Tech giant Microsoft and large equipment manufacturer Liebherr are collaborating on a new generation of smart refrigerators that would help in shopping and planning meals with intelligent food management. "As part of the Liebherr household appliances division's digital initiative, the duo would develop'SmartDeviceBox' -- a communication module which fits into refrigerators and freezers -- connecting them to the internet," T.J. Hazen, Principal Data Scientist Manager at Microsoft, wrote. The system, which would utilize the same machine learning technology used in Microsoft's artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Cortana, is designed to have a long lifecycle. With this technology, modular units can be integrated and upgraded at any time in existing SmartDevice-ready appliances to create value and comfort for customers through new digital features and solutions, the post on Microsoft blog said. With the refrigerators, stored groceries can be monitored using internal cameras and object recognition technology.

A driverless tractor could run around the clock. CNH Industrial unveiled an autonomous tractor concept at the 2016 Farm Progress Show in Iowa during the last week of August. Theses self-driving tractors would be able to work around the clock while also providing real-time data monitoring. Farmers would program the tractors to accomplish specific tasks. Then, instead of sweating in the fields, they could tend to livestock or even sit in an air-conditioned office and monitor the tractors from a tablet or computer. In essence, automated equipment could turn farming into a desk job.

There are currently over 100 million students waiting to become the next generation of engineers, rocket scientists and astrophysicists to get humans from Earth to Mars and beyond, but they may not be able to fulfill their potential simply due to a lack of access to a quality education. According to a study from UNESCO, more than 100 million young people worldwide, 62 to 66 million of whom are girls, are not attending school of any kind. Hundreds of millions more are unable to afford good-quality or safe schools. However, groups like OneWeb and ONE are aiming to provide universal Internet access worldwide by 2020, greatly expanding the ability to use educational resources online. Nevertheless, Internet access does not guarantee a quality education.

Researchers from the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio used tissues from a sea slug and 3D-printed components to create a biohybrid robot that can crawl like sea turtles on a beach. The robot, just under two inches long, can "walk" at a pace of 0.43 centimeters a minute when an external electrical current is applied which forces the muscles to contract. The scientists behind this biohybrid robot believe that in the future, an army of such robots could be used for a variety of tasks like locating the source of a toxic leak in a pond or even searching the ocean floor for a flight data recorder. "We're building a living machine--a biohybrid robot that's not completely organic yet," lead researcher and PhD student Victoria Webster said in a statement. "We want the robots to be compliant, to interact with the environment. One of the problems with traditional robotics, especially on the small scale, is that actuators -- the units that provide movement -- tend to be rigid."

The successful candidates will join the Data Mining & Machine Learning Group and contribute to a new research project, ROCSAFE (see below) funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Programme. The research is likely to involve one of: (1) advances in temporal Bayesian reasoning for decision support; (2) routing of autonomous vehicles for optimal collection of multi-resolution image and sensor data; (3) context-aware decision support driven by sensor data analytics.

Bold Robotics LLC has created a cloud-based software-as-a-service business that tends the emerging world of automated manufacturing devices -- such as 3-D printers -- with a co-robot arm.

But I wanted to make the community aware of an interesting new set of problems. How would you modify your favorite algorithm, if some of the choices you made were irrevocable? For example, writing the size of a mosquito to a memory location can be done an infinite number of times, but killing a mosquito with a laser can be done only once, we cannot bring the insect back to life. In a new paper we consider one such problem, irrevocable sampling from a stream.

Farms of 3D printers are a potential solution to batch production, with some companies relying on numerous machines to 3D print a large group of parts at once. While they may increase output, print farms may also be labor intensive to operate. To demonstrate the overall utility of its cloud robotics platform, an Oregon startup called Tend.ai has deployed a robotic arm, artificial intelligence and cloud computing to create an automated print farm. Tend.ai has built what it suggests is a universal machine automation solution that combines a number of components into a cloud robotics platform. While the specific make and model of each piece of hardware is left up to the user, all one needs to get started with Tend.ai is a robotic arm, a webcam and a robotic gripper.

The future is folding, if the exhibits at a major New York tech exhibition are to be believed. Pocket size drones, 3D printers, phone accessories and cutting-edge wearables all took center stage at CE Week, which kicks off today. CE Week is designed to showcase products and services set to launch in the second half of 2016, which all focus around the world of technology. 'This is the year that a new ecosystem of products that communicate with other products, immersive entertainment systems and emerging technologies will really begin to take hold,' said Eric Schwartz, executive producer, CE Week. 'CE Week is a way for those most passionate about technology to see the future, now.' 'New York City, with its burgeoning finance, media and high tech industries provides a great backdrop.'

If you've got more than a handful of 3D printers or other devices running at a time, it's a full-time job keeping them going -- removing and packaging products, tweaking settings, pushing "OK" after minor errors, that sort of thing. Why not have a robot do it for you? Tend.ai is a new company that helps you train collaborative robots to perform machine tending, something generally reserved for bots serving heavy industry. "This whole thing started because a friend of mine down the street literally has 20 3D printers, and his wife was having to run out every three minutes to keep them running," said Mark Silliman, co-founder and CEO of Tend.ai, in an interview. Silliman's company Smartwaiver was acquired in December, and his co-founders have also had a few recent exits. Security head James Gentes sold his analytics company The Social Business last year, as well, and backend engineer Robert Kieffer was part of Zenbe, which Facebook bought in 2010.