first attempt to use deep learning -- an artificial-intelligence technique that teaches neural networks using large, complex data sets -- to tackle the difficult taxonomic task of identifying species in natural-history collections. It's unlikely to be the last attempt, says palaeobotanist Peter Wilf of Pennsylvania State University in University Park. "This kind of work is the future; this is where we're going in natural history."

Machine learning algorithms have successfully identified plant species in massive herbaria just by looking at the dried specimens. According to researchers, similar AI approaches could also be used identify the likes of fly larvae and plant fossils. There are roughly 3,000 herbaria in the world, hosting an estimated 350 million specimens -- only a fraction of which has been digitized. But the swelling data sets, along with advances in computing techniques, enticed computer scientist Erick Mata-Montero of the Costa Rica Institute of Technology in Cartago and botanist Pierre Bonnet of the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development in Montpellier, to see what they could make of the data. Researchers trained... algorithms on more than 260,000 scans of herbarium sheets, encompassing more than 1,000 species.

The same technology that lets soldiers see in the dark can also help protect birds and bats near offshore wind turbines. Night vision goggles use thermal imaging, which captures infrared light that's invisible to the human eye, and now, researchers are using thermal imaging to help birds and bats near offshore wind farms. The thermal tracking software automatically detects birds and bats, which is useful for night tracking they're hard to spot - and it could help inform policymakers about where new and existing offshore wind turbines should be placed. The thermal tracking software automatically detects birds and bats, which is useful for tracking them at night when they're hard to spot . The thermal imaging software, developed by researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), is called ThermalTracker.

Industry leaders in the self-driving car race have teamed up to create an'ecosystem' to push the technology further. Intel and Toyota, among others, announced today they have joined forces to create the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium. The companies plan to share data to boost the creation of maps and improved driver assistance technology. Toyota's AI-enabled Concept-i prototype, which was unveiled at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Several firms just joined forces to create the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium. This includes Intel, DENSO, Ericsson, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), NTT DOCOMO and both the Toyota InfoTechnology Center Co. and Toyota Motor Corp.