One of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's autonomous Astrobee robots is operating on the International Space Station. A National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Astrobee robot is now up and running on the International Space Station (ISS). The goal of the robot, named Bumble, for its first autonomous mission was to undock itself, follow a flight plan consisting of a list of waypoints and objectives uploaded to the robot from the ground, and then return to its dock in the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) on the ISS. So far, the biggest hurdle to the robot accomplishing its goals has been getting its localization to work in a robust way. The robot navigates visually, but it is dependent on preexisting maps rather than doing simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM).

"This is an interesting and positive step forward, but it is really important not to exaggerate it," said Ken Goldberg, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who explores similar techniques. A robot that can solve a Rubik's Cube is not new. Researchers previously designed machines specifically for the task -- devices that look nothing like a hand -- and they can solve the puzzle in less than a second. But building devices that work like a human hand is a painstaking process in which engineers spend months laying down rules that define each tiny movement. The OpenAI project was an achievement of sorts because its researchers did not program each movement into their robotic hand.

This video covers the action of the 2018 League of Legends World Championship and previews the 2019 event. Riot Games, publishers of "League of Legends," is looking to expand its lore. For starters, there are some new features coming to the super-popular online video game, which turns 10 this month. Beyond that, Riot Games announced Tuesday it is working on several other projects including new shooter and strategy games, as well as a trio of new video games set in the "League of Legends" universe. The game publisher announced these developments as part of its 10th anniversary livestream Tuesday night.

Fueled by improvements in speech recognition, machine learning, better algorithms, cloud processing, and more powerful computing devices, the quality of machine translations is improving. Learning another language has never been a simple proposition. It can take months of study to absorb the basics and years to become fluent. Of course, there's the added headache that learning a language doesn't help if a person encounters one of the world's other 7,000 or so languages. "There has always been a need for human translators and interpreters," says Andrew Ochoa, CEO of translation technology firm Waverly Labs.

Whether it's dubious viral memes, gaffe-prone presidential debates, or surreal TikTok remixes, you could spend the rest of your life trying to watch all the video footage posted on YouTube in a single day. Researchers want to let artificial intelligence algorithms watch and make sense of it instead. A group from MIT and IBM developed an algorithm capable of accurately recognizing actions in videos while consuming a small fraction of the processing power previously required, potentially changing the economics of applying AI to large amounts of video. The method adapts an AI approach used to process still images to give it a crude concept of passing time. The work is a step towards having AI recognize what's happening in video, perhaps helping to tame the vast amounts now being generated.

Artificial intelligence can now solve a Rubik's cube one-handed. The task requires so much dexterity that even humans find the movements difficult. The system was developed by researchers at OpenAI, a technology firm that has previously created an AI that could outplay humans at the video game Dota 2. The team taught an AI to control a commercially available robotic hand developed by the Shadow Robot Company. The AI learned using a technique called reinforcement learning, which involves trial and error. "It starts from not knowing anything about how to move a hand or how a cube would react if you push on the sides or on the faces," says Peter Welinder, part of the team.

Fully autonomous robots that are able to inspect damaged wind farms have been developed by Scots scientists. Unlike most drones, they don't require a human operator and could end the need for technicians to abseil down turbines to carry out repairs. The multi-million pound project is showing how the bots can walk, dive, fly and even think for themselves. They're being developed by Orca - the Offshore Robotics for Certification of Assets hub. The hub bills itself as the largest academic centre of its kind in the world and is led from Heriot-Watt and Edinburgh universities through its Centre for Robotics.

Need to back up personal files outside your computer? Here's a breakdown on the type of hard drives you can choose from to save your important files. Various forms of automation are sweeping through the economy. The thought of machines doing human work and eliminating jobs is a big worry, but it's not all bad. Automation can be a force for good, and health care is an example. That's where Intuitive Surgical, the pioneer in robotic surgery, comes in.

Researchers have shrunk state-of-the-art computer vision models to run on low-power devices. Growing pains: Visual recognition is deep learning's strongest skill. Computer vision algorithms are analyzing medical images, enabling self-driving cars, and powering face recognition. But training models to recognize actions in videos has grown increasingly expensive. This has fueled concerns about the technology's carbon footprint and its increasing inaccessibility in low-resource environments.

One day in 2005, a mother in Evanston, Ill., joined Flickr. Then she more or less forgot her account existed. Years later, their faces are in a database that's used to test and train some of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems in the world. The pictures of Chloe and Jasper Papa as kids are typically goofy fare: grinning with their parents; sticking their tongues out; costumed for Halloween. None of them could have foreseen that 14 years later, those images would reside in an unprecedentedly huge facial-recognition database called MegaFace.