Do join our debate chaired by Will Hutton, author of'How Good We Can Be', on The Future with AI: Will it be good for us? The UK has a wealth of capability in AI techniques and their application, but a future with AI raises many questions. Will AI really take our jobs or augment them? Will AI lead to the concentration of power into a small number of hands? Which is our biggest worry – smart machines or dumb machines?

Kaname Hayashi is known as the "Father of Pepper." Hayashi is the "father of Pepper," the charming humanoid robot from Japanese carrier SoftBank Mobile and French company Aldebaran Robotics. Pepper, with its circular doe eyes and welcoming smile, is billed as a robot that can read your emotions. It's available for sale and has even enrolled in school. Like any proud parent whose kids leave home, Hayashi had a void to fill.

Local Motors, well known for the crowdsourced Rally Fighter off-road coupe, has been diversifying lately. After starting some 3D-printed projects, it has gone in yet another direction, announcing the Olli, an electric minibus that looks like a large phonebooth that's been tipped on its side. Local Motors refers to the vehicle as a shuttle it will transport up to 12 people from location to location along a pre-set route. The plan is to allow an Olli to be summoned using an app or a kiosk. It uses lidar, cameras, and GPS to move along its route, making adjustments as needed to avoid collisions.

Microsoft and Google have announced plans to expand their machine learning capabilities, through acquisition and new research offices respectively, reports Telecoms.com.

Google's week consisted of bringing its TensorFlow machine learning software to iOS, seeing its Tango software added into the first consumer smartphones, and receiving a proposal by its DeepMind division to add a kill switch to artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The firm's AlphaGo AI is also scheduled to face the best Go player the world can offer in a match later this year. Google updated its TensorFlow machine learning software to run on iOS devices. The technology that powers AlphaGo was released to the open source community in November, but has now reached the hands of Apple developers who can build a neural network right into apps. Google's Tango software was revealed to be a key feature of Lenovo's new smartphones.

The edtech trend on the tip of everyone's tongue at this year's EdtechXEurope event is artificial intelligence. By harnessing the power of AI and deep learning, educators can glean insights from the vast quantities of data hoovered up from their students. AI could also help lecturers make better decisions and could improve student retention rates, according to experts. "AI is a tool to make better sense of data," says Satya Nitta, director of education and cognitive sciences at IBM. The world's top online learning platforms are working with business schools such as Yale SOM and Duke Fuqua, and are offering advanced analytical tools to help them refine and enhance student learning.

Robots have already invaded the operating room in some hospitals, but in Belgium they will soon be taking on the potentially more difficult task -- for robots, at least -- of greeting patients and giving them directions. The Citadelle regional hospital in Liège and the Damiaan general hospital in Ostend will be working with Zora Robotics to test patients' reactions to robot receptionists in the coming months. Zora already has experience programming the diminutive humanoid robot Nao to act as a chatty companion for the elderly, offering it as a form of therapy for those with dementia. Now the Belgian company is working with Nao's newer, bigger sibling, Pepper. Both were developed by French robotics company Aldebaran, now owned by Japanese Internet conglomerate SoftBank.

Based in Google Research offices in Zurich, Switzerland, the new group will focus on three key areas of artificial intelligence: machine intelligence, machine perception, and natural language processing and understanding, according to a blog post by Emmanuel Mogenet, head of Google Research for Europe. It will research ways to improve machine-learning infrastructure and enable the technology for practical use, for instance. Researchers will also work closely with linguists to advance natural language understanding, Mogenet said. Zurich, meanwhile, is home to Google's largest engineering office outside the U.S. Researchers there developed the engine that powers Knowledge Graph as well as the conversation engine that powers the Google Assistant in its Allo messaging app. Katherine Noyes has been an ardent geek ever since she first conquered Pyramid of Doom on an ... Full investment news article is here.

Computer systems could also be smarter than people at some issues, however are they clever? The ultimate in our Computing turns 60 collection, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the primary pc in an Australian college, seems at how clever the expertise has turn into. The time period "synthetic intelligence" (AI) was first used again in 1956 to explain the title of a workshop of scientists at Dartmouth, an Ivy League school in the US. At that pioneering workshop, attendees mentioned how computer systems would quickly carry out all human actions requiring intelligence, together with taking part in chess and different video games, composing nice music and translating textual content from one language to a different language. These pioneers had been wildly optimistic, although their aspirations had been unsurprising.

Elon Musk has released video footage of SpaceX's latest landing attempt, in which the aerospace firm lost a Falcon 9 rocket. The Falcon 9 took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Wednesday, carrying two communications satellites into orbit. Looks like early liquid oxygen depletion caused engine shutdown just above the deck pic.twitter.com/Sa6uCkpknY Head of SpaceX, Elon Musk, has released video footage showing just how close the first stage of this week's rocket launch came to successfully landing on the floating barge. The Falcon 9 appeared to be on course for an upright landing before it was lost in clouds of smoke.