Prerequisites: No prerequisites, knowledge of some undergraduate level mathematics would help but is not mandatory. Working knowledge of Python would be helpful if you want to run the source code that is provided. Taught by a Stanford-educated, ex-Googler and an IIT, IIM - educated ex-Flipkart lead analyst. This team has decades of practical experience in quant trading, analytics and e-commerce. The course is shy but confident: It is authoritative, drawn from decades of practical experience -but shies away from needlessly complicating stuff.

When the world's smartest companies such as Microsoft, Google, Alphabet Inc., and Baidu are investing heavily in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the world is going to sit up and take notice. Chinese Internet giant Baidu spent USD1.5 billion on research and development. And as proof of China's strong focus on AI and Machine Learning, Sinovation Ventures, a venture capital firm, invested USD0.1 billion in "25 AI-related startups" in the last three years in China and the U.S. Research shows that although genuine intelligence may still be a bit far off, AI and Machine Learning technologies are still expected to reign in 2017. Try reading up on Microsoft Project Oxford, IBM Watson, Google Deep Mind, and Baidu Minwa, and you'll understand what I am trying to get at. In 2015, Gartner's Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies introduced Machine Learning (ML), and the graph showed (Figure 1) that it would reach a plateau in 2 to 5 years.

The scientist behind Google Glass wearable technology has criticised the use of restrictive and "fear-based" testing regimes in education, describing a lack of innovation in the system as a crisis. Sebastian Thrun, who led the Google research lab responsible for self-driving cars and Google Glass, made the comments ahead of a meeting with education minister Michael Gove. Thrun, who is one of the world's most influential computer scientists, is exploring online collaborative education – known as Moocs, which stands for "massively open online courses". He has developed a project called Udacity, which is working with two colleges and workplace learning schemes. "The education system is based on a framework from the 17th and 18th century that says we should play for the first five years of life, then learn, then work, then rest and then die. I believe we should be able to do all those things all the time," said Thrun.

Whether you're new to automation or are an experienced user, Automate has the solutions for you! Taking place April 3-6, 2017 at McCormick Place in Chicago, Automate offers the opportunity to connect with industry experts and over 300 exhibitors. While at the show, be sure to attend the Automate Conference, featuring the 48th Annual International Symposium on Robotics. The Automate Conference offers everything from a basic understanding of automation to more advanced topics in courses taught by industry professionals. To learn more about Automate and to register for the show and conference, visit the Automate website.

The delights of computer programming can be a tough sell to many students -- particularly girls. "If you walk into a roomful of middle school girls and say'Do you want to learn how to program a computer?', "But if you walk in and say'Do you want to learn how to tell a story and make a movie?', all the hands go up." That's one reason why Dr. Pausch is so excited about a groundbreaking deal announced earlier this month in which video game giant Electronic Arts has agreed to donate the animation for characters from "The Sims" to Carnegie Mellon for use in a novice programmers' course the school has developed. Electronic Arts, Inc., headquartered in Redwood City, Calif., has sold 58 million copies of "The Sims," making it the best-selling video game of all time. Players can choose characters, build and furnish houses for them, and take care of them as they interact with each other. Carnegie Mellon will use the Sims characters in its "Alice" course, which is designed to make basic programming more palatable to students by allowing them to move animated figures around on the computer screen rather than writing abstruse lines of code. Alice, first developed a decade ago, already has its own set of animated characters, which Dr. Pausch described as "the best we could make with our own two hands.

Trails are narrow ribbons of civilization cutting through wilderness. They are as much about what is worth exploring as they are about what's off limits. A hiker loses a trail, and suddenly they're in a deep wilderness, unmoored from the world until they stumble back to that thin filament again. To find missing hikers, it makes sense to look near trails, and to do that, a team at the University of Zurich is training drones to identify and follow trails into the woods. The drone used by the Swiss researchers observes the environment through a pair of small cameras, similar to those used in smartphones.

Intel is buying deep-learning startup Nervana Systems in a deal that could help it make up for lost ground in the increasingly hot area of artificial intelligence. Founded in 2014, California-based Nervana offers a hosted platform for deep learning that's optimized "from algorithms down to silicon" to solve machine-learning problems, the startup says. Businesses can use its Nervana cloud service to build and deploy applications that make use of deep learning, a branch of AI used for tasks like image recognition and uncovering patterns in large amounts of data. Also of interest to Intel, Nervana is developing a specialty processor, known as an ASIC, that's custom built for deep learning. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but one estimate put the value above $350 million.

Last year, the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center created the "Rollin' Justin" robot, a technical marvel that could catch a ball through a mix of precision, user input, and motion sensors. It proved to be a success, but there's only so much research you can do with a single-function robot. Enter "Agile Justin," the counterpart machine that can pitch a ball with a great deal of finesse. Huffington Post relayed video footage of the two robots in action, as each unit showed off their respective skills in a short game of catch. It's a neat thing to watch in terms of mechanical detail, especially when you consider that each robot has to mimic the hand-to-eye coordination required for a seemingly simple thing.

A free online course at Stanford University on artificial intelligence, to be taught this fall by two leading experts from Silicon Valley, has attracted more than 58,000 students around the globe -- a class nearly four times the size of Stanford's entire student body. The course is one of three being offered experimentally by the Stanford computer science department to extend technology knowledge and skills beyond this elite campus to the entire world, the university is announcing on Tuesday. The online students will not get Stanford grades or credit, but they will be ranked in comparison to the work of other online students and will receive a "statement of accomplishment." For the artificial intelligence course, students may need some higher math, like linear algebra and probability theory, but there are no restrictions to online participation. So far, the age range is from high school to retirees, and the course has attracted interest from more than 175 countries.