It's the familiar multicoloured "cube" brain-teaser which has challenged puzzle solvers for more than 40 years and is still the world's bestselling toy of all time. But on Thursday – following a 10-year legal tussle – Rubik's Cube lost a key trademark battle after the European court of justice (ECJ) said its shape was not sufficient to grant it protection from "copycat" versions. The eponymous puzzle, invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and architect Erno Rubik, is popular among young and old, with more than 350m cubes sold to date worldwide. UK company Seven Towers, which oversees Rubik's Cube intellectual property rights, registered the shape as a three-dimensional EU trademark with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) in April 1999. But the court ruled that the EU trademark representing the shape of the Rubik's Cube is invalid, triggering fears it will lead to a surge of cheap, mass-produced versions and a weakening of European intellectual property protection.

It has been said that to give a man a fish is to feed him for a day, whereas to teach a man to fish is to feed him for life. Forward-looking financial service companies are similarly finding that giving computers instructions is not nearly as fruitful as teaching them to write their own. From assessing credit risks to beefing-up the security of their own networks, fintech startups, in particular, are turning to machine learning finance-based solutions in order to work smarter rather than harder. Considering that over 200 leading financial institutions will attend the upcoming October 2016 Machine Learning Fintech Conference, investment in this subset of artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be a wise move, indeed, for companies that don't want to be left behind. With leading banks starting to invest in AI, and machine learning in particular, fintech companies will be significantly disadvantaged if they fail to do likewise.

Siri is still very much a walled garden, but Apple has slowly begun opening its voice assistant to third parties. At its WWDC keynote back in June, the company confirmed app makers could let iPhone and iPad users send and receive money via Siri, with Square Cash and Monzo becoming the first to tap into that functionality. Now, bigger players are tapping into hands-free money transfers, after PayPal announced it too now lets users in over 30 countries send and request money via using only their voice. Sending and receiving is very easy, but you'll first need to link Siri with your PayPal account. This involves granting PayPal access to your Contacts and confirming via two-factor authentication (a code sent via text message) that you are who you say you are.

Artificial Intelligence is not about statistics, is about experience. In this webinar Stuart Waplington, Co-Founder and CEO, will walk you through what deep learning really means and the possibilities that have been unlocked to the marketing world. The global market for AI is set to be worth $5.05 Billion by 2020 (Markets & Markets). Happy Finish is already ahead of the curve; we've just presented Shoegazer, a unique Proof of Concept that uses AI and Transfer Learning to identify the exact brand and style of trainers in real-time – with 95% accuracy and Buzzteam, our on-demand workforce resource platform which allows individual companies building teams by employing global network of resources that can be discovered by skill-set, experience, cost or rating. Join this webinar to understand AI and how its rapid adoption is set to transform a range of markets, from advertising and media to finance and retail, offering benefits such as improved productivity and increased customer satisfaction.

The video game world is vastly different now than it was in 2007, when Fumito Ueda and his team began working on The Last Guardian. Nintendo dominated the hardware market with the 3DS and Wii, while the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 trailed by millions in console sales. Assassin's Creed, BioShock and Mass Effect debuted, kicking off a fresh round of long-running AAA franchises. Today, we have the Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PS4 Pro, and Nintendo is attempting to rebound from slow sales of the Wii U. Day-one patches are normal, pre-order DLC bundles are standard practice, we're on the ninth Assassin's Creed and, sometimes, indie games are indistinguishable from AAA titles. This is the brave new world that Ueda will release The Last Guardian into on December 6th.

Oxford University researchers have developed an artificial intelligence that can accurately read lips using deep learning technology from DeepMind. The team calls its AI LipNet and it uses a technique called deep learning. Basically, the team trained the AI with many different videos of people talking and the AI learned how to lip-read by itself. Deep learning is extremely powerful. Earlier this year, DeepMind's deep learning AI AlphaGo beat the human champion at the game of Go, and deep learning has been applied to all sorts of other problems.

For more than a decade, neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine has been flying every few months from his lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne to another lab in Beijing, China, where he conducts research on monkeys with the aim of treating spinal-cord injuries. The commute is exhausting -- on occasion he has even flown to Beijing, done experiments, and returned the same night. But it is worth it, says Courtine, because working with monkeys in China is less burdened by regulation than it is in Europe and the United States. And this week, he and his team report the results of experiments in Beijing, in which a wireless brain implant -- that stimulates electrodes in the leg by recreating signals recorded from the brain -- has enabled monkeys with spinal-cord injuries to walk. "They have demonstrated that the animals can regain not only coordinated but also weight-bearing function, which is important for locomotion. This is great work," says Gaurav Sharma, a neuroscientist who has worked on restoring arm movement in paralysed patients, at the non-profit research organization Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio.

In research conducted in China, a rhesus monkey whose spinal cord was partially severed quickly regained lost control over his paralyzed leg after researchers implanted a signal-emitting electronic array below the site of the spinal injury. That pulse generator sent out electrical signals to the monkey's leg to move, and the monkey's affected leg responded as early as six days after his spinal cord was deliberately injured. The signals to move were commands collected from the motor cortex of unharmed rhesus monkeys as they freely walked and used their legs. Together, the two devices leaped over the broken connection between brain and limb, allowing the partially paralyzed monkey to mimic key walking motions. The brain-spine interface offers new hope that patients who have lost function due to spinal cord injury might be able to restore movement and prevent the degeneration of the neural wiring that is needed for an eventual return to movement.

Just like nuclear physics, machine learning, AI, and data science can be used either for the better of for the worse. You can make either useful energy or terrible bombs using nuclear fission. The same applies to machine learning, and in my example below, it gets even worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Here I am discussing a potential use of machine learning in military operations. The scenario below is entirely hypothetical.

We @ProjectJunoAI are big fans of landscapes. That's why we've created a machine intelligence landscape focused entirely on Europe [1]. Europe deserves a landscape of its own to highlight its talent and expertise. Until recently, its contribution to the innovation and commercialisation of machine intelligence technologies has been under-appreciated. We now see growing self-confidence borne of the success, and continued presence, of local acquired startups like VocalIQ, Swiftkey, Deepmind, Magic Pony Technology, and PredictionIO.