A school robotics team made up of five students from The Gambia has joined Afghanistan's all-girl robotics team in having their one-week visas rejected by the U.S. in order to attend the First Global Challenge robotics competition in Washington D.C. The five Gambian students on the robotics team will have their robot shipped from the West African country to the First Global Challenge competition in the U.S., which takes place from July 16-18. But the teens will not be able to attend the prestigious international event themselves, Al-Jazeera reports. Despite saying they worked "rigorous shifts" of seven hours during Ramadan to complete the robot, they will instead have to settle for presenting it via Skype. Director of The Gambia's ministry of higher education, research, science and technology, Moktar Darboe, told Al Jazeera that the students are "very disappointed" they won't be able to attend the competition.

Facebook is challenging a court order preventing it from telling users about secret US government requests for their private account information, according to court documents. The company says the order threatens freedom of speech. The search warrants were accompanied by a non-disclosure order prohibiting Facebook from informing the users about the requests before it actually complied with them. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

An artificial intelligence (AI) system, which can record and analyse customer conversations, will be trialled by Natwest in order to ensure they provide better quality information and advice, a Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) press release announced last week. Natwest has partnered with Recordsure, a London-based fintech company, whose AI, with customer consent, will record face to face and over the phone customer interactions, which will be analysed by human agents and the AI itself. According to Natwest's press release, the Recordsure AI can identify distinct parts of a conversation, so it will know, for example, when a customer is being given an initial disclosure, financial advice, and general conversation. It should be able to inform staff if certain topics or issues have not been discussed. Security is said to be a top priority in the introduction of the AI, and conversations are immediately encrypted and uploaded to a secure cloud, before being archived at former UK and US military facilities, originally built as nuclear bunkers.

On the day U.S.-backed forces made a major breakthrough in the battle for Islamic State group's (ISIS) operation capital Raqqa, reports said the terror group's poster girl Sally Jones, also known as Mrs. Terror, is desperate to return to the U.K. This was revealed by the wife of a former ISIS militant who is now living in a refugee camp in Syria, in an interview to Sky News. The woman, known as Aisha, said of Jones: "She was crying and wants to get back to Britain. She told me she wish [sic] to go to her country. Aisha said Umma Hussain al Britani, the name adopted by Jones, was distraught and crying as her plea had been denied by ISIS leaders on the basis she considered a military wife. READ: Who Is Sally Jones? Jones is originally from from Chatham, Kent, became the leading female recruitment officer for ISIS after moving to Raqqa and marrying a now-dead jihadist in 2004. She is now the most wanted woman in the world after climbing to the top of the CIA assassination list, the Sun reported. Jones, 47, has remained at large since her husband, ISIS recruit Junaid Hussain, was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2015. The couple are thought to have been behind at least a dozen murderous attacks both in the Middle East and abroad. On September 28, 2015, the United Nations sanctioned Jones as an agent operating on behalf of a terrorist organization, the Mirror reported. Jones is believed to have enticed scores of would-be European jihadis to join the self-declared caliphate through her influential recruitment network called the "Raqqa 12," the Sun reported. Jones has been attributed with the recruitment and training of young girls in Syria. The Express quoted a counter extremism website as saying Jones's activity online was in line with her role as leader of the secret "Anwar al-Awlaki" battalion's female wing. "In this role, Jones is responsible for training all European female recruits, or'muhajirat', in the use of weapons and tactics.

The Justice Ministry announced Tuesday a plan to introduce a new type of unmanned gate at major airports to fast-track Japanese passengers while allowing more officials to screen foreign nationals as a measure to counter terrorism and block illegal entry. "By smoothing out the immigration entry and exit processes for Japanese people, we can have more immigration officials run investigations on foreign nationals," said a news release distributed by the ministry on Tuesday. With 40 million travelers from overseas expected to come into Japan in 2020, and 60 million expected in 2030, it's easy to predict that airports will be short on immigration staff, a Justice Ministry official said. The new gates will feature cameras that take photographs of passengers. By using facial recognition technology, they will match the photo with image data retrieved from passports.

The challenge we face today is not a "world without work" but a world with rapidly changing work. The pace of progress in AI and machine learning is accelerating rapidly. In the past month alone, these are just a few of the news items I've seen: Deep learning and neural networks have dramatically improved in effectiveness and impact, leading to human-level performance in many aspects of vision, conversational speech, and problem-solving. As a result, industries are in the midst of a major transformation and more is on the way. Median income in America is lower now than in the past 15 years, and wealth is concentrated at the highest levels.

Germany may soon launch an investigation into Facebook over the social network's broad privacy policy that allows it to collect massive amounts of information from users. They, in part, blame the "fine print" of Facebook's terms of service. The Federal Cartel Office, Germany's national competition regulator, believes Facebook is "extorting" its users by making them agree to terms and conditions they may not fully understand in order to use the popular service. German regulators have also floated the possibility that anti-trust actions could use this angle in the courts. Read: Why Was Google Fined $2.7 Billion By The European Union?

It's no wonder that artificial intelligence is hot in cybersecurity. As the number of IoT devices is projected to reach into the tens of billions in coming years, enterprise companies will be compelled to embrace AI, machine learning and automation tools to help secure and manage their networks. Doing it the old-fashioned way will simply not be feasible. As a result, the field of cybersecurity is beginning to look like an endless game of chess that pits human hackers against AI-enhanced security professionals. "Already, it is possible to automate cybersecurity responses with machine learning and AI, which demonstrates the edge of what's possible," says T.J. Laher, senior solutions marketing manager at Cloudera.

Five teenage pupils from The Gambia who built a robot for a prestigious international competition in the United States will not be able to accompany their invention to the event after being denied a visa. The Gambian pupils become the second team of students to be refused entry to attend the FIRST Global robotics event in Washington, DC on July 16-18. On Saturday, it was reported that an all-girls team from Afghanistan were also denied a visa to travel to the US to showcase their creation at the same competition. We're not giving up, despite the challenges we face, we still continue to work hard. Moktar Darboe, director of The Gambia's ministry of higher education, research, science and technology, told Al Jazeera that the team, made up of high school pupils aged 17-18, were "very disappointed".

Medicine has come unimaginably far over the last century, driven by brilliant committed people and technology. In the last 20 years, we have seen the introduction of monoclonal antibody drugs, robotic surgery, and astounding intravascular treatments. All of medicine is entering a renaissance with a multitude of minimally invasive techniques and advancements. As we see the'old fashioned' physical exam go by the wayside as technology supplants and enhances our diagnostics by leaps and bounds. With cheap and plentiful EKG machines, how much less do we rely on a stethoscope?