In April 2008 I wrote "Where Have All the Great Programmers Gone?" . In trying to answer the question, I contrasted the contemporary introduction to programming with the way it was learned in the 1950s. The first was that one of the prerequisites for being a promising oddball was that of having a nontrivial college degree. Examples were philosophy (J. A. Robinson), English literature (Mark Halpern), Classics (C. A. R. Hoare), Physics (E.W. Dijkstra). Being thrown into the deep end in this way was educative, something that cannot be said of the typical first-year programming text, dumbed down in the way that only Educators have the secret of. A Programmer's Place (APP) has yet to snag Hoare or Halpern, but was fortunate to find J.A. Robinson available for an interview.

Robots are on the march again into the last bastion of labour intensive industry - farming and horticulture. Warwick researchers are working on a suite of robots and automated systems which could transform farming and horticulture over the next decade. The researchers from the University of Warwick's horticultural arm, Warwick HRI, and its manufacturing engineering section, Warwick Manufacturing Group, are working on a number of robotics and automation products that will vastly reduce the labour costs of farmers and growers. Those projects include: A robotic mushroom picker: the robot uses a charged coupled camera to spot and select only mushrooms of the exact size required for picking achieving levels of accuracy far in excess of human labour. The mushroom(s) are then picked by a suction cup on the end of a robotic arm.

The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, which most people refer to as Xerox PARC, is one of the most fabled institutions in Silicon Valley. PARC is also where Steve Jobs and early Apple engineers took inspiration for aspects of the Macintosh computer. Today, Xerox PARC remains an active operation with a host of commercial clients, focused in areas that include printed electronics, data and analytics, cleantech, and contextual intelligence. During the conversation, we talked about innovation, managing brilliant researchers, and the critical importance of user experience. One of the fascinating parts of our discussion was a window Steve provided into PARC's work on the Internet of Things.

However, the HP-Aecus study also shows that innovation isn't just one thing. It's a spectrum of ideas that might affect how an individual team functions, through big IT projects, to major scientific or technological breakthroughs. The trouble is that although almost everyone thinks innovation is desirable, just six percent of companies see themselves as very good at it, with only a further one in four businesses saying they're seeing regular and successful achievements from their efforts. Together, those two groups account for 31 percent of organisations and demonstrate the disparity between the desire for increasing innovation and its realisation. To close that gap, and rather than leaving innovation to chance, the first step for most businesses has to be the creation of the right environment for it to flourish.

The researchers have shown how it's possible to perturb facial recognition with patterned eyeglass frames. Researchers have developed patterned eyeglass frames that can trick facial-recognition algorithms into seeing someone else's face. The printed frames allowed three researchers from Carnegie Mellon to successfully dodge a facial-recognition system based on machine-learning 80 percent of the time. Using certain variants of the frames, a white male was also able to fool the algorithm into mistaking him for movie actress Milla Jovovich, while a South-Asian female tricked it into seeing a Middle Eastern male. A look at some of the best IoT and smart city projects which aim to make the lives of citizens better.

Following a recall of some of its Shield tablets last week, Nvidia published solid second quarter financial results after the bell on Thursday. Non-GAAP earnings were 34 cents per share on a revenue of $1.153 billion, up five percent year-over-year. Wall Street was looking for earnings of 10 cents per share with $1.01 billion in revenue. Nvidia highlighted revenue growth for two verticals in particular: gaming and automotive tech. The GeForce GTX GPU series alone -- primarily utilized for sports gaming titles -- is touted to now have an estimated 130 million viewers. The GeForce Experience PC gaming platform has also grown to 65 million users, up from 38 million a year earlier.

Neura has announced plans to make its personal artificial intelligence (AI) service and ecosystem commercially available after successfully raising $11 million in a Series A funding round. The funding round was led by AXA Strategic Ventures and existing investor Pitango Venture Capital, and was joined by Liberty Israel Venture Fund and Lenovo Group. Speaking to ZDNet, Neura CEO Gilad Meiri said just shy of launching the company three years ago, the company is now ready to make its AI ecosystem commercially available. "What we're going to do is putting it on the shelf and inviting the world to use it, and that obviously requires a different level of infrastructure, scale, security, and customer support, so the money is mainly geared towards that," he said. Neura has developed technology based on data collected from human behaviours, and plans to make the information accessible to help enhance apps and devices through personalisation.

Microsoft Research and a team at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a system that can train machines to examine an image and seek to answer questions the way a human might ask them. Microsoft's latest effort in developing the tools for artificial intelligence focus on the field of so-called'image-question answering', which aims to automatically answer natural-language questions about the content of a given image. 'Building AI is like launching a rocket': Meet the man fighting to stop artificial intelligence destroying humanity Skype's co-founder wants to keep humankind safe from the existential threats of artificial intelligence. That's easier than it sounds, even for a seemingly simple image of a dog sitting in a bike basket. To answer the question, 'What's sitting in the basket on a bicycle?' requires multi-step reasoning, the researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft Research noted.

With the deluge of reports lately on how robots are replacing humans at everyday tasks, you may think the end of the world, at least for a certain category of human workers, is nigh. Indeed that may well be the case in certain professions. The Associated Press, for instance, has a team of robots that generates 3,000 news reports about the quarterly earnings releases of companies. This Japanese hotel that I wrote about recently is staffed entirely with robots. The paralegal may soon be a position of the past as law firms commission bots to sift through vast reams of legal information and synthesise them.

The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE is a $5 million competition, challenging teams globally to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful AI technologies to tackle the world's grand challenges. The prize aims to accelerate adoption of AI technologies and spark creative, innovative, and audacious demonstrations of the technology that are truly scalable and solve societal grand challenges. To encourage innovation in any form, the competition is an open challenge in AI. Rather than set a single, universal goal for all teams, this competition will invite teams to each create their own goal and solution to a grand challenge. The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE is a four-year competition with annual milestone competitions in 2017 and 2018.