Facebook will now let everyone add a flag to their profile picture, in a move thought to have a far wider significance than just letting people change up their photos. The change lets people add nearly 200 flags to their profile photos on the site. The frames began in 2015 as a way of showing support for a sport team – but has now widened to include a range of different national flags from the smallest to biggest countries. The change in itself is a reflection of the way that Facebook is giving people more and more tools to change up their pictures as a way of encouraging them to post more about themselves on the site. Changing pictures drives engagement and helps collect the data that Facebook uses to get ad revenues.

Like all great programmers I get most of my code from StackOverflow questions. Can't figure out how to add authentication to Flask? Want to shut down sendmail? Now, thanks to all the code on the Internet, a robot can be as smart as a $180,000 coder. The system, called DeepCoder, basically searches a corpus of code to build a project that works to spec.

News of a potential re-launch for the iconic Nokia 3310 took the world by storm earlier this month, and the likelihood of a resurrection is growing stronger by the day. Fresh leaks have shed more light on the capabilities of the heavily tipped 2017 version of the handset, which is expected to go on sale for €59 (£50). According to Chinese site Vtech, the new Nokia 3310 will feature a colour screen, rather than the monochrome 84 x 84 display of old. 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 ...

The race to bring self-driving cars to the road got uglier this week as the self-driving car company owned by Google parent Alphabet accused Uber of using stolen technology to speed up its autonomous car development. Waymo filed a lawsuit against Uber on Thursday accusing the ride-hailing company of stealing its trade secrets. "Competition in the self-driving space is a good thing; it pushes everyone to develop better, safer and more affordable technology. But we believe that competition should be fueled by innovation in the labs and on the roads, not through unlawful actions," the Waymo team said in a Medium post announcing the suit, which names both Uber and Otto, a startup owned by the ride-hailing company, as defendants. The lawsuit argues that former Waymo manager Anthony Levandowski took information when he left the company to co-found a venture that became Otto.

Can artificial intelligence replace teachers in near future? Artificial intelligence applications are changing our lives. While a lot of examples show how AI is already being used, there is still a lot of room for innovation and new applications. Will artificial intelligence and machine learning replace teachers in near future? Automation has affected nearly every industry.

Could machines, in time, write software themselves, and take programmers' jobs? At the very least, they might well provide the same boon automation has for many other fields: Remove some of the drudgery, and leave developers to do more creative work. A recently released research paper co-authored by Microsoft Research and the University of Cambridge discusses how a machine learning system called DeepCoder could learn to write small programs by using routines from other programs as raw material. It uses small snippets of code, only a few lines each, written in a custom, DSL (domain-specific language) to make it easier to analyze the input and output of each snippet. The better a match each snippet is to solving a particular problem, the more likely it'll end up as part of the solution.

The era of "Quantified Self" (a term coined in 2007 by US WIRED founding executive editor Kevin Kelly) is relatively new. The first Fitbit digital step counters launched in late 2009, and we've since seen an explosion of various wearables, apps and digital health devices all riding the exponential wave of smaller and cheaper mobile-connected and app-ified sensors and computing. We are now at the point where it is possible to measure almost every component of human physiology and many elements of behavior. But just having data (in increasingly overwhelming amounts) from disparate devices and apps does not alone translate to better health and prevention or improved management of disease. The data and analytics need to connect with clinical endeavors to be translated into knowledge and actionable information.

The robots were Joe McGillivray's idea. The first one arrived at Dynamic Group in Ramsey, Minn., by pickup truck in two cardboard boxes. With a mixture of excitement and trepidation, McGillivray watched as a vendor unpacked two silver tubes, assorted blue-and-gray joints and a touch screen and put them all together. When he was finished 10 minutes later, McGillivray beheld an arm that, had its segments not all been able to swivel 360 degrees, might have belonged to a very large N.B.A. player or a fairly small giant. Its "shoulder" was mounted to a waist-high pedestal on wheels. If it were to hail someone across the room, its "elbow" would reach eye level. Below its "wrist," which was triple-jointed for extra dexterity, there were sockets for various attachments. McGillivray, not sure yet if he wanted to keep the contraption, stuck a piece of clear tape to the wrist and drew a happy face on it, which made the arm look a bit as if it were putting on a puppet show. He hoped that this would help it look nonthreatening.

Google has rolled out in beta a new cloud service that allows users to rent Nvidia GPUs running in Google data centers for machine learning and other compute-heavy workloads. While relatively few companies outside of a small group of web giants like Google itself use machine learning in production, there's a lot of development work going on in the field, with computer scientists building and training machine learning algorithms and companies mulling various business cases for using the capability. Training these systems requires a lot of computational horsepower, and at least today companies have found that harnessing the power of many GPUs working in parallel is the best way to get that horsepower. The problem is that building, powering, and cooling a GPU cluster is far from trivial – not to mention expensive – which makes renting one an attractive option, especially at the experimental stage, where most companies are with machine learning. It's a business opportunity for cloud providers, who already have experience with this kind of infrastructure and the resources to offer it as a service.

Robot-maker Sean Bielat says he's fine with the Dallas Police Department's apparently unprecedented use of a police bomb-disposal robot to kill a gunman on Thursday. "A robot was used to keep people out of harm's way in an extreme situation," said Bielat, the CEO of Endeavor Robotics, a spinoff of iRobot's military division. "That's how robots are intended to be used." Joergen Pedersen, the CEO of RE2 robotics and the chairman of the National Defense Industrial Association's robotics division concurred. "If these robots are used in manners for which they were unintended, we would expect that the officers who are there to keep citizens and themselves safe would use good judgment where the application of lethal force is a last resort," he said.