A Japanese amusement park is turning the fears of a robot-run world into a family friendly attraction. Guests at Huis Ten Bosch will soon be able to enjoy okyonomiyaki prepared by a robotic chef, cocktails made by an autonomous bartender and a complete staff of serving cyborgs. This'robotic kingdom' will feature over 200 androids that attendees can touch and interact with while spending the day at the park. Guests at Huis Ten Bosch will soon be able to enjoy okyonomiyaki prepared by a robotic chef, cocktails made by an autonomous bartender and a complete staff of serving cyborgs. This'robotic kingdom' will feature over 200 androids.

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Hospi-R is the aggressively friendly robot that may deliver your medication during your next hospital stay. Panasonic has created an aggressively pleasant Dalek-nurse to whir silently between hospital beds, smile, and drop off medications and meals to patients. Japan and other countries have already given the wifi-camera-sensor driven bot proper certification to chip in with menial hospital duties. While good bedside manor is definitely appreciated by anyone stuck in a hospital for more than a few hours, something about the over-the-top grin on Hospi-R, the pink robo-servant, just seems a little off. Thankfully Hospi-R seems to lack arms, teeth, or articulated needle jabbers that might make the prospect of it wheeling into your room late at night extra scary.

They had invented--or, rather, discovered; no, really they'd just inexplicably gone to the trouble of creating--a die with a hundred and twenty sides. "What do you use it for?" "We have no idea," he answered. Futility notwithstanding, the d120 is billed as the "ultimate fair die allowed by Mother Nature (i.e., mathematics!)," At two inches in diameter and a little more than three ounces in weight, the d120 casts an impressive but not a runaway roll--even with so many sides, all of them skinny right triangles, the die is far from spherical.

Comet Labs has assembled a coalition of investors and corporate partners to help accelerate product and customer development cycles for fast growing robotics and machine learning companies. Startups are paired with experienced mentors and are given access to industry partners and platform technology. The fund's partners include the world's largest global manufacturing, agriculture, and healthcare companies. About Comet Labs Comet Labs is an early-stage venture capital firm associated with a 300M fund, Legend Star. They work with startups developing solutions in specific industry verticals, as well as those building enabling technologies.

You'll soon be getting much better video recommendations from YouTube. Google is launching new iOS and Android apps for YouTube aimed not only at a design refresh, but also at offering you smarter video recommendations. You'll also notice larger photos, which should help in identifying videos from particular channels. "The new recommendation system is based on deep neural network technology, which means it can find patterns automatically and keep learning and improving as it goes," said a blog post detailing the update. "Every day, we recommend hundreds of millions of different videos on Home, billions of times, in 76 languages."

If your self-driving car crashes, who gets sued? Google, Uber, and Ford would rather it be you, according to some experts. Tech companies making self-driving cars could become better protected under the law than those car's owners, experts warn, as the announcement came of a powerful new coalition of automakers and big tech companies forming to take on US government regulations around self-driving vehicles. Google, Uber, Lyft, Ford and Volvo, all of which are working on self-driving car technology, will lobby as the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets to bring autonomous vehicles to the road across the US. Related: We don't need self-driving cars – we need to ditch our vehicles entirely Heading it up will be David Strickland, the former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Administration, the same group he will now be working to influence.

The ACM constitution provides that our Association hold a general election in the even-numbered years for the positions of President, Vice President, Secretary/Treasurer, and Members-at-Large. Biographical information and statements of the candidates appear on the following pages (candidates' names appear in random order). In addition to the election of ACM's officers--President, Vice President, Secretary/Treasurer--five Members-at-Large will be elected to serve on ACM Council. Please refer to the instructions posted at https://www.esc-vote.com/acm2016. To access the secure voting site, you will need to enter your email address (the email address associated with your ACM member record) and your unique PIN provided by Election Services Co. Please return your ballot in the enclosed envelope, which must be signed by you on the outside in the space provided. The signed ballot envelope may be inserted into a separate envelope for mailing if you prefer this method. All ballots must be received by no later than 16:00 UTC on 24 May 2016. Validation by the Tellers Committee will take place at 14:00 UTC on 26 May 2016. Vicki Hanson is a Distinguished Professor of Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology, U.S. (since 2013), Professor and Chair of Inclusive Technologies, Computing, University of Dundee, U.K. (since 2009), and an IBM Research Staff Member Emeritus (since 2009). Previously, she was Research Staff Member and Manager, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (1986–2008), Research Associate, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT (1980–86), and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1978–80). Vicki is the ACM Vice President. She also currently serves as a member of the ACM Executive Committee and Council, on the ACM-W Europe Executive Committee, and on the ACM Fellows Awards Committee (Chair, 2015). She is Vice President at Large of ACM SIGCHI and an ACM Distinguished Speaker. She has served on the SIG Governing Board Executive Committee (2005–14; SGB Chair 2010–12), and as Chair of SIGACCESS, where she revitalized the SIG and established a successful annual conference (ASSETS). She co-founded the field's premier archival journal (ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing) and served as Associate Editor of ACM TWEB. She was on the organizing committee for several SIGPLAN OOPSLA conferences, chaired the recent ACM CEO Search Committee, and currently serves on the Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellows committee (since 2013; Convener 2015). She is an ACM Fellow, a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Senior Member of IEEE.

Volvo is set to run self-driving versions of its family 4x4s on roads around London next year as the motor industry's trial of autonomous vehicles accelerates. While self-driving pods and shuttles were already due to operate on pavements in Greenwich and Milton Keynes this summer, the Swedish carmaker is planning to test autonomous vehicles on public roads in the capital from 2017. Volvo's UK test, called Drive Me London, will go a step further than other programmes by using real families driving autonomous cars on public roads. The manufacturer has conducted tests with the same vehicles in Gothenburg since 2014, and plans a parallel public trial in the Swedish city next year. The cars will record data from everyday users to help develop driverless cars for real-world conditions.

The big news on March 12 of this year was of the Go-playing AI-system AlphaGo securing victory against 18-time world champion Lee Se-dol by winning the third straight game of a five-game match in Seoul, Korea. After Deep Blue's victory against chess world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, the game of Go was the next grand challenge for game-playing artificial intelligence. Go has defied the brute-force methods in game-tree search that worked so successfully in chess. In 2012, Communications published a Research Highlight article by Sylvain Gelly et al. on computer Go, which reported that "Programs based on Monte-Carlo tree search now play at human-master levels and are beginning to challenge top professional players." AlphaGo combines tree-search techniques with search-space reduction techniques that use deep learning. Its victory is a stunning achievement and another milestone in the inexorable march of AI research.