MOSCOW – It's mission over for a robot called Fedor that Russia blasted to the International Space Station, the developers said Wednesday, admitting he could not replace astronauts on spacewalks. There's nothing more for him to do there, he's completed his mission," Yevgeny Dudorov, executive director of robot developers Androidnaya Tekhnika, told RIA Novosti news agency. The silvery anthropomorphic robot cannot fulfill its assigned task to replace human astronauts on long and risky space walks, Dudorov said. Fedor -- short for Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research -- was built to assist space station astronauts. A storm of publicity surrounded Fedor's space odyssey and provided some light relief for Russia's beleaguered space industry. In the last year it has seen the unprecedented failure of a manned launch and continuing delays on construction of the Vostochny spacepad where President Vladimir Putin upbraided officials last week. But Fedor turned out to have a design that does not work well in space -- standing 180 centimeters (six feet) tall, its long legs were not needed on space walks, Dudorov said. The Russian space agency said the legs were immobilized during the trip and Fedor was not programmed to grab space station hand rails to move about in microgravity. Dudorov said developers were sketching out plans for a replacement "that must suit the demands of working on the outside of the ship." Fedor, officially Skybot F-850, rocketed to the ISS on Aug. 22, entering the orbiting laboratory five days later. On the station, the robot posed holding a Russian flag and for hugs with cosmonauts who were assigned to train it before touching down back on Earth on Monday. A final tweet posted in an account in the robot's name said: "Now I'm in my case.

XAG has been invited to attend the inaugural Fortune Global Sustainability Forum, held from September 4-6 in China's Yunnan Province, to explore cutting-edge thinking and innovative solutions for the growing environmental problems. This three-day summit has convened senior leaders from Fortune 500 companies, government, NGOs, academia and other pioneering business to forge new environmental consensus through the convergence of energy, technology and sustainability. Guest speakers included Tony Fadell, Principal of Future Shape, Pat Brown, Founder and CEO of Impossible Foods Inc, Jim Fitterling, CEO of Dow Chemical, Clay Chandler, Executive Director and Asia Editor of Fortune, Cristiana Paşca Palmer, Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, etc. As a representative of agriculture technology company and the only drone maker at this year's forum, XAG, together with Nature Conservancy, CreditEase, WildChina and Yunnan Poverty Alleviation Office, presented key insights that falls under the sub-theme Rural Development and the Environment. Speaking at the forum, Justin Gong, Co-founder and Vice President of XAG, has informed the world of an upcoming paradigm shift in agriculture.

The robot is no stranger to heavy industry, but its virtual co-worker, robotic process automation (RPA), is only just beginning to find a place within the industrial sector. The technology's clever software robots can fulfil repetitive and time-consuming tasks, and offer a multitude of benefits from improved accuracy to cost-savings. However, with RPA failures a common occurrence in its early adoption, it's clear that initial implementation of the technology has not proved to be smooth sailing for many businesses. For multinational consultancy EY, RPA failures are all too familiar, having witnessed 30 to 50 per cent of initial projects fail. Companies developing the technology claim it can transform operations, but if it's as favourable as they say, why are there so many RPA failures?

Danny Goh is the founder and CEO of a Nexus Frontier Tech, a new company that's helping corporations use artificial intelligence to more efficiently mine and use their own data. This may sound prosaic, but Goh believes, in spite of the conventional fears about artificial intelligence, this is where AI is going to have the most immediate impact. There are no robots in the works at Goh's London based company. What he and his team of engineers do is analyze problems plaguing mid to large size corporations--and help them use AI algorithms to solve them. "Even though there's a lot of information available on the internet, it's still true that more than ninety-percent of the world's data is still in private hands--whether in private corporations or governments," he told me when we talked via Skype.

I'm sure most of my readers are avid movie watchers. Let's look at one of Disney's animated movies that were a good amalgamation of emotions with science. We're talking about a Disney movie where a robot (read, healthcare companion) is designed to provide medical aid and assistance to humans. The robot is designed to never harm humans but talks to them and through them of all their issues pertaining to mental and physical health. The robot sacrifices its life to save the protagonist's life in the end.

Artificial intelligence is giving medical professionals the ability to create a digital replica of patients, allowing doctors to predict how effective surgery will be. Australia's peak science agency CSIRO is developing AI-powered tools to diagnose mental health disorders more accurately and safeguard patients' genetic data in DNA testing. Northeast Health Wangaratta is already using AI to stop cyber attacks. Using its public hospital in regional Victoria, Northeast Health Wangaratta is investigating the use of AI to create a digital replica of its patients. Doctors then use the replica to trial treatment.

Interview Natural language processing, or NLP for short, is one of the key research areas of artificial intelligence, and has had a major boost in the last couple of years. After all, the written word is everywhere – be it in the form of scientific texts, news articles, wiki entries, or seemingly simply status updates on the social platform of your choice – and there's a huge interest in making sense of it all. One company especially enthusiastic about NLP is Facebook. No matter your opinion about its platform, the amount of data the Silicon Valley giant has to process every single day is simply mind boggling. And its platform comes with some NLP already built in: take its translation capabilities, for example.

Felix Kjellberg, better known by his online pseudonym PewDiePie, now reaches over 100 million subscribers on YouTube with his Let's Play content. And a recent report estimates that the audience for Let's Play videos and livestreams now rivals that of paid content from HBO, Netflix, ESPN, and Hulu combined. But producing quality Let's Play videos takes time, much of which is devoted to writing scripts. To ease the burden on creators, a team at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Alberta recently investigated an AI system that can automatically generate commentary. They say their approach outperforms existing work and lays the groundwork for future studies.

Filings with the FCC provide more details on an anticipated addition to Google's smart home product lineup. As reported by 9to5Google, the filings seem to reveal some features of the yet-to-be-announced Nest mini -- the newest addition to the company's smart speaker lineup, not to be confused the the Google Home Mini. According to images in the filing, the device is wall-mounted and contains a cutout on the side rim of the speaker which is suspected to be a space for a headphone jack -- a feature reportedly being mulled according to prior reports from 9to5Google. A headphone port would allow the device to hook up to external audio sources like a laptop or computer and would also mimic a similar hardware design from the Echo Dot, Amazon's popular smart speaker. It's still unclear whether the cutout is indeed a place for a headphone jack as noted by The Verge which suggests the space could also be the location of the device's mute switch.

Zygmunt received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Adelaide, Australia in 2013, and his MSc degree in Computer Science from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa in 2009. He is a senior research fellow at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning. His research lies at the interface of computer vision, machine learning, and challenging industry problems. He develops algorithms that allow computers to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence. In the last couple of years, his work has focused on the application of machine learning and image processing techniques for the development of smart medical devices.