Christophe Dubach received his Ph.D in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh in 2009 and holds a M.Sc. He is currently an RAEng/EPSRC Research Fellow in the Institute for Computing Systems Architecture at the University of Edinburgh.

Germany's economy minister and vice-chancellor has defended flicking the middle finger to a group of right-wing protesters earlier this month. Sigmar Gabriel, who is Angela Merkel's second-in-command, said his only mistake was not using both hands. He said his critics should think about what they would do if faced with 12 "young, aggressive, swearing and ready-for-violence Nazis". Mr Gabriel was confronted by the hecklers in northern Germany. They called him a traitor of the people and mentioned his father's Nazi past.

NAIROBI – Japanese and African leaders on Sunday pledged to fight terrorism and emphasized the importance of rule-based maritime order as they wrapped up a Japan-led international conference on the continent's development. In the Nairobi Declaration adopted at the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), the leaders also agreed to promote investment in infrastructure that leads to job creation in the fast-growing region. The sixth TICAD, convened in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, was held outside Japan for the first time, as Tokyo seeks to strengthen its economic and political presence in the continent amid China's increasing influence. In the declaration, the leaders said they will seek to maintain maritime order based on rules, and strengthen security and safety at sea by international and regional cooperation in accordance with international law. The reference to maritime security comes as tensions remain high in the South China and East China seas amid China's growing assertiveness.

Tesla makes the world's best electric cars - but they're not content to rest on their laurels. The company just launched a powerful new battery that makes the Model S the fastest production car you can actually buy. Meanwhile, autonomous vehicle startup nuTonomy has beat Uber to the punch by launching the world's first fleet of self-driving taxis in Singapore. The MIT Climate CoLab awarded honors to a new elevated Caterpillar Train that soars over traffic jams. And in Europe, Paris is planning to go completely car-free for an entire day this September, and we spotted an awesome pedal-powered school bus on the streets of the Netherlands.

Chasm Waxing is a cyber-techno-thriller. Twenty-somethings Becca Roberts and Josh Adler work for companies selected by the NSA's new Venture Capital firm. Conflict arises when the NSA Director uses the VC in a vendetta against ISIS. Josh's AI discovers the location of an ancient religious relic, drawing all three into a confrontation with a rising military/ political figure in the Middle East. Chasm Waxing is the first novel in the Chasm Trilogy. It's a realistic, apocalyptic, cyber-techno-thriller; ripped from today's headlines--projected into the year 2020.

For thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people. Jean-Jacques Rousseau summed up this revolution in Emile, his 1762 treatise on education. When looking for the rules of conduct in life, Rousseau found them "in the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can efface. I need only consult myself with regard to what I wish to do; what I feel to be good is good, what I feel to be bad is bad." Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all.

Seated against a deep red backdrop, gazing intently at hand-held mirrors, two eunuchs in sparkling saris inspect their appearance before Raksha Bandhan celebrations in the red light district of Mumbai. The photograph from the Reuters news agency is an arresting contemporary scene, but a new Tate Britain project is aiming to inspire deeper reflections with images from its own collection of paintings. Launching on Friday, Recognition is the winner of 2016's IK Prize – an annual award, this year supported by Microsoft, for a project that embraces digital technology to explore and showcase Tate's collection of British art. This year, the challenge was to do it with artificial intelligence. The team behind the winning project, from Italy-based communication research centre, Fabrica, say their inspiration came from an intriguing conundrum: how can you apply rational thinking to a subject like art? Recognition matches stunning photographs from the 24/7 news cycle with centuries-old artworks, and presents them online.

Olivier Curé is an associate professor of computer science at the Université Paris-Est in France and is researching at the CNRS LIGM lab. He holds a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the Université de Paris V, France and has published three book chapters, eight journal articles and more than 50 papers in international, peer-reviewed conferences in the fields of databases, semantic web and ontologies. Professor Curé has organized workshops including Ambient Data Integration (ADI) at On the Move (OTM) conference in 2008, 2009 and 2010. He has received three cooperative research grants to work with the Database and Information System research team of Pr. In 2013, Professor Curé received a grant for a France-Stanford collaboration to conduct research with Stanford's BioMedical Informatics Research (BMIR) laboratory.

In general, the decision-making process regarding enterprise software has been difficult – and made more so by the inflated promises of slick marketing. But business process automation has proven difficult in particular, and for three particular reasons. The first is that providers over-sold the capabilities of the first generation of process automation solutions. Second, it's problematic to do an apples-to-apples comparison of automation products because no two are exactly alike. Finally, since most enterprise operations are in the early phase of automation adoption, case studies are hard to find.

Elected officials tend to pass laws they believe will appeal to the median voter. A politician on the left or right usually can win more votes by moving to the center, a theory you can see in action by watching how presidential candidates soften their policies after the primaries. The median voter wields great power over what politicians ultimately do. But -- and here's the problem -- the median voter would fail economics or Political Science 101. For 60 years, political scientists have studied what voters actually know.