COASTLINE Community College was a higher-education pioneer in the late 1970s when it started developing television-based courses that students could take from anywhere as long as they had another innovation of the time, a video player. Today the Fountain Valley-based school remains a trendsetter, producing college classes whose lectures and study materials can be viewed on iPods, personal digital assistants and cellphones. But these days Coastline has plenty of company. Though long known for their adherence to tradition, colleges in California and elsewhere increasingly are embracing a variety of higher-tech approaches to teaching and learning. And new gizmos, including gear with cutting-edge videogame or artificial intelligence technology, are on the way to provide more individualized instruction.

This fun and thought provoking session will look at fundamental issues about the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). When is human-level AI likely to emerge? When it does emerge will it be more likely to be friendly, hostile, or indifferent to humanity? What, if anything, can we do to influence these outcomes? Panelists will draw on their expert knowledge in the field as well as look at science fiction for inspiration.

With the help of human instructors, a robot has learned to talk like a human infant, learning the names of simple shapes and colors, reports Wired Science. "Our work focuses on early stages analogous to some characteristics of a human child of about 6 to 14 months, the transition from babbling to first word forms," wrote computer scientists led by Caroline Lyon of the University of Hertfordshire. Named DeeChee, the robot is an iCub, a three-foot-tall open source humanoid machine designed to resemble a baby. The similarity isn't merely aesthetic, but has a functional purpose: many researchers think certain cognitive processes are shaped by the bodies in which they occur. A brain in a vat would think and learn very differently than a brain in a body.

Soon they will be sophisticated enough to fill certain faculty roles at traditional universities. But to make this revolution work for students, academic leaders at those traditional institutions will need to broker a peace between artificially intelligent teaching programs and their human counterparts, according to a new report written by the former presidents of two prominent traditional universities on behalf of the nonprofit Ithaka S R. Online education has enabled many colleges to transition into the prevailing modern medium while adding new sources of revenue in times of scarcity, according to the Ithaka report. However, these innovative colleges have shown less interest in using the novel medium to curb tuition charges and measure learning outcomes. The report, called "Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in U.S. Higher Education," was co-written by Lawrence S. Bacow and William G. Bowen, the former presidents of Tufts and Princeton Universities, respectively, along with several Ithaka analysts. It was bankrolled by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) is the premier forum for researchers and practitioners in planning and scheduling - two technologies that are critical to manufacturing, space systems, software engineering, robotics, education, and entertainment. The ICAPS conference resulted from merging two bi-annual conferences, namely the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS) and the European Conference on Planning (ECP). The primary objectives of ICAPS are to further the field of automated planning and scheduling through the organization of technical meetings, including the annual ICAPS conference, through the organization of summer schools, tutorials and training activities at various events, through the organization of planning and scheduling competitions, benchmarking and other means of advancing and assessing the state of the art in the field, by promoting the involvement of young scientists in the field through scholarships and other means, and by promoting and disseminating publications, planning and scheduling systems, domains, simulators, software tools and technical material. The ICAPS 2016 conference was held from June 12-17, 2016 in London, UK. Conference chairs are Andrew Coles and Daniele Magazzeni.

In his 10-week course Ng takes a an engineering-oriented approach to Machine Learning that concentrates on statistical models. If you are looking for an alternative Coursera also has Neural Networks for Machine Learning, a class taught by University of Toronto professor, Geoffry Hinton who is a leading proponent in the field from a cognitive science perspective. His eight-week course sets out to teach students artificial neural networks and how they're being used for machine learning, as applied to speech and object recognition, image segmentation, modeling language and human motion. Its prerequisites are programming proficiency in Matlab, Octave or Python, plus knowledge of calculus, linear algebra and probability theory.

Some students articulated the view that new regulations and government oversight over the use of cognitive technologies are required. One student suggested that deployments of cognitive technologies require specialized quality assurance, possibly provided by an "independent third party, similar to the auditors of today." But it's not too early to think about the issues that regulations might cover and how we address them. Regarding quality assurance, one thing is sure: new technologies fail in new and unexpected ways. Organizations building and deploying these technologies will need to consider how their testing and risk management procedures need to evolve.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in 1995 to be precise, a scholar named Eli Noam published an article in the prestigious journal Science under the title "Electronics and the Dim Future of the University". In it, Professor Noam argued that the basic model of a university – which had been stable for hundreds of years – would be threatened by networked communications technologies. Under the classical model, universities were institutions that created, stored and disseminated knowledge. If students or scholars wished to access that knowledge, they had to come to the university. But, Noam argued, the internet would threaten that model by raising the question memorably posed by Howard Rheingold in the 1980s: "Where is the Library of Congress when it's on my desktop?"

Taking a computer science course will mean you will be studying a subject at the very forefront of technology and innovation. Computers are everywhere, and the demand to make them smaller, work more quickly, and be fitted with new and exciting software has never been greater. Most computing courses tend to focus on software engineering - things like database design, network systems, computer hardware, the internet. But there are other options in this field, such as artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and multimedia and games design, and apps design. You will be expected to be good at maths and an interest in physics would also help, as most of the theory will touch on both subjects.

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Thursday April 22 2004 The seminar at which Stephen Jay Gould was rigorously questioned by Dennett's students was Dennett's seminar at Tufts, not Gould's at Harvard. Dennett wrote Darwin's Dangerous Idea before, not after, Gould called him a "Darwinian fundamentalist". Dan Dennett is a sailor, with a billowing white beard and moustaches that he twiddles when thinking. He uses "salty" as a term of praise and has just bought a 42ft boat that sleeps five and could, if he wished, cross the Atlantic. His passion for sailing may be the best way to approach his philosophy. In both, un-charted and dangerous areas are to be navigated by explorers ingeniously equipped. Like all sailors, he has stories. One concerns a French couple he met when sailing off Greenland. They were on their honeymoon, sailing from France to Iceland, then Greenland, and finally, in one long reach, from Greenland to the Falklands.