The secrets of a hidden room in Coughton Court, a Tudor mansion linked to the plot to assassinate King James I in 1605, have been revealed in a new study. The double room was a hiding place for priests during the anti-Catholic persecutions of the 16th and 17th centuries and was leased by Sir Everard Digby, one of the leading conspirators of the plot. The room was discovered in the 1850s, but has now been revealed in more detail than ever before with the help of 3D laser scanners. The secrets of a hidden room in Coughton Court, a Tudor mansion linked to the plot to assassinate King James I in 1605 have been revealed in a new study. In 1605 Coughton Court was leased to Sir Everard Digby, one of the leading conspirators of the plot to blow up the House of Lords and kill King James I. On the evening of the plot, Sir Everard's wife was waiting anxiously for news at Coughton alongside Father Henry Garnet, the head of the Jesuit mission in England, and Nicholas Owen, the celebrated priest-hole maker.

An artificial intelligence watchdog should be set up to make sure people are not discriminated against by the automated computer systems making important decisions about their lives, say experts. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to an explosion in the number of algorithms that are used by employers, banks, police forces and others, but the systems can, and do, make bad decisions that seriously impact people's lives. But because technology companies are so secretive about how their algorithms work – to prevent other firms from copying them – they rarely disclose any detailed information about how AIs have made particular decisions. In a new report, Sandra Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt, and Luciano Floridi, a research team at the Alan Turing Institute in London and the University of Oxford, call for a trusted third party body that can investigate AI decisions for people who believe they have been discriminated against. "What we'd like to see is a trusted third party, perhaps a regulatory or supervisory body, that would have the power to scrutinise and audit algorithms, so they could go in and see whether the system is actually transparent and fair," said Wachter.

Apparently Google Translate, the company's popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination. Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post. First, he compared a few sentences from two published versions of "The Great Gatsby," Takashi Nozaki's 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami's more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce.

It is supposed to be the futuristic household tool catering to the demands and whims of tech-savvy homeowners. But to those named Alexa, it appears the Amazon Echo makes life decidedly more frustrating. The gadget, which perform tasks including ordering shopping online through simple voice commands, has become the focus of annoyance to Alexas across the globe – because that is precisely the name to which the device answers. Amazon Echo is a voice-controlled smart speaker that works alongside a smartphone app. Using a virtual assistant called Alexa, the speaker can respond to voice commands from the user, such as setting an alarm or ordering a cab.

A picture claiming to show off the Samsung Galaxy S8 has been posted online, along with purported specifications and launch plans. The handset will be available in 5.8-inch and 6.2-inch options and will be officially unveiled at an event on 29 March, according to VentureBeat tipster Evan Blass. The picture appears to back up past reports describing the S8's dual-edge curved "infinity display", which is said to cover 83% of the handset's front panel, leaving no room for a home button or even Samsung's logo. 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.

Over four days there are over 400 sessions on the official World Economic Forum Annual Summit program. In addition, there are a multitude of breakfasts, lunches and dinners with speakers and panels. No person can truly summarize the event since one only gets to experience a sliver of what is possible. Keeping this reality in mind, here are some of the key themes and takeaways from my perspective. Globalization on the whole has been dramatically good for the world, helping lift a billion people out of poverty, reducing prices, and bringing new opportunities.

If at first you don't succeed, try again. It took YouTuber Val JP 32,873 attempts to get to the end of a minute-long level he had designed for Super Mario Maker, a 2015 Nintendo game that lets you craft your own levels and upload them for others to play. Val JP is known for making extremely difficult levels, stuffed with spike traps, fire pits and floating enemies that thwart anyone with less than pixel-perfect reflexes. This time he might have gone too far, however. Before you can upload a home-made level, you must prove that it is playable – and that means completing it at least once yourself.

Increased investor interest in AI startups – from around 10 deals in Q1'11 to over 120 in Q2'16 – can be attributed to recent advances in machine learning algorithms, particularly "deep learning" technology, a souped up version of AI. Just this week, Google integrated deep learning into its Google Translate tool; Baidu announced the launch of DeepBench, an "open source benchmarking tool for evaluating deep learning performance across different hardware platforms"; and NVIDIA introduced Xavier, a deep learning-based supercomputer for driverless cars. In the private market, Google put deep learning in the spotlight back in 2014 when it acquired 4 startups focused on this AI tech in quick succession: DeepMind, Vision Factory, Dark Blue Labs, and DNNresearch. Apple, which joined the race in 2015, most recently acquired Turi, which has developed a deep learning toolkit, among other AI-based solutions. Not to be outdone, Intel has acquired around 5 AI startups since January 2015, including deep learning startup Nervana Systems and, more recently, Movidius.

As investigations into Wells Fargo's systemic banking fraud continue, new findings show that retail branches were given notice of internal audits a day or three in advance of them taking place. This allowed for managers and employees to scrub, purge and modify documents and data, which, by most firsthand accounts, probably looked something like this. With new oversights and practices well underway at Wells Fargo, many banks are having a broader discussion of just what guaranteed transparency and compliance looks like beyond just throwing people and money at the situation. Many institutions are asking themselves, especially in the wake of the Wells Fargo mess, "What does the future of controls, compliance and processes look like?" The answer to this question, like so many others in a rapidly changing, operationally strained industry, is increasingly rooted in the adoption of technologies like automation and artificial intelligence (AI).

Last September, a U.K. House of Commons committee concluded that it is too soon to regulate artificial intelligence (AI). Its recommendation comes too late: The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into force next year, includes a right to obtain an explanation of decisions made by algorithms and a right to opt-out of some algorithmic decisions altogether. These regulations do little to help consumers, but they will slow down the development and use of AI in Europe by holding developers to a standard that is often unnecessary and infeasible. Although the GDPR is designed to address the risk of companies making unfair decisions about individuals using algorithms, its rules will provide little benefit because other laws already protect their interests in this regard. For example, when it comes to a decision to fire a worker, laws already exist to require an explanation, even if AI is not used.