Russia was preparing to display its military might to the world by showing off its latest weaponry: an updated version of its robot soldiers. The country's military was expected to fully participate in the upcoming ARMY-2017 International Military-Technical Forum this summer, according to Sputnik News. While details were scarce, Moscow debuted one of its fleet of military robots at least year's ARMY-2017. This year's forum will serve as a stage for Russia to showcase the latest developments it has made for its autonomous weapons of war. "The advanced development of the Russian Defense Ministry's Main Research and Testing Robotics Center will be demonstrated," Moscow's equivalent of the Pentagon said in a statement Monday.

All who have tried to get something like a conference off the ground knows how extremely difficult it can be. Getting everything right from the speakers to the venue is an extremely demanding process, not to mention attracting the right people. But here the day before Nordic.ai As a small teaser I took it upon myself to write a short teaser about a couple of the talks I am looking especially forward too. My favourite will of course be my very own brilliant colleague Lars Maaløe, who'll speak at 15.20, but to keep if from becoming to much of an advertisement I've focused on some of the many other gems you can look forward to tomorrow.

Unpicking the secrets of the brain's reward system has earned three neuroscientists a reward of their own. Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan, and Ray Dolan have today been awarded the €1 million Brain Prize by Denmark's Lundbeck Foundation. The prize recognises researchers who have made vital contributions to understanding how our brains work. Together, their research has revealed how reward systems in the brain that involve the signalling chemical dopamine influence our behaviour and survival, playing important roles in decision-making, gambling, drug addiction, psychopathic tendencies, and schizophrenia. "This is the biological process that makes us want to buy a bigger car or house, or be promoted at work," says Wolfram Schultz, at the University of Cambridge.

Astronomer Kevin Schawinski has spent much of his career studying how massive black holes shape galaxies. But he isn't into dirty work--dealing with messy data--so he decided to figure out how neural networks could do it for him. Problem is, he and his cosmic colleagues suck at that sophisticated kind of coding. That changed when another professor at Schawinski's institution, ETH Zurich, sent him an email and CCed Ce Zhang, who actually is a computer scientist. "You guys should talk," the email said.

Blue Yonder, the business intelligence cloud computing company recently revealed that it has partnered with Microsoft Azure as its primary platform. The predictive analytics company, which has its origins at the CERN facility in Geneva, uses the cloud to calculate variables at speed, primarily aimed at allowing retailers to make decisions on what to buy, what to stock and what to make in order to ensure that when you look for something in store or online, it'll be there. "The fast-growing amount of data from customer transactions and replenishment processes makes it imperative that retailers switch to automated decisions based on data," says Jan Karstens, CTO of Blue Yonder. "The high expectations of consumers in the face of contemporary cross-channel concepts like Click & Collect, where items are ordered online and picked up in store, can only be met using machine learning." By crunching data ranging from the weather in previous years, to customer footfall, perhaps due to known factors like transport links to a particular branch, the company has been able to perfect a technique that uses machine learning to constantly improve stock availability and decrease waste.

A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox. February is only just gone, and already 2017 is shaping up to be a year full of big ideas and ambitions. The Future of Life Institute, for example, just published the Asilomar AI principles: 23 guidelines to ensure AI developments are beneficial to humanity. They are calling for shared responsibility and caution against an AI arms race.

Wednesday's Budget will see the Chancellor announce the most ambitious education reforms since A-Levels were launched 70 years ago. There will be new investment of £500m a year for technical education, increasing the amount of training for 16 to 19-year-olds by 50 per cent, to 900 hours a year.

The creator of a chatbot which overturned more than 160,000 parking fines and helped vulnerable people apply for emergency housing is now turning the bot to helping refugees claim asylum. The original DoNotPay, created by Stanford student Joshua Browder, describes itself as "the world's first robot lawyer", giving free legal aid to users through a simple-to-use chat interface. The chatbot, using Facebook Messenger, can now help refugees fill in an immigration application in the US and Canada. For those in the UK, it helps them apply for asylum support. The London-born developer worked with lawyers in each country, as well as speaking to asylum seekers whose applications have been successful.

Computer researchers are betting they can take on the house after designing a new artificial intelligence program that has beat professional poker players. Researchers from University of Alberta, Czech Technical University and Charles University in Prague developed the "DeepStack" program as a way to build artificial intelligence capable of playing a complex kind of poker. Creating an AI program that can win against a human player in a no-limit poker game has long been a goal of researchers due to the complexity of the game. Michael Bowling, a professor in the Department of Computing Science in the University of Alberta, explained that computers have been able to win at "perfect" games such as chess or Go, in which all the information is available to both players, but that "imperfect" games like poker have been much harder to program for. "This game [poker] embodies situations where you find yourself not having all the information you need to make a decision," said Bowling.

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