Farmers in New Zealand have used a four-legged robot to herd sheep, patrol fields and perform other agricultural tasks. The feats were carried out as part of a demonstration of Spot – a robotic dog developed by Massachusetts-based engineering firm Boston Dynamics. Equipped with software developed by robotics company Rocos, Spot was controlled remotely to shepherd sheep across a mountainside. "The age of autonomous robots is upon us," claimed Rocos chief executive David Inggs. "Our customers are augmenting their human workforces to automate physical processes that are often dull, dirty, or dangerous. Organisations can now design, schedule and manage inspection missions remotely."

Researchers in Australia have achieved a world record internet speed of 44.2 terabits per second, allowing users to download 1,000 HD movies in a single second. A team from Monash, Swinburne and RMIT universities used a'micro-comb' optical chip containing hundreds of infrared lasers to transfer data across existing communications infrastructure in Melbourne. The highest commercial internet speed anywhere in the world is currently in Singapore, where the average download speed is 197.3 megabits per second (mbps). In Australia, the average download speed is 43.4 mbps – one million-times slower than the speeds achieved in the latest test. "There's a bit of a global race on at the moment to get this technology to a commercial stage, as the'micro-comb' at its heart is useful in a really broad range of existing technologies," Dr Bill Corcoran from Monash University, told The Independent.

It was on this day in 1980 that one of gaming's most iconic characters made his debut. The idea for the character came to him when he removed a slice from a pizza. "When you think about things women like, you think about fashion, or fortune-telling, or food or dating boyfriends. So I decided to theme the game around'eating'." Blinky constantly chases Pac-Man, Pinky attempts to ambush him, Inky is randomised depending on Pac-Man's position and Clyde will get close to the player then attempt to flee to the bottom left corner, potentially cutting off escape routes.

The New Zealand software company Rocos is training a Boston Dynamics-designed robot called Spot to work on farms to help'relieve the strain of worker shortages, and create precision in farming'.

When working on a Machine learning project flexibility and reusability are very important to make your life easier while developing the solution. Find the best way to structure your project files can be difficult when you are a beginner or when the project becomes big. Sometime you may end up duplicate or rewrite some part of your project which is not professional as a Data Scientist or Machine learning Engineer. A quick example is when running different Machine Learning experiments to find the best model for the problem you are trying to solve, most of the time people tend to change the values of the different parameters directly from the source code and run the experiment again and again. They repeat this process until they get the best results.

We made good progress on narrow AI, very good at specific tasks like object recognition and speech to text. On the other hand, we are still far off from General AI. Various challenges still exist in transparency of the outcomes of AI, trust by the ones using the algorithms and the shortage of skills. AI will play an important role to overcome these shortages. Join us in our chat with Wouter.

Dr. Albert Hsiao and his colleagues at the University of California, San Diego health system had been working for 18 months on an artificial intelligence program designed to help doctors identify pneumonia on a chest X-ray. When the coronavirus hit the United States, they decided to see what it could do. The researchers quickly deployed their program, which dots X-ray images with spots of color where there may be lung damage or other signs of pneumonia. It has now been applied to more than 6,000 chest X-rays, and it's providing some value in diagnosis, said Hsiao, the director of UCSD's augmented imaging and artificial intelligence data analytics laboratory. His team is one of several around the country that has pushed AI programs into the COVID-19 crisis to perform tasks like deciding which patients face the greatest risk of complications and which can be safely channeled into lower-intensity care.

Marketing scientist Kevin Gray asks Dr. Anna Farzindar of the University of Southern California about chatbots and the ways they are used. Is there a formal definition you prefer? Conversational or dialog agents are designed to communicate with us in human language. These software agents are deployed everywhere around us; when talking to your car, communicating with robots, or using your personal assistant on any device or smartphone, such as Alexa, Cortona, SIRI or Google Assistant. The term "chatbot" is often used in industry for conversational agents that can be integrated through any online messaging application.

One of the defining aspects of COVID-19 is its disproportionate impact on underserved communities and the harsh spotlight it shines on existing social equity issues around the world. From access to quality education, jobs or affordable healthcare, COVID-19 is magnifying virtually every inequality in our communities. Never has there been a more important time to capture the moment to create the solutions the world needs to make a positive and lasting contribution to the social inequity issues of our generation. Solutions will come from all corners and technology innovators will need to play their part. Building on Microsoft's long-standing efforts to ensure technology fulfills its promise to address the world's biggest challenges, Microsoft joined efforts with Giving Tech Labs to unleash the power of public interest technology.

Ceibal Foundation is organizing the 3rd edition of the EdTech Winter School in partnership with ANII (Agencia Nacional de Investigación e Innovación) and with the support of the International Development Research Centre -IDRC-. The EdTech Winter School is a multi-stakeholder initiative organized within the framework of the Education Sector Fund "Digital Inclusion: Education with New Horizons" created with ANII and ADELA (Alliance for the Digitalization of Education in Latin America) supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). In this context and for the past three years, the Winter School focused in creating a stimulating learning environment to present and discuss key challenges, research trends and opportunities; to foresee new horizons in education, learning and teaching practices enhanced by digital technologies. This year's edition "Human Centered Technologies for Education" aims to assess, analyze and explore the changes, opportunities and challenges that technology-driven transformations are creating for education worldwide. Advances in areas as automation, artificial intelligence, robotics, Big Data, among others, are shaping society in ways that could not be foreseen a few years ago.