A 7-year-old's letter seeking a job at Google earned a quick and uplifting response from the search giant's CEO, further proving the power of a good first impression. Andy Bridgewater said he and his 7-year-old daughter were sitting at his desk last week, when she asked him what he did for a living. "I work as a sales manager for a refrigeration company," Bridgewater said, "which I assume is boring to a 7-year-old." So Chloe Bridgewater asked where he would like to work. He then showed her photos of the work at the tech company, which evidently left a mark on her.

The European Parliament today called for EU-wide liability laws to cover robotics and artificial intelligence. MEPs also want researchers to adopt ethical standards that "respect human dignity". In a resolution today MEPs noted that several countries are planning robotics regulations and that "the EU needs to take the lead on setting these standards, so as not to be forced to follow those set by third countries". According to a European Parliamentary press release, MEPs said draft legislation was "urgently needed" to clarify liability in accidents involving self-driving cars. Although manufacturers including Volvo, Google, and Mercedes say they will accept full liability if their autonomous vehicles cause a collision, this is not currently a legal requirement.

Fan Hui is speaking to a chatty audience at the 2016 European Go Congress in St. Petersburg, Russia, gushing over a game of Go played by one of his mentors. Hui's enthusiasm is infectious--the room's chatter subsides as he pulls up slides of the complex Chinese game, whose players battle to dominate a 19 19 board with black and white tiles called stones. Hui's mentor, AlphaGo, has studied strategies built over the game's 4,000-year history, and has played thousands of practice matches. But a training regiment that took Hui years to perfect, AlphaGo did in about four weeks. The game Hui showed to the Saint Petersburg audience is one that the machine played against itself, and to Hui, is an example of the beauty of AlphaGo's strategic mind Even the smartest humans miss patterns that computers see instantly. Problems like file-compression, translation, and custom drug fabrication have millions of variables and data points whose limits exceed human understanding dozens of times over.

Bono and The Edge are excited by Nuritas' potential for impact and profitability. Try to imagine walking into your local grocery store ten years from now. You head towards the back, as you've done countless times before, to snatch a handful of your favorite cereal bars. Only this time, the packaging looks a bit different. You notice that there are two new versions, each with a label below the brand name.

A'scorpion' robot sent into a Japanese nuclear reactor to learn about the damage suffered in a tsunami-induced meltdown had its mission aborted after the probe ran into trouble, Tokyo Electric Power company said Thursday. TEPCO, the operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant, sent the remote-controlled device into the No. 2 reactor where radiation levels have recently hit record highs. The'scorpion' robot, so-called because it can lift up its camera-mounted tail to achieve better viewing angles, is also designed to crawl over rubble inside the damaged facility. The'scorpion' robot is designed to withstand up to 1,000 sieverts of radiation - but had its mission aborted after the probe ran into trouble, Tokyo Electric Power company said After a manually operated camera probed the deepest point yet within the reactor earlier this month, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) estimate that radiation levels inside the plant's No. 2 reactor have hit 530 sieverts per hour. Radiation exposure at 530 sieverts per hour would effectively shut down TEPCO's planned robot camera probe in under two hours.

In the summer months of 2015, Jeffrey Schnapp and a few of his colleagues started collecting rideables. The hoverboard craze was in full swing, and OneWheels and Boosteds were showing up on roads and sidewalks. Schnapp and his co-founders rode, drove, and crashed everything they could find. For Schnapp, a Harvard professor and longtime technologist with a shaved head, pointy goatee, and a distinct Ben Kingsley vibe, this was market research. It goes with you, turns with you, stops with you.

A 7-year-old girl got a head start into her career with an endearing letter to the "Google Boss." Chloe Bridgewater, who lives in Hereford, England, loves her tablet computer and robots. When she found out about Google – and the perks of working there that slides, go-karts and bean-bag chairs – she knew she had to work there. Her father Andy told Business Insider that he told Chloe to "get the ball rolling" and send a letter to the tech company to see about a job. The letter begins with "Dear Google Boss" and goes on to make a pretty good case for the 7-year-old.

NEW YORK--Are you ready to turn your car, washing machine or running shoes into a point of sale? Visa is teaming up with IBM Watson to bring secure payment experiences to all sorts of connected products and services, embracing the ecosystem techies inelegantly refer to as the Internet of Things. IBM and Visa announced the collaboration Thursday at an event in Munich, Germany, where IBM is opening up a $200 million Watson Internet of Things headquarters. Via the partnership, the companies say they can support payments and commerce on virtually any of the 20 billion connected devices that Gartner estimates to be part of the global economy by 2020. "What we've seen over the last 12 months is serious companies committing serious business to IoT," says Brett Greenstein, vice president for IBM Watson IoT. Watson is IBM's cognitive computing platform, which leverages natural language processing and machine learning to learn from and extract patterns and meaning from mounds of unstructured data, from health care to sports.

A town in the Netherlands is trialling special pavement lights designed to help smartphone users cross the road safely. The LED strips have been embedded into the ground at a pedestrian crossing in Bodegraven, close to three schools. The hope is that they'll catch the eye of pedestrians who are too distracted by their smartphones to bother looking at the road, telling them when to cross and when not to cross by either glowing green or red, depending on the traffic light signals. 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. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

What supercomputers will look like in the future, post-Moore's Law, is still a bit hazy. As exascale computing comes into focus over the next several years, system vendors, universities and government agencies are all trying to get a gauge on what will come after that. Moore's Law, which has driven the development of computing systems for more than five decades, is coming to an end as the challenge of making smaller chips loaded with more and more features is becoming increasingly difficult to do. While the rise of accelerators, like GPUs, FPGAs and customized ASICs, silicon photonics and faster interconnects will help drive performance to meet many of the demands of such emerging applications as artificial intelligence and machine learning, data analytics, autonomous vehicles and the Internet of Things, down the road new computing paradigms will have to be developed to address future workload challenges. Quantum computing is among the possibilities being developed as a possible solution as vendors look to map out their pathways into the future.