IS IT a new medium on a par with film and music, a valuable educational tool, a form of harmless fun or a digital menace that turns children into violent zombies? Video gaming is all these things, depending on whom you ask. Gaming has gone from a minority activity a few years ago to mass entertainment. Video games increasingly resemble films, with photorealistic images, complex plotlines and even famous actors. The next generation of games consoles--which will be launched over the next few months by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo--will intensify the debate over gaming and its impact on society, as the industry tries to reach out to new customers and its opponents become ever more vocal. Games consoles are the most powerful mass-produced computers in the world and the new machines will offer unprecedented levels of performance.

Science is an activity of human societies. It is our belief that computer-based scientific discovery must support strong integration into existing the social environment of human scientific communities. The discovered knowledge must add to and build on existing science. We believe that the ability to incorporate background knowledge and re-use learned knowledge together with the comprehensibility of the hypotheses, have marked out ILP as a particularly effective approach for scientific knowledge discovery.

Artificial intelligence and automation technologies are already starting to affect our work and daily lives. AI is present in everyday objects and processes such as virtual assistants, supermarket checkouts, driverless cars and detecting fraud in credit card transactions. Disruption is inevitable but it is often deeply feared. The current wave of change, fuelled by technological advancement, is no different. However, like generations before us, we must learn to transcend the disruption and thrive in new times.

It has already been cheerfully offering advice to customers hoping to buy a phone in Tokyo, but Pepper the'emotional' robot is now about to enrol in school. The expressive humanoid, which has been developed by Japanese corporation SoftBank Robotics, is designed to identify and react to human emotions. It is now due to attend classes at Shoshi High School in Waseda, in the Fukushima Prefecture of Japan – making it the first time a robot will'study' alongside human students. Pepper the robot has become the world's first humanoid to enroll into a high school. Pepper is intended to be used for customer service in banks, shops and for greeting people. However, SoftBank has said it – or he as they company seems to prefer – could become a companion in people's homes in the future too.

If you have ever tried your hand at lip-reading in a noisy environment, you'll know it isn't easy. Now, researchers have invented a machine that can tell the difference between sounds that look the same on the lips to give anyone the ability to decipher what's being said. It is hoped the new technology could help people with hearing and speech impairments communicate more easily and even help solve crimes. Researchers have invented a machine that can tell the difference between sounds that look the same on the lips to give anyone the ability to decipher what's being said. The visual speech recognition technology, can be applied'any place where the audio isn't good enough to determine what people are saying,' according to Helen Bear, who created the machine alongside Richard Harvey at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

Virtual learning programs could soon mark the end of test-taking. Researchers from Stanford University and Google in California have developed a new algorithm that aims to understand students' individual learning abilities. The system can even predict whether the students will get questions right or wrong in a given exercise, and as development progresses, it may be also able to identify why they've chosen that way. Virtual learning programs could soon mark the end of test-taking. Researchers from Stanford University and Google in California have developed a new algorithm that can understand students' individual learning abilities.

Computers could soon replace human intuition in many areas - and a new system developed at MIT has shown it can outperform even the smartest of people. MIT researchers have designed a big-data analysis system which aims to replace human intuition in the search for buried patterns. The system, called the Data Science Machine, competed against human teams in three data science competitions, and outperformed them. In Stanley Kubrick's 2001, humans were challenged by a'smart' computer. Now MIT's system was able to out-perform humans in a series of tasks designed to look for patterns in data - beating human intuition.

Scientists have revealed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can solve SAT geometry questions as well as the average American 11th-grade student. Called GeoS, it uses a combination of computer vision to interpret diagrams, natural language processing to read and understand text and a geometric solver to achieve 49 percent accuracy on official SAT test questions. If these results were extrapolated to the entire Math SAT test, the computer achieved an SAT score of 500 (out of 800), the average test score for 2015, the team behind it say. The system uses a combination of computer vision, natural language processing and a geometric solver to achieve 49 percent accuracy on official SAT test questions. GeoS is the first end-to-end system that solves SAT plane geometry problems.

Google's DeepMind division is using Daily Mail and CNN articles to teach its artificial intelligence programs to read. Using the unique style of articles on the sites - with concise bullet points summarising a story at the top of a page - artificial intelligence was able to learn key facts about articles to answer queries. Ultimately, scientists hope that the study could lead to complex artificial'brains' that can read entire documents and respond to questions put to them by a human. The British-based DeepMind unit analysed almost 400,000 articles from the sites (language process shown). They were used for their unique style of bullets, text and captions. Artificial intelligence was able to learn key facts from the articles.

Teachers may soon be able to lecture pupils, view their work and help them with any problems without ever stepping foot in the classroom. A school in Columbus Ohio has introduced a new robo-teacher into its classrooms to allow staff in other parts of the country to teach their pupils. The 4ft (1.2 metre) tall robot features a screen that broadcasts a video of the teacher's face and a camera allows the teacher to see what is going on in the classroom. A school in Columbus Ohio has introduced a new robo-teacher into its classrooms to allow staff in other parts of the country to teach their pupils. The 4ft (1.2 metre) tall robot features a screen that broadcasts a video of the teacher's face and a camera allows the teacher to see what is going on in the classroom Thomas Fetch, a social studies teacher at Nexus Academy of Columbus is one of the first to trial the robot, controlling it from his computer more than 1,600 miles (2,570km) away in Arizona.