Drones have a habit of crashing. If they are ever to be relied on for delivering packages in complex environments like cities, they're going to have to get smarter. A team of researchers from the University of Zurich and Intel has come up with a way for drones to do this – learn to dodge obstacles as they fly. Elia Kaufmann and colleagues wanted to develop drones that could autonomously pilot themselves through hoops or gates used in drone racing.

Siri, Alexa and Cortana all started out as female. Now a group of marketing executives, tech experts and academics are trying to make virtual assistants more egalitarian. Siri, Alexa and Cortana all started out as female. Now a group of marketing executives, tech experts and academics are trying to make virtual assistants more egalitarian. Have you ever noticed something most virtual assistants have in common?

Amazon has a new version of Alexa for hotels. Voice assistants such as Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) Siri, Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG)(NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google Assistant and Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) Alexa have integrated themselves into our digital lives. Almost half of American adults used voice assistants last year, according to Pew Research. Earlier this year, PwC reported that U.S. internet users who spoke to their devices interacted with smartphones most frequently. However, users are also talking to their tablets, PCs and smart speakers.

Developers know a lot about the machine learning (ML) systems they create and manage, that's a given. However, there is a need for non-developers to have a high level understanding of the types of systems. Artificial neural networks and expert systems are the classical two key classes. With the advanced in computing performance, software capabilities and algorithm complexity, analytical algorithm can arguably be said to have joined the other two. This article is an overview of the three types.

UK engineers will design a robot that can retrieve rock samples on Mars so they can be sent to Earth for study. The European Space Agency is issuing contracts to industry to spec the technology needed for what will be a complex joint undertaking with the US. Aerospace giant Airbus will scope the concept for a surface "fetch rover" at its Stevenage centre north of London. Esa and the American space agency (Nasa) expect to send the sample-return equipment to the Red Planet in 2026. "It will be a relatively small rover - about 130kg; but the requirements are very demanding," said Ben Boyes who will lead the feasibility team at Airbus.

Yandex spokesman Ilya Grabovsky said Thursday that some Internet users contacted the company Wednesday to say that its public search engine was yielding what looked like personal Google files. Grabovsky said the company has alerted Google.

Baidu unveiled an artificial intelligence chip called Kunlun during its annual Baidu Create event on Tuesday. The company joins a raft of other Chinese firms in designing hardware tailored for machine-learning. Seven years: Kunlun is optimized for various AI tasks including voice recognition, natural language processing, image recognition, and autonomous driving. Baidu first started making customized AI processors using FPGAs (a kind of chip that can be reconfigured on the fly) in 2011. The new design is 30 times faster than the original FPGA-based processor, but the company says it's not ready to begin mass producing it yet.

It is the most exacting of surgical skills: tying a knot deep inside a patient's abdomen, pivoting long graspers through keyhole incisions with no direct view of the thread. Trainee surgeons typically require 60 to 80 hours of practice, but in a mock-up operating theatre outside Cambridge, a non-medic with just a few hours of experience is expertly wielding a hook-shaped needle – in this case stitching a square of pink sponge rather than an artery or appendix. The feat is performed with the assistance of Versius, the world's smallest surgical robot, which could be used in NHS operating theatres for the first time later this year if approved for clinical use. Versius is one of a handful of advanced surgical robots that are predicted to transform the way operations are performed by allowing tens or hundreds of thousands more surgeries each year to be carried out as keyhole procedures. "The vast majority of patients, despite all the advantages of minimal-access surgery, are still getting open surgery, because so few surgeons have the skills," said Mark Slack, head of gynaecology at Addenbrooke's hospital, Cambridge, and co-founder of CMR Surgical, the company behind Versius.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. On June 11, a self-driving Cruise Chevrolet Bolt had just made a left onto San Francisco's Bryant Street, right near the General Motors-owned company's garage. Then, whoops: Another self-driving Cruise, this one being driven by a Cruise human employee, thumped into its rear bumper. According to a Department of Motor Vehicles report, the kind any autonomous vehicle tester must submit to the state of California after any incident, both vehicles escaped with only scuffs. "There were no injuries and the police were not called," Cruise reported. A single incident does not a metaphor about self-driving technology make, but Cruise has had flurries of bumping and rear-ending incidents in San Francisco, where it has tested its technology since 2016.