I never win raffles, but I finally did last week at the MIT Xconomy in Boston. My prize was a Roomba. These robotic vacuums have been around for years for personal use, but now hotels are using similar devices to not only automate the cleaning process but also most of the hotel functionality like check-in, check-out, food delivery, and the automatic folding of clothes. There's even a completely robot-powered automated hotel in Japan. As a service, automation is invaluable when done well.

The assumption that a college education should take four years is baked into American culture. Colleges in the colonial days were founded on the premise of a four-year degree, a concept imported from Europe. Harvard University experimented with a three-year degree when it was founded in 1636, but the test was short-lived, and the four-year degree has been the standard ever since. We expect students to enter college at 18 and leave when they turn 22, and we worry about those who take a more circuitous route to graduation. But we need to reconsider that long-established, one-size-fits all model.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

A 30ft (9m) model of the Loch Ness Monster built for a Sherlock Holmes movie has been found almost 50 years after it sank in the loch. The beast was created for the Billy Wilder-directed The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, starring Sir Robert Stephens and Sir Christopher Lee. It has been seen for the first time in images captured by an underwater robot. Loch Ness expert Adrian Shine said the shape, measurements and location pointed to the object being the prop. The robot, operated by Norwegian company Kongsberg Maritime, is being used to investigate what lies in the depths of Loch Ness. VisitScotland and Mr Shine's The Loch Ness Project, which gathers scientific information on the loch's ecology and the potential for a monster, is supporting the survey.

CHINA has rich talent sources and great potential on AI or artificial intelligence thanks to strong mathematics and IT research as well as local firms' expansion into AI, said LinkedIn in a report yesterday after the AlphaGo's winning in a machine-vs-human Go match. There are totally 250,000 people work and research on AI globally, mainly in the United States, Europe, India and China, according to LinkedIn, the world's largest business social network. Besides the eye-catching AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence is already part of people's lives, from applications used in navigation, Siri and Google Translate to robots deployed in manufacturing and stock-advice software. AI technologies have been evolving steadily alongside the development of the Internet, big data, cloud computing and graphic chips. The United States has the most AI talents with the top employers Google, developer of AlphaGo, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Apple.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Cian Westmoreland was 18 years old when he enlisted in the US Air Force. Now 28, the former serviceman served with the 606 Air Control Squadron in Germany and the 73rd Expeditionary Air Control Squadron in Kandahar, Afghanistan, as an Air Force Technician. He built the communications infrastructure for the US military's drone programme in Afghanistan, which, according to a 2015 report by The Intercept led to the deaths of hundreds of civilians. In 2010, after four years in the military, he left the Air Force and joined other whistle-blowers speaking out about US drone policy. The group of technicians and operators wrote an open letter to US President Barack Obama.

During my last interview I had a great talk with Daniel McDuff. Daniel's research is at the intersection of psychology and computer science. He is interested in designing hardware and algorithms for sensing human behavior at scale, and in building technologies that make life better. Applications of behavior sensing that he is most excited about are in: understanding mental health, improving online learning and designing new connected devices (IoT). Listen to more about why it is important to collect data from much larger scales and help computers read our emotional state. Key Learning Points: 1. Understanding the impact, intersection, and meaning of Psychology and Computer Science 2. Facial Expression Recognition 3. How to define Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and Machine Learning 4. Applications of behavior sensing with Online Learning, Health, and Connected Devices 5. Visual Wearable sensors and heart health 6. The impact of education and learning 7. How to build computers to measure phycology, our reactions, emotions, etc 8. Daniel is building and utilizing scalable computer vision and machine learning tools to enable the automated recognition and analysis of emotions and physiology. He is currently Director of Research at Affectiva, a post-doctoral research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab and a visiting scientist at Brigham and Womens Hospital. At Affectiva Daniel is building state-of-the-art facial expression recognition software and leading analysis of the world's largest database of human emotion responses. Daniel completed his PhD in the Affective Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab in 2014 and has a B.A. and Masters from Cambridge University. His work has received nominations and awards from Popular Science magazine as one of the top inventions in 2011, South-by-South-West Interactive (SXSWi), The Webby Awards, ESOMAR, the Center for Integrated Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) and several IEEE conferences. His work has been reported in many publications including The Times, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC News, New Scientist and Forbes magazine. Daniel has been named a 2015 WIRED Innovation Fellow.

What if the computer algorithms could tell more compelling stories than journalists, writers or business analysts? Well, this is increasingly becoming a reality. A new generation of Big Data tools are being put to automate story telling. The ideas behind this application of analytics were first put to use generating automated news reports, covering sports and financial stories. Take the recent Wimbledon tennis championships as an example.

Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, John Nash--these "beautiful" minds never fail to enchant the public, but they also remain somewhat elusive. How do some people progress from being able to perform basic arithmetic to grasping advanced mathematical concepts and thinking at levels of abstraction that baffle the rest of the population? Neuroscience has now begun to pin down whether the brain of a math wiz somehow takes conceptual thinking to another level. Specifically, scientists have long debated whether the basis of high-level mathematical thought is tied to the brain's language-processing centers--that thinking at such a level of abstraction requires linguistic representation and an understanding of syntax--or to independent regions associated with number and spatial reasoning. In a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a pair of researchers at the INSERM–CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in France reported that the brain areas involved in math are different from those engaged in equally complex nonmathematical thinking.