Spacewalking astronauts stepped out Friday to wrap up months of repair work on the International Space Station's big robot arm. NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Japan's Norishige Kanai emerged from the orbiting complex as the sun rose over Peru's western coast, 250 miles below. The 58-foot robot arm had both of its aging mechanical hands replaced on spacewalks conducted in October and January. Friday's work involved bringing one of those old hands inside so it can be returned to Earth for a tuneup and then flown back up, and moving the other gripper to a long-term storage location outside. This last spacewalk in the series should have been completed by now, but was postponed because of complications with the robotic hand that was installed last month. Further delays were caused by this week's late arrival of a Russian supply ship.

We live in unprecedented times, where, unfortunately, increasingly things are not what they seem to be or what they should be. We have only been in this situation for less than 18 months, but it is rapidly affecting our lives on a daily basis. I am talking about fake news and how it has become one of the greatest threats to democracy, free debate and capitalism. Unfortunately, for many, fake news is not a problem at all. It is even Trump's favourite topic.

Artificial Intelligence has advanced in leaps and bounds over the last few decades, with the upgrades to the SpotMini furthering the concept of AI technology being an important part of society.

Buzzwords are part of what makes the internet go'round, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more popular and controversial term today than Artificial Intelligence (AI). Once just an ethereal concept that interested the nerdiest among us, AI has become a very real obsession in all corners of the tech world. Read the headlines and you'll hear about the variety of super-smart devices coming our way. The problem with these headlines, though, is that they assume a zero-sum game: "humans vs. AI-powered systems." The truth is far different: we need AI, and AI needs us.

Deep Learning gets more and more traction. It basically focuses on one section of Machine Learning: Artificial Neural Networks. This article explains why Deep Learning is a game changer in analytics, when to use it, and how Visual Analytics allows business analysts to leverage the analytic models built by a (citizen) data scientist. Deep Learning is the modern buzzword for artificial neural networks, one of many concepts and algorithms in machine learning to build analytics models. A neural network works similar to what we know from a human brain: You get non-linear interactions as input and transfer them to output. A neural network is a supervised algorithm in most cases, which uses historical data sets to learn correlations to predict outputs of future events, e.g. for cross selling or fraud detection.

Industrial revolutions have involved significant events that have had far-reaching impacts on future generations. There have been only three such industrial revolutions identified up until the beginning of this century. The first one was at the end of the eighteenth century and led by the introduction of the steam engine. The second one was at the beginning of the twentieth century which culminated in the mass production of goods. The third revolution has been happening since 1970 with the increase in commercial and civil usage of computers and the automation of production processes.

I think there is a lot of paranoia about Artificial Intelligence. Some of it is warranted but not for the reasons many would suspect. On Twitter, for instance, Elon Musk speculated that an AI system could choose to start a war "if it decides that a prepemptive [sic] strike is most probable path to victory." In fact, he has said elsewhere that there needs to be regulations curbing AI. Here is where a degree in the humanities would be useful to folks like Musk.

I thought hanging out with a Scrabble-playing robot would be a nice, chill time. I even imagined they would be useful at nursing homes, as therapy companions to elderly residents. Scrabble bot's official name is actually the Intelligent Vision System for Companion Robots, made by Taiwanese research company ITRI (Industrial Technology Research Institute). It uses a combination of AI, 3D vision, and hand-eye coordination to pour its opponent a cup of coffee, and then mercilessly crush them at Scrabble. The AI determines which combination of letter tiles can create the highest-scoring word, and tallies up the opponents score accurately as well.

For the first time in India, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has given up to 20 credits for subjects like artificial intelligence, internet of things, machine learning and robotics. In December 2017, the AICTE had revised the curriculum for the four year undergraduate (BTech) program. AI, robotics and IoT had been made mandatory from academic year 2018-19. In a move which is being clearly welcomed by academicians as well as students, over 80 percent of all the technical and engineering colleges in India have agreed to follow the new curriculum as well as the grading system. Now, this new move by AICTE is being hailed by everyone as the students are hoping to get better placements, and employers are expecting to hire more industry-relevant workforce.

Recorded: November 3, 2017 In December 2012, Kurzweil was hired by Google in a full-time position to "work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing". He was personally hired by Google co-founder Larry Page. Larry Page and Kurzweil agreed on a one-sentence job description: "to bring natural language understanding to Google".