Intel's keynotes can be fun, with robots parading on stage and drones zigzagging around the room. Now Intel's making new hardware to help enthusiasts join the fun by building robots and drones at home. The Robotic Development Kit and Aero Kit provide the necessary hardware and software tools to build robots and drones, respectively. The kits were announced at the ongoing Intel Developer Forum in Shenzhen, China. A major element of the developer boards is the RealSense 3D camera, which will ship with the kits and help the robots and drones navigate and avoid obstacles.

Love them or hate them, drones are increasing in popularity and there have already been incidents of propellers cutting and even blinding people. As a result, we are only just learning the true damage the propellers can cause. To study how the blades can tear through flesh, researchers have attached a drone to a catapult and fired it at a slab of pork in a bizarre slow-motion video. Researchers at a Danish University have rigged a purpose-built catapult to launch a hobby drone into the pork at high speed, recording the impact with a high-speed camera capturing 3,000 frames per second (pictured). Researchers at Aalborg University's Drone Research Lab rigged a purpose-built catapult to launch a hobby drone into the meat at high speed.

If you're planning on working in artificial intelligence (AI), you have to have a certain amount of bravery. Not the creeper-smashing, rose-toting iron golem sort of bravery one may encounter in Minecraft, but bravery nevertheless. As Katja Hoffmann, a researcher in the Machine Intelligence and Perception group at Microsoft Research Cambridge, notes, being part of the machine intelligence field means you have to develop an understanding of how learning works – and a big part of that is finding out what doesn't work. In other words, it requires a certain kind of bravery to accept that failure is an important step in the learning process. I had a chance to sit down with Katja to ask her what motivates her to do what she does, and also what advice she'd give to girls considering a career in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths).

A Swiss data analytics and cybersecurity company is beefing up its Boston-area presence after grabbing 40 million in venture capital, led by Highland Europe. Nexthink established a U.S. presence three weeks ago with the opening of a sales office in Cambridge, MA. The company employs about 10 people there to start, but it plans to grow to 120 local employees over the next 18 months, a spokeswoman says. Nexthink helps IT departments analyze and monitor their businesses' applications, devices, and other network activity in real time. The goal is to sniff out cyber attacks and minimize software disruptions for end users.

Even before the blockbuster acquisition of Cruise Automation by General Motors for more than 1 billion, venture firms were looking for big ideas in autonomous vehicles. The latest company to attract a round of funding for driverless car technology is Palo Alto-based NAUTO, co-founded in 2015 by CEO Stefan Heck and CTO Frederick Soo. Andy Rubin's hardware focused venture fund, Playground Global, led the 12 million investment in Nauto, joined by Draper Nexus. Heck explained, "Our systems today help humans drive better, safer, smarter and faster in terms of avoiding congestion and traffic. They retrofit into existing cars, and eventually will enable true autonomy in new or older vehicles."

I never win raffles, but I finally did last week at the MIT Xconomy in Boston. My prize was a Roomba. These robotic vacuums have been around for years for personal use, but now hotels are using similar devices to not only automate the cleaning process but also most of the hotel functionality like check-in, check-out, food delivery, and the automatic folding of clothes. There's even a completely robot-powered automated hotel in Japan. As a service, automation is invaluable when done well.

The assumption that a college education should take four years is baked into American culture. Colleges in the colonial days were founded on the premise of a four-year degree, a concept imported from Europe. Harvard University experimented with a three-year degree when it was founded in 1636, but the test was short-lived, and the four-year degree has been the standard ever since. We expect students to enter college at 18 and leave when they turn 22, and we worry about those who take a more circuitous route to graduation. But we need to reconsider that long-established, one-size-fits all model.

Facebook has begun rolling out its new chatbot platform on Messenger, and it's available to try out right now. The long-awaited'Bot Platform' was unveiled by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the first day of the F8 developer conference, and the company hopes it's going to change the way we all use the web. Rather than browsing the latest news, communicating with businesses and buying goods through standard sites and apps, Facebook's bots make it possible to do it all through Messenger - theoretically, you should be able to get what you're looking for by speaking to the bots in natural language. The platform is currently the beta stage and it's only working with a few US-based companies. But it's already possible to get a little taste of what this technology can do.

As we put the finishing touches on what promises to be another outstanding Hardcore Data Science Day at Strata Hadoop World in New York, I sat down with my co-organizer Ben Recht for the the latest episode of the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast. Recht is a UC Berkeley faculty member and member of AMPLab, and his research spans many areas of interest to data scientists including optimization, compressed sensing, statistics, and machine learning. At the 2014 Strata Hadoop World in NYC, Recht gave an overview of a nascent AMPLab research initiative into machine learning pipelines. The research team behind the project recently released an alpha version of a new software framework called KeystoneML, which gives developers a chance to test out some of the ideas that Recht outlined in his talk last year. We devoted a portion of this Data Show episode to machine learning pipelines in general, and a discussion of KeystoneML in particular.

At the most recent SXSW, Hanson Robotics, based in Plano, TX, debuted its latest personal robot – Sophia. With lifelike skin that is made from patented silicon, Sophia can emulate more than 62 facial expressions. Cameras inside her "eyes," sophisticated computer algorithms, and a combination of voice recognition technology and other tools enable Sophia to "see" and "think." Sophia is just the latest example of major advances in the development of machines striving to attain human "characteristics," "intelligence," and "awareness". Arguably, the notion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Cognitive Computing has been around since Frankenstein was published in 1818.