If you've ever whined that employing people means dealing with their personal messes, don't think hiring robots can make your life any better. Two restaurants in China have been forced to close after replacing their flesh-and-bone waitstaff with robots turned out to be a terrible mistake. According to the Worker's Daily (translated by Shanghaiist), the expensive droids were incapable of taking orders, carrying soup or pouring water. That means that a sophisticated artificial intelligence is being outdone by a 17-year-old on minimum wage with their head in a cloud of marijuana smoke.

A report shown at the 2016 World Economic Forum in January says millions of jobs will be lost to robots in the next few years. When thinking about who is most vulnerable, factory workers, drivers, and pilots come to mind. Surely the jobs requiring a human touch, such as artists, entertainers, and managers, will stick around, right? Maybe some of those jobs will be safe. Managers, not so much; very soon, robots will be replacing humans in top management positions, even up to the CEO level.

Microsoft is showing off its artificial intelligence abilities, with a new program that can produce an'original' Rembrandt painting based on the master's old works. The project is a collaboration between ING, Microsoft, Delft University of Technology, The Mauritshuis and Museum Het Rembrandthuis. 'The Next Rembrandt' project uses AI, capable of deep learning, was imprinted with 346 of Rembrandt's known works in the hopes that it can create a unique 3D printed image in his style. The computer analysed Dutch master Rembrandt's work, thoroughly tagged by humans. "We examined the entire collection of Rembrandt's work, studying the contents of his paintings pixel by pixel," the project team explained.

A SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station Sunday (April 10) to deliver vital supplies, science experiments and a prototype inflatable space habitat for the orbiting outpost and its six-person crew. Launched on Friday (April 8) from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the Dragon pulled up to space station on this morning where it was captured by the orbital complex's Canadarm2 robotic arm. "It looks like we caught a Dragon," British astronaut Tim Peake of the European Space Agency radioed to Mission Control after snagging the spacecraft with the station's arm. Dragon was later attached to the Earth-facing port on the station's Harmony module at 9:57 a.m. EDT (1357 GMT) to begin its one-month stay. The Dragon's arrival marked the first time that two U.S. commercial spacecraft were berthed to the space station simultaneously.

Venture capital firm IvyCap Ventures has raised the first tranche of Rs 300 crore in its Rs 600-crore IvyCap Fund 2, which was launched last October. The fund saw the participation of five of the 15 existing institutional investors of IvyCap. As a part of the IvyCap Ventures Initiative, we will invest in 25-30 startups in the next two years, in sectors like healthtech, IoT, machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, edtech and agritech." Last December, IvyCamp had partnered with Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), a business incubator of IIT Bombay. The objective was to leverage the IvyCamp Platform to connect and create value for entrepreneurs and innovators across the student and alumni community.

"You have to begin to lose your memory, if only bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all." -- Luis Buñuel Portolés, Filmmaker Every year, hundreds of millions of people experience the pain of a failing memory. The reasons are many: traumatic brain injury, which haunts a disturbingly high number of veterans and football players; stroke or Alzheimer's disease, which often plagues the elderly; or even normal brain aging, which inevitably touches us all. Memory loss seems to be inescapable. But one maverick neuroscientist is working hard on an electronic cure.

Google made headlines when it revealed that it is using machine learning to optimize its data center performance. In fact, Google's effort is only the latest in a series of initiatives to create an electronic "data center brain" that can analyze IT infrastructure. Automation has always been a priority for data center managers, and has become more important as facilities have become more complex. The DevOps movement seeks to "automate all the things" in a data center, while the push for greater efficiency has driven the development of smarter cooling systems. Where is this all headed? The data center won't be a portal to Skynet anytime soon.

Today's Internet applications are required to be highly scalable and available in the face of rapidly changing, unpredictable workloads. Multi-tier architecture is commonly used to build Internet applications, with different tiers providing load balancing, application logic, and persistence. The advent of cloud computing has given rise to rapid horizontal scaling of applications hosted in virtual machines (VMs) in each of the tiers. Currently, this scaling is done by monitoring system-level metrics (e.g., CPU utilization) and determining whether to scale out or in based on a threshold. These threshold-based algorithms, however, do not capture the complex interaction among multiple tiers, and determining the right set of thresholds for multiple resources to achieve a particular service level objective (SLO) is difficult. In this paper, we present vScale, a horizontal scaling system that can automatically scale the number of VMs in a tier to meet end-to-end application SLOs.

Right now, the New Economic Summit (NEST) 2016 conference is going on in Tokyo, Japan. One of the keynote speakers is Andy Rubin. Rubin was in charge of Google's robotics program in 2013, when the company (now Alphabet) acquired a fistful of some of the most capable and interesting robotics companies in the world. One of those companies was SCHAFT, which originated at the JSK Robotics Laboratory at the University of Tokyo and is best known for winning the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials by an absurd amount. We haven't heard anything from SCHAFT over the past three years, and all we know is that they're now part of X, Alphabet's experimental technology lab.

"Things that were, things that are… and some things that have not yet come to pass." I wish I had Galadriel's dramatic voice telling what the future will look like, as we are rapidly entering a time that still felt like a distant scenario not long ago. In the last few years, artificial intelligence, robots and connected devices have expanded into a whole new context: our everyday lives. They've also started making the headlines. We read how the Go-playing AI AlphaGo beat the world-class Go player Sedol by 5–1, and how toy robots like Pleo and social robots like Jibo and Pepper are coming to our homes.