The publisher behind Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider has a new subject for its next video game: superheroes. Square Enix announced Thursday it will partner with Marvel on a video game based on the superhero team The Avengers. No details were provided on when the game will launch or on what platforms. Big News: @SquareEnix and @Marvel announce a multi-game partnership leading with The Avengers project. Two studios have been enlisted to work on the project: Crystal Dynamics, developers of the recent Tomb Raider reboot, and Deus Ex developers Eidos Montreal.

Legal status, code of ethics, tax situation… Europe is pondering robots. On January 12, members of the Committee on Legal Affairs met to discuss regulations for robotics to be adopted by the European Union. Already in May 2016, the same commission proposed to give robots the status of "electronic persons", and thus rights and duties. The idea, among others, was to create a code of ethics determining responsibility in case of damages caused by a robot. The automobile sector and its autonomous vehicles is "the sector that is most in need of European and international regulations," emphasized Belgian Eurodeputy Mady Delvaux.

Google is planning to bring artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to the Raspberry Pi. The low-cost credit-card sized computer is widely used by schools and the maker community for programming devices. Google has asked makers to complete a survey about what smart tools would be "most helpful". And it suggests tools to aid face and emotion recognition, speech-to-text translation, natural language processing and sentiment analysis. Google has previously developed a range of tools for machine learning, internet of things devices, wearables, robotics and home automation.

Three years ago, artificial intelligence research firm DeepMind was acquired by Google for a reported £400m. As part of the acquisition, Google agreed to set up an ethics and safety board to ensure that its AI technology is not abused. The existence of the ethics board wasn't confirmed at the time of the acquisition announcement, and the public only became aware of it through a leak to industry news site The Information. But in the years since, senior members of DeepMind have publicly confirmed the board's existence, arguing that it is one of the ways that the company is trying to "lead the way" on ethical issues in AI. But in all that time DeepMind has consistently refused to say who is on the board, what it discusses, or publicly confirm whether or not it has even officially met. The Guardian has asked DeepMind and Google multiple times since the acquisition on 26 January 2014 for transparency around the board, and received just one answer on the record.

The emerging technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) will inevitably transform the world in many ways – some that are desirable and others that are not. The extent to which the benefits are maximized and the risks mitigated will depend on the quality of governance – the rules, norms, standards, incentives, institutions, and other mechanisms that shape the development and deployment of each particular technology. Too often the debate about emerging technologies takes place at the extremes of possible responses: among those who focus intently on the potential gains and others who dwell on the potential dangers. The real challenge lies in navigating between these two poles: building understanding and awareness of the trade-offs and tensions we face, and making informed decisions about how to proceed. This task is becoming more pressing as technological change deepens and accelerates, and as we become more aware of the lagged societal, political and even geopolitical impact of earlier waves of innovation.

Sky is going to let people watch all of its TV channels without a satellite dish for the first time ever. The company is going to let people watch its full TV service through broadband instead of installing an entire satellite dish on their house. The move is apparently an attempt to stop the rate of "churn" at Sky – how many people join the service and then leave. The announcement came as Sky revealed surging numbers of people leaving to competitors like BT – up to 11.6 per cent from 10.2 per cent last year. Those same results showed a 9 per cent fall in earnings because of the increased price of football rights.

Technology has transformed the way we communicate. From the early telegrams through to email, social media and smart phones, it has been an area of life that has been constantly evolving. Now, a Catz Fellow is pioneering a new method of interaction in the form of semi-autonomous telepresence robots. Shimon Whiteson, Associate Professor, Fellow and Tutor in Computer Science is the scientific coordinator for the TERESA project which has developed'socially intelligent' telepresence robots, which allow people to interact with others without being there physically. In telepresence systems, a human controller remotely interacts with people by guiding a remotely located robot, allowing the controller to be more physically present than with standard teleconferencing.

Smart machines and digitalization will boost rather than cut employment -- but people must get used to constant retraining to keep pace with change, the development chief of German software giant SAP tells Handelsblatt. SAP is the world's biggest supplier of business software and is shifting its business model towards cloud computing services. People are too negative about digitalization and artificial intelligence and should embrace new technologies as job creators rather than job killers, Bernd Leukert, the head of development at German business software giant SAP told Handelsblatt at the Davos World Economic Forum last week. Mr. Leukert, 49, who has worked at SAP since 1994 and joined the management board in 2014, said the German education system, the government and firms weren't doing enough to prepare people for a future in which there will be a constant need for new job training. "I think there's there's too much talk of negative scenarios in the discussion about digitalization and new technologies," he said.

In 1872 a British general named Alexander Cunningham, excavating an area in what was then British-controlled northern India, came across something peculiar. Buried in some ruins, he uncovered a small, one inch by one inch square piece of what he described as smooth, black, unpolished stone engraved with strange symbols -- lines, interlocking ovals, something resembling a fish -- and what looked like a bull etched underneath. The general, not recognizing the symbols and finding the bull to be unlike other Indian animals, assumed the artifact wasn't Indian at all but some misplaced foreign token. The stone, along with similar ones found over the next few years, ended up in the British Museum. In the 1920s many more of these artifacts, by then known as seals, were found and identified as evidence of a 4,000-year-old culture now known as the Indus Valley Civilization, the oldest known Indian civilization to date. Since then, thousands more of these tiny seals have been uncovered.

Last spring the startup Flow Health began a five-year contract with the Department of Veteran Affairs to examine all historic and ongoing medical records. The startup will use information obtained from those records to train artificial intelligence to, among other things, fight illness and predict disease for the more than eight million people cared for by the Department of Veteran Affairs. Advice and predictions from Flow Health will be presented to health care professionals through Vista, the DoD's open source system for electronic medical records. Doctors can then choose to apply or ignore the advice drawn from the VA's vast storage of medical records. "When a veteran comes in and presents certain clinical symptoms, we can better understand and make predictions about'What is the likely diagnosis? What is the best diagnostic test? What's the best care pathway?' and so forth," CEO Alex Meshkin told VentureBeat in a Skype interview.