Iran introduced blocks on pornography so aggressive that they broke the internet around the world. The country's censorship laws on adult websites are infamously stringent, and require access pornographic websites to be cut off. But last week the state internet provider did so not only for those in Iran but for people across the world – as far away as Russia and Hong Kong. The strange ban was the result of the way that the internet provider cut off access to those sites. It did so using some of the basic mechanisms of the web – not just stopping people in Iran accessing the websites, but changing the directions that power the internet so that nobody could. 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.

How do we unlock the true value of data? Nowadays, collecting data has never been easier and faster, but understanding its true meaning and value still remains a challenge. IBM estimates 90% of all the data existing in the world today has been generated in the last 24 months. For data-driven organisations such as the NHS, which has disparate trusts throughout Britain generating vast amounts of data, having the ability to harness this information and analyse it correctly to get the right insights has never been more important. In the technology profession, we may have, ironically, promoted Big Data as a panacea without truly and fully understanding the issues it can solve.

Whenever one separates sociology and technology, one misses the point.

Major AI researchers and textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents", where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success. John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1955, defines it as "The science and engineering of making intelligent machines". AI research is highly technical and specialized, deeply divided into subfields that often fail to communicate with each other. Some of the division is due to social and cultural factors: subfields have grown up around particular institutions and the work of individual researchers. AI research is also divided by several technical issues.

It's poised to be an exciting year in artificial intelligence. Last year, artificial intelligence deals topped a billion for the first time. The White House started publishing reports on AI and the economy. Samsung just announced a new $150 million fund for early-stage AI startups. Their recent acquisition of "super-Siri" Viv Labs must have whetted their appetite. There's are even AI startup incubators popping up, like deep learning mastermind Yoshua Bengio's Element in Montreal.

HONG KONG: McDonald's Corp has agreed to sell the bulk of its China and Hong Kong business to state-backed conglomerate CITIC Ltd and Carlyle Group LP for up to $2.1 billion (Dh7.71 billion), seeking to expand rapidly without using much of its own capital. Zurich The Swiss National Bank expects a 2016 full-year profit of 24 billion francs (Dh86.68 billion; $23.6 billion), enabling it to shell out money to the federal government and municipalities. Foreign-currency holdings contributed more than 19 billion francs, and valuation gains on its gold holdings added 3.9 billion francs, the central bank said on Monday, citing an initial estimate. Last year's result is set to be the second-best in the Read More ... Tags: Corporate Enterprises Finance Sectors Banks Profits Financial institutions German automaker Volkswagen saw sales jump 16 percent in December for its namesake brand, propelled by a big increase in China, Volkswagen's biggest market. Global sales reported Monday rose to 567,900 from 487,700 despite the damage to the company's reputation from its scandal over cars rigged to cheat on diesel emissions tests.

Our lives are now heavily mediated by digital technology (music streaming, social media, e-banking etc). We are increasingly and often continuously online, open to engagement in a myriad of services and simultaneously open to cyberattack. We now need to defend against the lone wolf hacker, organised crime and terrorism, and nation states with well-funded advanced capabilities. The 2016 cyber message is clear – we have a big problem, it's going to get worse, and we need help. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a promising source of such help.

Video games as a professional sport made no sense to Lars Windhorst, a European oil and agriculture investor, until a summer evening in Seoul. Before him lay an impressive sight: Thousands of kids in lawn chairs outdoors watching teams battle in the 2012 championship for "League of Legends." "It was exotic," Windhorst recalled. Over the next four years, his firm Sapinda Group invested upwards of $40 million in Azubu, a Sherman Oaks start-up developed to stream such e-sports matches online. But in the last year, several employees resigned and the only other major investor clawed back funding, exposing long-simmering troubles inside Azubu.

Amazon is developing technology that will allow a flock of drones to fly in convoy, allowing the machines to cover longer distances and carry heavier loads. The company has been granted the patent for a a large and robust flying drone, which is made up of several smaller drones. The Amazon Technologies Inc. patent says that individual modules could detach from the collective drone body once they were no longer required, allowing them to operate independently to deliver smaller parcels. The patent description explains that a collective aerial drone would be capable of transporting'virtually any size, weight, or quantity of items.' The average drone can typically fly continuously for up to 30 minutes and can only transport items weighing up to 10 pounds. Last month the company revealed that it had made its first aircraft delivery and claimed to have dropped off the package just 13 minutes after it was ordered.

This repository contains a 1st place solution for the Painter by Numbers competition on Kaggle. Below is a brief description of the dataset and approaches I've used to build and validate a predictive model. The challenge of the competition was to examine pairs of paintings and determine whether they were painted by the same artist. The training set consists of artwork images and their corresponding class labels (painters). Examples in the test set were split into 13 groups and all possible pairs within each group needed to be examined for the submission.