A competitive video gaming team from Harvard University was disqualified from a tournament featuring the game Heroes of the Storm for "violating several tournament rules." In a statement, Blizzard Entertainment, makers of Heroes of the Storm, and fellow tournament organizer Tespa announced Team Ambush from Harvard was removed from the ongoing Heroes of the Dorm event. An investigation found one of the members of the team shared his account for Battle.net "We have zero tolerance for cheating in our tournaments," reads a joint statement from Blizzard and Tespa. "The rules are in place to ensure a fair playing field for all participants--when these rules are abused, they put the integrity of the competition at risk."

Domino's latest "deliveryman" stands three feet tall and doesn't need to be tipped. It has ferried pizzas in Brisbane at a top speed of 19 km/h, and the company's Australian master franchise said it's excited for what could come next. "We have a relentless passion to push the boundaries of what's possible with pizza delivery," said Michael Gillespie, chief digital officer for Domino's in Australia. "As we get further, it's not hard to believe that we might have a store with a couple of [robots] that are doing deliveries." Domino's has started using a robotic cart named DRU, which stands for Domino's Robotic Unit, to deliver its offerings.

From gene mapping to space exploration, humanity continues to generate ever-larger sets of data -- far more information than people can actually process, manage, or understand. Machine learning systems can help researchers deal with this ever-growing flood of information. Some of the most powerful of these analytical tools are based on a strange branch of geometry called topology, which deals with properties that stay the same even when something is bent and stretched every which way. Such topological systems are especially useful for analyzing the connections in complex networks, such as the internal wiring of the brain, the U.S. power grid, or the global interconnections of the Internet. But even with the most powerful modern supercomputers, such problems remain daunting and impractical to solve.

Machine learning has crossed from the lab to the business world. Machine learning provides insights that help to create more intelligent data-driven applications that improve business processes, operation, and easier decision making. In a conversation at Structure Data 2016 conference in San Francisco, Dr. Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research and Jack Clark, Bloomberg News – San Francisco, talked about the advances we made in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning in recent years. Dr. Lee is responsible for Microsoft Research New Experiences and Technologies. He said that AI is essentially used to really understand what customers want.

Google's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo's overwhelming win over South Korean go grandmaster Lee Sedol in a five-game tournament this month has shown that machine intelligence is rapidly evolving and underlined the possibility that it will catch up with and eventually surpass human intelligence. The time has come for us to think how best to use AI in ways that will contribute to -- and not detract from -- our well-being. In the tournament held in Seoul, the program built by a Google subsidiary DeepMind defeated Lee, a 33-year-old 9-dan professional go player with 18 world titles, in a 4-1 victory. Google had chosen Lee as an opponent in view of his impressive records, considering him as the world's strongest player of the board game. The outcome has stunned go players, professional programmers and the public alike -- given that experts had previously expected it would take more than 10 years for an AI program to beat a world-class professional go player.

At a debate Wednesday night co-hosted by Intelligence Squared US and the 92 Street Y in New York City, a largely white, middle-aged audience was easily convinced that the supposed bright future of artificial intelligence is perhaps not all that it's cracked up to be. The nonprofit debate series, syndicated as a podcast on NPR, works something like this: Before the debate begins, the audience votes in favor of the motion, against the motion, or as undecided. Last night's motion, "Don't Trust The Promises of Artificial Intelligence," was affirmed by 30 percent of the audience and negated by 41 percent at the start of the debate. A whopping 29 percent were undecided, indicating they knew little about the topic beforehand. The elderly white woman next to me, who would be asleep by the end of the debate, chose to abstain.

The folks over at x.ai – creators of Amy, the artificial intelligence answer to scheduling meetings – have had a shot at showing exactly what it looks like inside their bot's brain, using AI, of course. The team used a powerful deep-learning model, a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), to trawl 500,000 words in its database, looking at their sequence in a sentence to understand what they mean, then predicting how to categorize them. Get your company on stage at TNW Europe. Without a human ever telling the RNN the definitions of different word groups, it has managed to understand that Stanford is different from Instagram, and that Jesse, Luke and Jason are names. This data was cut to down to the 3,500 most frequently used words and has then been projected into a 2D shape in order to show the relationships the AI has made between different words.

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

This week in big data we've got an acquisition by Hadoop distributor Cloudera, what Nvidia's CEO thinks of the state of AI, news out of the Adobe Summit 2016, Google's machine learning pitch, and more. Plus, we've got a quick look at a new book about applying statistics and analytics to college basketball. Let's start with the news from Cloudera. This week the company quietly acquired Sense, a big data cloud platform that lets data scientists collaborate with each other. "We launched Sense with the mission of helping data scientists and data engineers focus on what's important -- extracting value rather than managing infrastructure," wrote Sense founders Tristan Zajonc and Anand Patil in a blog post.

One of the biggest issues in the presidential race is voter anger over lost middle-income jobs, real and perceived damage from trade deals, and rising inequality. But none of the candidates is talking about the elephant pushing its way into the room: a new wave of job-eating information technology, advanced automation, robots and artificial intelligence. The elites have been discussing what's coming for some time, notably a 2014 speech by Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google's parent Alphabet. Huge numbers of middle-class jobs were going to be automated, and few new positions would replace them. He called it the "defining" issue of the next two or three decades.