A man who groomed young boys through the online game Minecraft has been jailed for two years and eight months. Adam Isaac, 23, from Merthyr Tydfil, previously admitted eight sexual offences against children. Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court heard he targeted two boys, aged 12 and 14, and asked them to send intimate photos of themselves. Judge Richard Twomlow QC said: "This predatory behaviour is a worry and a concern to parents." Isaac admitted causing or inciting child prostitution or pornography, performing sexual acts in the presence of a child, encouraging a child to engage in a sexual activity and the possession of indecent photos of a child.

We've got new smartphone teasers, anti-drone guns in action, an even faster Tesla Model S, and so much more. Months after its stunning recall, we still don't know exactly why Samsung's most recent phablet had a tendency to overheat. The company's internal investigation has apparently reached a conclusion however, and its results will be revealed in a livestreamed press conference this Sunday night at 8PM ET. Swiss authorities have added another security measure for this year's World Economic Forum in Davos: anti-drone guns. Bloomberg spotted local police preparing HP 47 Counter UAV Jammers to make sure no unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) gets too close to the venue, whether it's sent by a spy organization or just a nosy onlooker.

They are already changing things inside the software giant it seems. Dr. Markus Noga is vice president of Machine Learning at SAP. His global team focuses on improving SAP products and services through leading research projects and innovative solutions of startups. Markus has been in charge as VP for SAP's portfolio as well as leading the company's corporate strategy group. He spoke exclusively to us about the company's vision for an AI-charged back office of the future.

Imagine a building that tells you – before it happens – that the heating is about to fail. Some companies are using machine learning to do just that. Software firm CGnal, based in Milan, Italy, recently analysed a year's worth of data from the heating and ventilation units in an Italian hospital. Sensors are now commonly built into heating, ventilation and air conditioning units, and the team had records such as temperature, humidity and electricity use, relating to appliances in operating theatres and first aid rooms as well as corridors. They trained a machine learning algorithm on data from the first half of 2015, looking for differences in the readings of similar appliances.

Headhunter Casey Abel spent four months trying to hire a data center architect for a Japanese automaker, including five meetings with the client -- one with the top executive. In the end, the IT specialist joined an e-commerce company abroad for significantly more money. "There's just a massive mismatch in salaries," said Abel, managing director at recruiter HCCR K.K., who has spent as long as a year trying to land some IT candidates. "You've got some engineers making ¥20 million ($170,000) a year. Then you try to fit them in the traditional manufacturer-based salary structure" where it should be between ¥7 million and ¥9 million. Attracting the best information technologists is becoming increasingly important for Toyota Motor Corp., Honda Motor Co. and Nissan Motor Co. as they seek a bigger share of revenue from IT-driven services such as ride-hailing and cloud-based monitoring of vehicles.

PARIS Just as IBM's Deep Blue showed the world a computer can play chess as well as a human master, Eduardo Reck Miranda, a researcher for the Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc., aims to demonstrate a computer program able to compose original music. So far, neural networks have succeeded in imitating distinct musical styles, but truly original compositions have remained elusive. Miranda is tackling that problem with an orchestra of virtual musicians called agents that interact to compose original music. "From the viewpoint of a composer, I can hardly say that our agents are composing music at this stage," Miranda acknowledged. Instead, he said, "the breakthrough in this work is the action of collective machine learning for generative music systems."

Originally from Leeds, U.K., Andy Russell received his BEng (Hons) and Ph.D degrees from the University of Liverpool. Prior to immigrating to Australia in 1982, Andy worked as a design engineer in private industry and at the Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University. He is currently Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering at Monash University, where his primary areas of research are mechatronics and intelligent robotics. Particular interests include humanoid robotics, robot tactile sensing, olfactory sensing for robots, the design of robotic mechanisms and robot learning.

The domain of computer chess playing is suggested as a general means for quantifying the distance by which we have not yet achieved our stated objectives in artificial intelligence. The game of chess traditionally has been considered, at least in Western societies, as the epitome of intellectual skill and accomplishment. Herbert Simon and later John McCarthy, among the cofounders of AI, have referred to chess as the Drosophila of AI, speaking metaphorically about the importance for genetics of Thomas Morgan's early research with fruit flies, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1933. This metaphor is appropriate, since the quantification of human chess play has been institutionalized over the last 40 years by giving every tournament player a numerical rating, a metric that also can be used to measure progress in machine performance. In 1993, world champion Gary Kasparov unilaterally created his own world chess organization (The Professional Chess Association or PCA) with the aim of displacing The International Chess Federation (FIDE), which traditionally has supervised tournaments for the world title.

The hugely popular Meitu beauty app also seems to be doing something very, very ugly. The Chinese app has been around for years but rocketed in popularity in America and elsewhere this week after people started sharing photos of themselves taken with it. The app performs a "makeover" on pictures of its users, brightening up and re-shaping their faces and eyes and changing their hair. The app can do things like read a person's messages, see where they are all the time and look through their contacts – and it's not clear what the company is doing with it. 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.