The maker of the Roomba robotic vacuum, iRobot, has found itself embroiled in a privacy row after its chief executive suggested it may begin selling floor plans of customers' homes, derived from the movement data of their autonomous servants. "There's an entire ecosystem of things and services that the smart home can deliver once you have a rich map of the home that the user has allowed to be shared," said Colin Angle, iRobot's boss. That possibility has led to a shift in direction from the company technologically. While all of the housecleaning robots in its range are capable of navigating around a room, only the most advanced machines it makes do so by creating a mental map of the space; its dumber bots simply move almost randomly until they're pretty sure they've covered the whole area. Angle told Reuters that iRobot, which made Roomba compatible with Amazon's Alexa voice assistant in March, could reach a deal to sell its maps to one or more of the Big Three – Amazon, Apple and Google's Alphabet – in the next couple of years.

Researchers often call 2017 the year of the conversational computer in China. Leveraging recent advances in voice recognition and natural-language processing, e-commerce giant Alibaba and search giant Baidu have both been developing technology to crack voice-based communication. Now voice-operated products derived from Baidu and Alibaba's technology are coming to the Chinese market. The Tmall Genie, which has Alibaba's voice assistant, AliGenie, built in, is akin to the Amazon Echo. It can place online orders, check the weather, play your favorite music, and control other smart devices in your home through voice commands.

Anthony Rowe, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, wants bikes to feed information to nearby cars to avoid collisions. His back is fitted with an array of precise instruments and a battery hidden in the water bottle. Anthony Rowe, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, wants bikes to feed information to nearby cars to avoid collisions. His back is fitted with an array of precise instruments and a battery hidden in the water bottle. Proponents of self-driving cars say they'll make the world safer, but autonomous vehicles need to predict what bicyclists are going to do.

A Knightscope K5 security robot roamed the Prudential Center in Boston in May. A Knightscope K5 security robot roamed the Prudential Center in Boston in May. Some of the best minds of our times, including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, have warned that human beings may invent intelligent machines that could wind up destroying humankind. A Knightscope K5 security robot that patrolled an office complex along the Georgetown waterfront in Washington, D.C., rolled itself into a shallow fountain on Monday -- and drowned.

Dozens of near-misses with aircraft around airports have stoked fears over the safety of drone use. Under the rules, owners of drones weighing more than 250g – heavier than many available on the high street – will have to register their details and demonstrate that they understand safety and privacy laws that affect their use. The move follows research that showed strikes by drones of more than 400g could critically damage helicopter windscreens, while a bigger drone of about 2kg could critically harm airliner windscreens at higher speeds. Pilots have been calling for a clampdown after a series of near-collisions between drones and passenger jets, particularly on approach or take-off from major airports, including Heathrow. Twenty-two incidents involving commercial airliners and possible drones were investigated by the Civil Aviation Authority's Airprox Board in the first four months of this year.

What do we all have in common? Surprisingly, the answer is menopause. But scientists still haven't quite figured out why this phenomenon exists. After all, if the purpose of evolution is to make sure that we most effectively pass on our genes, then why would women stop reproducing after a certain age? A study published on Thursday in PLOS Computational Biology may offer some insight into the evolution of menopause in humans.

Demis Hassabis knows a thing or two about artificial intelligence: he founded the London-based AI startup DeepMind, which was purchased by Google for $650 million back in 2014. Since then, his company has wiped the floor with humans at the complex game of Go and begun making steps towards crafting more general AIs. But now he's come out and said that be believes the only way for artificial intelligence to realize its true potential is with a dose of inspiration from human intellect. Currently, most AI systems are based on layers of mathematics that are only loosely inspired by the way the human brain works. But different types of machine learning, such as speech recognition or identifying objects in an image, require different mathematical structures, and the resulting algorithms are only able to perform very specific tasks.

Microsoft's vision for the smart home is finally taking shape. Following a demonstration of how its Cortana virtual assistant would work in cars and living rooms last May, the company just revealed it's working on a smart thermostat called GLAS. The device was built by Johnson Controls and is powered by Microsoft technologies like its Azure cloud platform, Cortana voice helper and Windows IoT core, a version of Windows 10 that's optimized for smaller devices. The company unveiled GLAS in a new YouTube video that offers a brief overview of what it's up to. Contrasted with rivals like the Nest Learning Thermostat and Honeywell Lyric, both of which have round shapes that resemble more traditional thermostats, GLAS appears to be a sleek, transparent touchscreen mounted on a wall.

Ever eaten a dish you didn't know them name of and wished you had the recipe so you could recreate it at home? Soon you might only need a picture of it. Researchers have devised a machine learning algorithm that looks at photos of food and predicts the recipe that created the dish. Nick Hynes at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues trained the algorithm on one million recipes, each with an illustration of the finished result, from dozens of cooking websites. Given a fresh photo of a dish, the system picked the right recipe 65 per cent of the time.

Robocars are a bit like infants--we teach them in steps. First, humans gave them the ability to drive down the highway without smashing into things. Then humans taught them to change lanes without smashing into things. Now, self-driving vehicles finally mastering taking turns without smashing into things. The methodical German engineers behind the 2018 Mercedes-Benz S-Class want their baby to move beyond simplistic freeway driving, and onto the roads that wind through towns, villages, and cities.