A team at Harper Adams University are trying to grow and then harvest a field of barley using only robots and drones. If they succeed it will be a world first and we're following their progress. Last time we watched as the team from Harper Adams started to prepare for this year long experiment. They were using a small robot, not much bigger than a toy car, to refine the steering system they wanted to use. But at that point they were still waiting on their tractor to be delivered and couldn't find a suitable combine harvester. Since then things have moved on pretty quickly with triumphs and also some sleepless nights.

Today on In Case You Missed It: We get our first close-up look at Saturn's rings thanks to the Cassini spacecraft -- which just completed the first of its twenty-two passes through the planets' famed hoops. NASA stitched together the images from the craft to give us Earthlings an incredible first-person (first-spacecraft?) point-of-view of the recent dive, which began at the north pole of the planet and moved down its side. The imaging team working on Cassini's trips expects to get even better data from the subsequent trips, which will gather information on Saturn's gravity and magnetic fields. Meanwhile, a biomedical engineering team at Newcastle University in the UK is using computer vision in a robotic hand to make an "Intuitive" hand prosthetic. The team used a camera, AI and neural networking to enable the hand to recognize objects in front of it, and then change its grasp in response.

Like major transformations before it, Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to transform our lives and to lead us to a better world, while creating even greater impact for business and society. Already, machines and programs that can sense, learn, reason, and act, are tackling large-scale global challenges in a variety of fields, including science, medicine, education, finance. They are augmenting human capability, and helping us to go exponentially farther and faster in the understanding of our world. Fueled by improved algorithms, access to growing and massive data sets, ubiquitous network access, near infinite storage capacity and exponential computing power, AI is at the heart of much of today's technical innovation. AI is a new factor of production, driving growth by providing intelligent automation and potential labor augmentation: Unlike traditional automation solutions, AI can help automate complex physical and reasoning tasks that require adaptability and self-learning; enabling workers to transition to more creative and innovative responsibilities.

The UK government is secretly planning to force technology companies to build backdoors into their products, to enable intelligence agencies to read people's private messages. A draft document leaked by the Open Rights Group details extreme new surveillance proposals, which would enable government agencies to spy on one in 10,000 citizens – around 6,500 people – at any one time. The document, which follows the controversial Investigatory Powers Act, reveals government plans to force mobile operators and internet service providers to provide real-time communications of customers to the government "in an intelligible form", and within one working day. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Amazon said on Thursday it would open a 60,000 square foot development center later this year in the U.K. focused on artificial intelligence (A.I.) and drone delivery research. The site in Cambridge, which is just north of the capital London, will have a capacity for 400 people but the U.S. e-commerce giant did not say how many people it was hiring. Amazon's announcement comes after it pledged in February to hire 5,000 full-time staff in the U.K. this year, which would bring its headcount in the country to 24,000 from the previous 19,000 figure. The company announced separately on Thursday that it has invested £6.4 billion ($8.26 billion) across the U.K. since 2010. "By the end of this year, we will have more than 1,500 innovation related roles here in Britain, working on everything from machine learning and drone technology to streaming video technology and Amazon Web Services," Doug Gurr, U.K. country manager for Amazon, said in a press release on Thursday.

The months-long manhunt for French-born Rachid Kassim ended one chilly morning early this year when a drone-launched missile destroyed his battered white pickup truck as it motored through the besieged Iraqi city of Mosul. The 29-year-old former rapper had cast a grim shadow in international counter-terrorism circles. He spoke fluent French, once beheaded a man in an online video and allegedly helped organize or encourage nine terrorist plots -- nearly all unsuccessful -- in France last year. The Feb. 8 drone strike notched a victory for a U.S.-led effort that seeks to silence Islamic State operatives who use social media, encrypted messaging and other online tools to reach disaffected Muslims overseas and to launch what counter-terrorism experts now call "remote-controlled" attacks. As Islamic State steadily loses ground in Iraq and Syria, its ability to sponsor and inspire headline-grabbing attacks abroad looms larger than ever -- providing the militants the appearance of lethal viability despite the caliphate's collapsing borders.

The Drum has launched a survey of its readers to explore how brands are investing in artificial intelligence (AI). The research survey, in partnership with Sysomos, will explore how AI is set to make a huge impact in the marketing industry and will form the basis of The Drum Market Insight Report - Artificial Intelligence Edition. Brand investment in AI is starting to pick up. Forrester has predicted there will be a 300% increase in investment in AI in 2017. According to a study by researchers at Oxford University and Deloitte, the likelihood of a robot taking a marketer's job is 33%.

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What the paper failed to mention was that America's social safety net is much weaker than those of other rich countries, making the comparison a difficult one. Think universal healthcare, affordable education, accessible childcare options -- all hallmarks of the European welfare state, for better or worse. While some economists have argued such programs have actually been growth retardants in the long-run, it's hard to dispute they make it easier to get through a recession. Germany, for instance, used its more constructive relationship between businesses and unions to work out job-sharing schemes during the recession that allowed workers to keep their jobs while reducing their hours temporarily. Germany also offers ample lessons for other countries in terms of its renowned apprenticeship programs, credited with sustaining high levels of manufacturing employment despite increased mechanization.

In this paper we study the variational problem associated to support vector regression in Banach function spaces. Using the Fenchel-Rockafellar duality theory, we give explicit formulation of the dual problem as well as of the related optimality conditions. Moreover, we provide a new computational framework for solving the problem which relies on a tensor-kernel representation. This analysis overcomes the typical difficulties connected to learning in Banach spaces. We finally present a large class of tensor-kernels to which our theory fully applies: power series tensor kernels. This type of kernels describe Banach spaces of analytic functions and include generalizations of the exponential and polynomial kernels as well as, in the complex case, generalizations of the Szeg\"o and Bergman kernels.