SENDAI – A research team says it has developed a snake-like robot that can climb over debris and rubble by shooting a jet of air to lift its front end from the ground. It is the first snake-shaped robot in the world that can move with its front tip off the ground, according to the team, which includes members from Tohoku University in Sendai. The Tohoku region was devastated by the March 11, 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. The robot will provide important capabilities during search and rescue operations because it can enter a collapsed building and look for people trapped inside with the camera mounted on its front tip, the team said. After working to improve durability, the team aims to put the device to practical use in three years. The plastic robot is 8 meters long and weighs around 3 kg.

If the human race has any hope of meeting the challenge of climate change, it will need to think its way out of the conundrum it has wrought. People need meaningful work to do. Business owners need profits to stay in business. Commerce takes energy -- lots of it -- to keep chugging ahead. But work and commerce generate effluent that poisons the land, the air, and the seas.

Along with the recent advances in scalable Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, sampling techniques that are based on Langevin diffusions have started receiving increasing attention. These so called Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) methods are based on diffusions driven by a Brownian motion, which gives rise to Gaussian proposal distributions in the resulting algorithms. Even though these approaches have proven successful in many applications, their performance can be limited by the light-tailed nature of the Gaussian proposals. In this study, we extend classical LMC and develop a novel Fractional LMC (FLMC) framework that is based on a family of heavy-tailed distributions, called $\alpha$-stable L\'{e}vy distributions. As opposed to classical approaches, the proposed approach can possess large jumps while targeting the correct distribution, which would be beneficial for efficient exploration of the state space. We develop novel computational methods that can scale up to large-scale problems and we provide formal convergence analysis of the proposed scheme. Our experiments support our theory: FLMC can provide superior performance in multi-modal settings, improved convergence rates, and robustness to algorithm parameters.

Big data and AI to reshape marketing. Put your face anywhere: Microsoft's FaceSwap app available for Android and iOS What are the three keys to success for a chief data officer?

Enterprise asset management software (EAM) has been around for more than 20 years. Over that time, it's evolved from simply providing tools for managing asset maintenance to being able to provide a way for organizations to track their assets -- anything from an HVAC system to a key piece of manufacturing equipment, to a stretch of railroad track -- and record their condition, get alerts about the need for preventative maintenance, extend the life cycle of those assets, and of course, manage work orders. Until now, improvements to EAM systems have largely been evolutionary, not revolutionary. We're already starting to see new technologies that are making EAM a clear differentiator for companies. Ultimately, the future of EAM will be about information exchange between devices/components and people.

This week I was lucky enough to sit down with Paul Papas, the Global Leader of IBM's Digital Strategy & Interactive Experience (iX) practice, to ask him some tough questions about where digital technology is headed and what part IBM has to play in it. This is the second installment in Roth Ryan Hayes's recently-launched, regular interview series, where we tap into to some of the greatest minds in digital to find out what's in store for the future. Hayes: Nearly 20 years ago, John Doerr talked about the notion of moving from the internet to the "Evernet," which would be "always-on" like electricity. While I'm impressed with breakthroughs we've made in technology, I've not been impressed with the pace, strength, reliability, and accessibility of mobile and WiFi connections. Do you believe that the promise of the Evernet will be realized in the near future?

Beyond Limits, which is commercialising technology used by NASA and the US Department of Defence, has announced securing $20 million from sole investor BP Ventures. The Series B round brings the total amount raised by the Pasadena, California-based artificial intelligence company to $25.5 million. Developed in the labs of NASA's Caltech deep space program, Beyond Limits' AI software is 20 years in the making. The company said the technology has been "battle tested in deep space where there is zero margin for error" and is subsequently a lot faster than other AI technology in the market. "It has been used in NASA for diagnostics of the NASA deep space network, for optimisation of Mars missions, and has even helped discover a weather model by tracking dust build and wind storm activity based on Mars rover battery and solar panel performance," Beyond Limits' CEO AJ Abdallat told ZDNet.

It's a dirty job but somebody's got to do it. And when it comes to the expensive, claustrophobic and sometimes dangerous work of inspecting natural gas and oil pipelines, that somebody is a robot. "We can make sure that these critical elements of energy infrastructure operate more safely, more reliably, more economically," said Edward Petit de Mange, the managing director at the San Diego hub of Diakont, an international high-tech engineering and manufacturing company with offices in Russia, Italy and North America. According to the federal government, more than 2.6 million miles of pipelines supply the nation's energy needs. But aging and deteriorating pipelines pose substantial risks.

For militaries, tech like this provides an excellent platform for surveillance missions against military and terrorist targets. It can utilize its high flight ceiling to maintain line-of-sight contact with over 400,000 square miles of ground and water. For both militaries and tech firms, covering so much territory makes it an excellent data relay and communications node. This will allow the drone to replace or back up satellite communications, maintain coverage between distant aircraft and ships, or even provide broadband to rural Chinese households. While conversations around drone usage are often limited to their roles as potential missile-toting killers and parcel-delivering quadcopters, some of the most important drones of the future may be those like the Caihong X and Helios Prototype, unseen and high up, gathering data day in and day out.

Automated translation, including translating one programming language into another one (for instance, SQL to Python - the converse is not possible) Spell checks, especially for people writing in multiple languages - lot's of progress to be made here, including automatically recognizing the language when you type, and stop trying to correct the same word every single time (some browsers have tried to change Ning to Nong hundreds of times, and I have no idea why after 50 failures they continue to try - I call this machine unlearning) Detection of earth-like planets - focus on planetary systems with many planets to increase odds of finding inhabitable planets, rather than stars and planets matching our Sun and Earth Distinguishing between noise and signal on millions of NASA pictures or videos, to identify patterns Automated piloting (drones, cars without pilots) Customized, patient-specific medications and diets Predicting and legally manipulating elections Predicting oil demand, oil ...