For a while it seemed like all we ever did in video games was shoot Nazis. In 1997, Steven Spielberg, post-Schindler's List, pre-Saving Private Ryan and apparently in the midst of a second world war fixation, met with a team at DreamWorks to outline an idea for a first-person shooter set in 1944. In the resulting game, Medal of Honor, you played as protagonist Lieutenant Jimmy Patterson, who parachutes into Nazi territory in a bid to single-handedly turn the tide of war. In this way, Spielberg's game was reminiscent of Hollywood's most jingoistic postwar output. Like 1949's Sands of Iwo Jima or 1965's Battle of the Bulge, Medal of Honor used the theatre and mud-flecked aesthetic of the war to present a revisionist, nationalistic yet deeply cathartic take on the war of our grandparents.

The British government is working on a new bill that would regulate insurance and liability for accidents involving cars operating in autonomous mode. When such a law is passed it would pioneer how authorities around the world should deal with new technologies in the motoring industry. One of the objectives of the new bill is to ensure accident victims can easily claim compensation if a crash occurs when a car is in autonomous mode. Insurers could still try to recover the costs from the vehicle's manufacturer. There will also be exceptions to full cover if, for example, a vehicle owner has made unauthorized changes to the car's software; and if he fails to install an update that his policy asks him to then the driver becomes liable.

Knowledge sharing website Science Alert has compiled a list of 23 science facts that we didn't know at the start of 2016. The new findings related to knowledge management include that it's possible to live a normal life without 90 percent of your brain, and that for the first time, artificial intelligence beat a human champion in the highly complex game of Go. The debate that is emerging around another of the 23 facts – NASA's peer-reviewed finding that the "impossible" EM drive produces thrust – highlights the complexities that exist in science and how self-correction in science benefits scientific rigour and integrity1. Yet another of the 23 facts highlights how attitudes and opinions can negatively influence the management of knowledge. In the 1920s, a museum director dismissed some of Leonardo da Vinci's scribbled notes and diagrams as being irrelevant. However, a University of Cambridge professor has found that a page of these scribbles from 1493 actually contains the first written records demonstrating the laws of friction.

HBO's Westworld features a common plot device--synthetic hosts rising up against their callous human creators. But is it more than just a plot twist? After all, smart people like Bill Gates and Steven Hawking have warned that artificial intelligence may be on a dangerous path and could threaten the survival of the human race. They're not the only ones worried. The Committee on Legal Affairs of the European Parliament recently issued a report calling on the EU to require intelligent robots to be registered, in part so their ethical character can be assessed.

"WOULD it not be of great satisfaction to the king to know, at a designated moment every year, the number of his subjects?" A military engineer by the name of Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban posed this question to Louis XIV in 1686, pitching him the idea of a census. All France's resources, the wealth and poverty of its towns and the disposition of its nobles would be counted, so that the king could control them better. These days, such surveys are common. But they involve a lot of shoe-leather, and that makes them expensive.

The electrical grid has become a network of billions of linked devices with highly complex energy and information flows. Add to this the elevated role of the consumer as a producer and you are looking at a massive volume, velocity and variety of data from smart meters, transformers, and substations that remains largely untapped. One extremely interesting solution to the impending challenges is cognitive computing, which is gaining traction among industry experts as a way to better manage data and improve both operating efficiencies and customer service. According to GTM Research, applying cognitive computing is expected to deliver an estimated $121 billion global return on investment (ROI) on grid analytics by 2020. There are three key areas where energy companies are already engaging with cognitive systems to experience real benefits.

I like the Nintendo Switch. Conceptually, it is the most intelligently designed console in the past 15 years. However, a console is only as strong as its library, and The Switch's selection of games looks a little thin for the foreseeable future. Nintendo is to gaming what Major League Baseball is to major sports leagues. They are so established, revered and covered by a hardcore following that they are often resistant to stepping outside of their normal profile.

Can artificial intelligence do the work of high-powered consultants? A Munich-based startup founded by a math major is doing just that. His fast-growing software startup offers companies like 3M, Cisco, and General Electric better results at a fraction of the cost -- and he's grabbing market share in a $15 billion market from consulting powerhouses like IBM and Accenture. Should investors in those incumbents be worried? Before getting into why, let's take a trip down my memory lane.

Artificial intelligence boosters predict a brave new world of flying cars and cancer cures. Detractors worry about a future where humans are enslaved to an evil race of robot overlords. Veteran AI scientist Eric Horvitz and Doomsday Clock guru Lawrence Krauss, seeking a middle ground, gathered a group of experts in the Arizona desert to discuss the worst that could possibly happen - and how to stop it. Their workshop took place last weekend at Arizona State University (ASU) with funding from Tesla co-founder Elon Musk and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn. Officially dubbed "Envisioning and Addressing Adverse AI Outcomes", it was a kind of AI doomsday games that organised some 40 scientists, cyber-security experts and policy wonks into groups of attackers - the red team - and defenders - blue team - playing out AI-gone-very-wrong scenarios, ranging from stock-market manipulation to global warfare.

We present a new random sampling strategy for k-bandlimited signals defined on graphs, based on determinantal point processes (DPP). For small graphs, ie, in cases where the spectrum of the graph is accessible, we exhibit a DPP sampling scheme that enables perfect recovery of bandlimited signals. For large graphs, ie, in cases where the graph's spectrum is not accessible, we investigate, both theoretically and empirically, a sub-optimal but much faster DPP based on loop-erased random walks on the graph. Preliminary experiments show promising results especially in cases where the number of measurements should stay as small as possible and for graphs that have a strong community structure. Our sampling scheme is efficient and can be applied to graphs with up to $10^6$ nodes.