Ants, it turns out, are extremely good at estimating the concentration of other ants in their vicinity. This ability appears to play a role in several communal activities, particularly in the voting procedure whereby an ant colony selects a new nest. Biologists have long suspected that ants base their population-density estimates on the frequency with which they--literally--bump into other ants while randomly exploring their environments. That theory gets new support from a theoretical paper that researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory will present at the Association for Computing Machinery's Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing conference later this month. The paper shows that observations from random exploration of the environment converge very quickly on an accurate estimate of population density.

CHENNAI: Societe Generale's 10-week accelerator programme Catalyst has eight Indian startups working on various themes and three of them -Uniphore Software Systems, FixNix and Gavs Technologies are from Chennai, working on various risk and analytics tools that may be used by SocGen in future. FixNix, founded by Shanmugavel Sankaran, is trying to develop an early prediction based warning system for employee retention and proactive management of employee expectations. "We have a three-member team working on risk analytics in the accelerator. FixNix is getting aggressively into security and risk analytics for Indian and international banks, including Societe Generale, UBS," said Sankaran. The SaaS based governance, risk and compliance (GRC) startup has funding from ex-CIO of Tesla Jay Vijayan and other angel investors.

It is Wednesday, July 13. The newest trend in San Francisco is robots acting as security guards. But can they be trusted to keep us safe? A mother says her toddler was knocked down and run over by a robot in Palo Alto. Here's what else is happening in the Golden State: Protesters marched outside LAPD headquarters before taking to City Hall on Tuesday as the Police Commission found that the fatal shooting of a 30-year-old woman was within the department's policy.

Dallas Police face questions this morning over the method used to kill the sniper in last week's officer ambush. Police sent a robot armed with explosives to kill the gunman. Robots in the past have stopped a lot of dangerous situations. They can do pretty much anything a person can do: go upstairs, communicate via speakers, and use cameras to explore a scene, and at least one has been deployed to spray tear gas to subdue a suspect. But using a robot to kill?

Cozmo is an AI robot that learns about you over time. Powered by a so-called emotion engine, Cozmo recognizes faces and responds to external stimuli in order to develop its personality. The palm-sized robot can play games and has facial recognition -- but that's just the start. Developed by Anki, the company behind the Overdrive racing cars, Cozmo will soon get even more powerful. Anki will have a beta software development kit for Cozmo available to makers and hobbyists at its launch in October 2016, the company said Monday.

Renewable power sources such as wind now provide about one-third of Germany's electricity. The rows of towering wind turbines and legions of glistening solar panels spread across Germany's landscape are striking emblems of the country's shift to non-nuclear, low-carbon power. But although Germany is the world's poster child for renewable energy, its grids cannot yet cope with the erratic nature of wind and solar power. In June, German meteorologists, engineers and utility firms began to test whether big data and machine learning can make these power sources more grid-friendly. "To operate the grid more efficiently and keep fossil reserves at a minimum, operators need to have a better idea of how much wind and solar power to expect at any given time," says Malte Siefert, a physicist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy System Technology in Kassel, Germany, and a leader on the project, called EWeLiNE.

The future of industry is digital. GE and BI Studios have co-created Digital Industry Insider, dedicated to bringing you what you need to know about digital industrial news and events. The reality is somewhere in between. In 2016, hulking machines are still executing heavy duty tasks, but humanoid types are increasingly working alongside humans on assembly lines. Manufacturing isn't that different from everyday life-smart robots are showing up in factories just as they're invading our homes.

By Alissa Quart, author of "The Republic of Outsiders" and "Branded", is the editor for the nonprofit Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Precariousness is not just a working-class thing. In recent interviews, dozens of academics and schoolteachers, administrators, librarians, journalists and even coders have told me they too are falling prey to an unstable new America. I've started to think of this just-scraping-by group as the Middle Precariat. The word Precariat was popularized five or so years ago to describe a rapidly expanding working class with unstable, low-paid jobs.

Albert Hernandez, a harvester from Castroville uses HUELLA X data collector Monday to scan the bar code on the side of a tray of freshly-picked and packaged strawberries in a field operated by Fresalda Farms south of Salins. The device was developed by and is being tested by Salinas-based Food Origins, Inc., to digitally provides data at farmers can use to track the rates of harvesting in their field. The Forbes AgTech Summit last year changed Nathan Dorn's life. Back then, Dorn, a systems engineer, was director of knowledge and innovation for a Valley strawberry grower. He also had an idea for a new business – making computer software and connected hardware to help farmers track the harvesting of hand-picked crops.

Nissan has a new autonomous driving system called ProPILOT, and it's coming to its first production vehicle in August. ProPILOT, a self-driving feature designed for use in single-lane highway driving situation, arrives in the Nissan Serena first, which is currently set to go on sale next month. Likely in light of recent events faced by Tesla around its own Autopilot self-driving tech, Nissan is very clearly laying out what ProPILOT is – and what it isn't. In a press release, the company notes that ProPILOT is single-lane, as mentioned (Autopilot can manage lane changes) and that it controls steering, acceleration and braking, and is designed to be used when traffic is heavy and the going is slow, or during extended commutes. Like other cruise-assist features you may have seen before, ProPILOT can automatically manage the distance between your car and any leading car, between speeds ranging from about 18mph to about 60mph.