German car giant BMW has demonstrated for the first time its fully self-driving car technology which it aims to have rolling out of showrooms within four years. Not only will drivers have their hands off the wheel, they'll soon have their feet off the pedals and their eyes off the road, said the car maker. The technology will be used in the futuristic'i-Next car' which from 2021 will be the firm's first fully-autonomous vehicle, powered by electric hybrid or a hydrogen fuel-cell. The all-electric version is expected to have a range of more than 300-miles thanks to new battery technology and it will be a real-life version of the Vision Next 100 prototype unveiled in 2016. Five levels of self-driving technology are used when the car completely drives itself, compared to the two or three used for cars currently on the road, and each one gives more control to the car itself.

Artificial intelligence is no longer reserved for sci-fi flicks, but the technology is still alien to many enterprise IT teams. Nevertheless, one adoption trend is clear: the public cloud will be the go-to destination for most enterprise AI workloads. "I'm not saying that AI won't happen in the enterprise in people's data centers, but this is a workload that will predominantly happen in the cloud," said Rob Koplowitz, principal analyst at Forrester Research. Some organizations will choose to keep AI applications -- particularly those that contain sensitive customer data -- in-house, as they do for other workloads with strict security or compliance requirements. But, in general, public cloud AI services will be the predominant model, agreed Adrian Bowles, lead analyst at Aragon Research.

This 3D rendering of a lionfish harvester robot was developed by Robotics in Service of the Environment (RISE). The prototype uses a robot arm with two metal electrodes on the end to electrocute invasive lionfish, which are then collected in a central chamber for use as food. The America's Cup sailing race kicked off this week in Bermuda, but a month ago, a different type of competition was held in the island's lucid waters. It was a contest that pitted chef against chef and robot against beast. Last August, NewsHour broke the story of a robot being developed to stop lionfish, an invasive species that has decimated Atlantic coral reef ecosystems due to their insatiable appetites for other fish.

I'm known to be a bit negative about email. When you receive a few hundred of them a day, it tends to make you a little skittish, even a little depressed. Yet, it's still my primary form of communication, especially when I'm trying to find answers to problems. In our highly digitized world, it's amazing we still use asynchronous communication so often. When you send a message, there's no way of knowing if the recipient is doing anything about it.

The AI company is in the early stages of partnering with the UK's National Grid DeepMind is in talks with the UK's National Grid to boost energy efficiency using artificial intelligence. The AI company, acquired by Google for £400 million in 2014, has developed algorithms that can anticipate energy demand and supply. These algorithms are already being used within Google's own data centres, allowing the tech giant to cut energy by 40%, but they are now in talks with the National Grid, which owns and operates energy infrastructure across the UK. DeepMind is offering AI-powered solutions that could help balance energy supply and demand across the nation. "We're early stages talking to National Grid and other big providers about how we could look at the sorts of problems they have," Demis Hassabis, DeepMind's co-founder and CEO, told the Financial Times.

Animals can't tell us when they're in pain, so owners and veterinarians have to rely on other cues to help treat animals in discomfort. But determining that amount of pain might have just gotten easier: Researchers at the University of Cambridge used facial recognition software to figure out the amount of pain a sheep is in simply by looking at it. When a sheep is hurting, it makes certain predictable facial expressions. It's so reliable, in fact, that scientists recently introduced the Sheep Pain Facial Expression Scale (SPFES) to easily determine the amount of pain a sheep feels. However, training humans to read these facial expressions and tics is time consuming; that's where the computer comes in.

Earlier this year, NASA launched a tool that would allow everyday citizens to join the search for alien worlds. Now, the space agency has confirmed there's already been a discovery. Observations with NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii have confirmed that an object spotted by four different users just days after the tool became available is, in fact, a'new cold world' just 100 light-years from the sun. The tool allows users to track moving objects in digital'flipbooks,' using observations from NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey (WISE) spacecraft. To search for undiscovered worlds, visit the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 website.

Machine translation systems that convert sign language into text and back again are helping people who are deaf or have difficulty hearing to communicate with those who cannot sign. KinTrans, a start-up based in Dallas, Texas, is trialling its technology in a bank and government offices in the United Arab Emirates, and plans to install it in more places over the next couple of months. SignAll, a company based in Budapest, Hungary, will begin its own trials next year. KinTrans uses a 3D camera to track the movement of a person's hands as they sign words. A sign language user can approach a bank teller and sign to the KinTrans camera that they'd like assistance, for example.

In 2011, entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen wrote his famous,"Why Software Is Eating the World" in the Wall Street Journal. Today, that story would more likely read, "Why Artificial Intelligence Is Eating the World." The market for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies-- from voice and image recognition to chat bots to self-driving cars-- is hot. A Narrative Science survey found last year that 38% of enterprises are already using AI, and that number will grow to 62% by 2018. Like the tech industry at large, the field of artificial Intelligence is dominated by white men.

For a more technical explanation, this and this article can be read. Here you can find a good explanation as well as a list of the mostly used Kernel functions.