A certain type of person might look at the Cowa Robot Suitcase and say (with an irritated, world-weary sigh), "A smart suitcase? When will this Internet of Things end?" I am not that person, and if you are, I have some bad news for you. The Internet of Things (IoT) has no end. There is no product, however trivial, on the do-not-upgrade list.

Two's company but three's a crowd according to dating app Tinder, which has launched a legal bid to kill off a rival app aimed at people looking for threesomes. Tinder, owned by global dating firm Match Group, is alleging trademark infringement in the high court against 3nder, an independent app for non-monogamous couples and their potential partners. It wants its smaller competitor to shut down and erase its presence from the web entirely to avoid "confusion" between the two apps, claiming the alleged similarity gives 3nder an "unfair advantage". But 3nder launched its fightback in bizarre fashion on Monday, calling on its users to send Tinder pictures of their socks via Twitter, using the hashtag #TinderSuckMySocks. Founder Dimo Trifonov vowed to fight Tinder, which he accused of "loading a nuclear weapon" against his firm, which employs just eight people.

This five-fingered robot hand developed by University of Washington computer science and engineering researchers can learn how to perform dexterous manipulation -- like spinning a tube full of coffee beans -- on its own, rather than having humans program its actions. A University of Washington team of computer scientists and engineers has built what they say is one of the most highly capable five-fingered robot hands in the world. It can perform dexterous manipulation and learn from its own experience without needing humans to direct it. Their work is described in a paper to be presented May 17 at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. "Hand manipulation is one of the hardest problems that roboticists have to solve," said lead author Vikash Kumar, a UW doctoral student in computer science and engineering. "A lot of robots today have pretty capable arms but the hand is as simple as a suction cup or maybe a claw or a gripper."

Artificial intelligence – what's the worst that can happen? Working with hacktivist and entrepreneur Federico Pistono, he has come up with a set of worst-case scenarios for a potential malevolent AI, from "enslaving mankind" to "destroying the universe". Yampolskiy argues that anticipating as many negative outcomes as possible – just as cybersecurity researchers do when looking for vulnerabilities – will help us guard against disaster. "The standard framework in AI thinking has always been to propose new safety mechanisms," he says. But looking at the issue with a cybersecurity mindset puts a different spin on things: starting with a list of all the things that could go wrong will make it easier to test any safeguards we may eventually want to put in place.

I was chatting with an old friend yesterday and he reminded me of a conversation we had nearly 50 years ago. I tried to explain to him what I did for living and he was trying to understand why getting computers to understand was more complicated than key word analysis. I explained about concepts underlying sentences and explained that sentences used words but that people really didn't use words in their minds except to get to the underlying ideas and that computers were having a hard time with that. Fifty years later, key words are still dominating the thoughts of people who try to get computers to deal with language. But, this time, the key word people have deceived the general public by making claims that this is thinking, that AI is here, and that, by the way we should be very afraid, or very excited, I forget which.

Google is launching a new artificial intelligence group called "Magenta" to see if computers can create their own masterpieces, according to Quartz. The group was reportedly outlined on Sunday by Douglas Eck, a researcher at Google Brain (one of Google's well-established AI divisions), at the Moogfest tech and music festival in Durham, North Carolina. Magenta, due to launch more publicly at the start of June, will reportedly aim to establish whether AIs can be trained to create original pieces of music, art, or video. In order to determine whether this is possible, the Magenta team will use TensorFlow -- a software library for machine intelligence that Google built and opened up to the public at the end of last year. The first product to be released by Magenta will be a simple program that's designed to help researchers import music data from MIDI music files into TensorFlow, according to Quartz.

Google introduced a new group dedicated to making artificial intelligence more creative at Moogfest, a four-day music and technology festival in Durham, North Carolina, Quartz first reported. Called Magenta, the group will use its AI system TensorFlow to see if AI can be trained to create its own art, music, and video. The ultimate goal is to see if AI could give a listener "musical chills" by generating entirely new pieces of music, Quartz reported. Google made TensorFlow open source in November so that any developer can use it. TensorFlow works by using deep learning, a process where machines learn to complete tasks all on their own, to recognize images.

This weekend, I hopped on a train for my annual trek to Maker Faire, held this year at the San Mateo Events Center. Over 150,000 people attended this year's show, coming to check out new drones, 3D printers, robots and more. This particular event is the granddaddy of Maker Faires, started by Maker Media and its visionary founder Dale Dougherty. It bills itself as the greatest "Show and Tell on Earth." I've long been following the Maker Movement as a part of my overall interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education.

My mother enrolled in a high school physics course in 1968. This wouldn't be especially notable except for the fact that it was the first time in her school's history that girls were permitted to take physics. In prior years, boys were allowed to study physics while girls were expected to enroll in home economics. While my mother acknowledges she was not destined for a career in physics, there were women of her generation that did aspire to enter the scientific field: Dr. France Córdova, Director of the National Science Foundation; Shirley Ann Jackson, President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; and Persis Drell, former director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, are just a few of the women who not only studied physics, but excelled and built their careers in the field despite the barriers of their generation. Women have progressed significantly since 1968.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, has been touted as a potential panacea for many of our national health services' current ills. But we need to employ intelligence and care of our own before jumping in'gung ho', says one NHS England boss.