On the first day of school, a child looks into a digital camera linked to the school's computer. Upon a quick scan, the machine reports that the child's facial contours indicate a likelihood toward aggression, and she is tagged for extra supervision. Not far away, another artificial intelligence screening system scans a man's face. It deduces from his brow shape that he is likely to be introverted, and he is rejected for a sales job. Plastic surgeons, meanwhile, find themselves overwhelmed with requests for a "perfect" face that doesn't show any "bad" traits.

In September, Israel also shot down an Iranian-made drone sent by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in the same area. Both Iranian and Hezbollah forces have been backing Syrian President Bashar Assad in the Syrian civil war.

"Built tough": That's the slogan used in ads for Ford trucks, which are shown hauling massive loads, towing equipment, and roaring across rugged terrain. But the workers who assemble those trucks in Ford's manufacturing plants are subject to human frailties. They can suffer from back and shoulder pain as a result of carrying out the repetitive tasks required by their jobs, particularly as they work on chassis suspended above them. Ford estimates that some assembly workers lift their arms about 4,600 times per day, or about 1 million times per year. So workers on Ford's assembly lines in two U.S. factories are getting some extra help.

As China gears up for its version of Black Friday, robots are one way companies are revolutionizing the logistics behind the annual online shopping extravaganza. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. As China gears up for its version of Black Friday, robots are one way companies are revolutionizing the logistics behind the annual online shopping extravaganza.

If Jonathan Rothberg has a superpower, it's cramming million-dollar, mainframe-sized machines onto single semiconductor circuit boards. The entrepreneurial engineer got famous (and rich) inventing the world's first DNA sequencer on a chip. And he's spent the last eight years sinking that expertise (and sizeable startup capital) into a new venture: making your smartphone screen a window into the human body. Last month, Rothberg's startup Butterfly Network unveiled the iQ, a cheap, handheld ultrasound tool that plugs right into an iPhone's lightning jack. You don't have to be a technician to use one--its machine learning algorithms guide the user to find what they might be looking for.

We are building technology that enables existing robot hardware to handle a much wider range of tasks where existing solutions break down, for example, bin picking of complex shapes, kitting, assembly, depalletizing of irregular stacks, and manipulation of deformable objects such as wires, cables, fabrics, linens, fluid-bags, and food. To equip existing robots with these skills, our software builds on the latest advances in deep reinforcement learning, deep imitation learning, and few-shot learning, to all of which the founding team has made significant contributions. The result isn't just a new set of skills in the robot repertoire, but teachable robots, that can be deployed for new tasks on short turn-around. The background here will be familiar to anyone who has followed Abbeel's research at UC Berkeley's Robot Learning Lab (RLL).

Waymo, formerly known as Google's self-driving car, is launching a fully autonomous Uber-like ride-hailing service with no human driver behind the wheel, after testing the vehicles on public roads in Arizona. Waymo, which is owned by Google parent Alphabet, said members of the public will begin riding in its fleet of modified Fiat Chrysler Pacifica minivans outfitted with self-driving technology in the next few months. Passengers will initially be accompanied in the back seat by a Waymo employee, but will eventually travel alone in the robotic car. The service will first be available to those who are already part of the company's public trial already under way in Phoenix. Rides will be free to start with, but Waymo expects to begin charging for journeys at some point.

Google Assistant is now able to identify songs that are currently playing out loud. The new feature was made available this Tuesday through a software update and should work on any Android smartphone that has Google Assistant enabled. One of the new features that Google introduced on its Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 flagship Android smartphones was the ability to recognize songs even when users are offline. Google also promised during the Pixel 2 launch that a similar feature would be made available to other Android smartphones through Google Assistant. Now, it looks like the search engine giant has delivered on it promise as the feature appears to be already available on some Android smartphones, as first discovered by 9To5Google.

Yoshua Bengio is one of the foremost thinkers in a field within artificial intelligence known as artifical neural networks and deep learning. Although significant progress has been made in recent years due to (among other factors) the combination of the proliferation of data, the decreasing cost of compute, and the tremendous amount of money and talent now devoted to artificial intelligence, Bengio chose this as a field of study during the 1980s, in the throes of what some referred to as the AI winter, seeing through a period when money and enthusiasm for artificial intelligence had dried up. Bengio is the co-author (with Ian Goodfellow and Aaron Courville) of Deep Learning, a book that Elon Musk referred to as "the definitive textbook on deep learning." On top of his growing influence in this field, he has also been enormously influential in shaping Montreal to become a hotbed for artificial intelligence. Bengio co-founded Element AI in 2016, which has a stated mission to "turn the world's leading AI research into transformative business applications."

You're lying on your stomach, with your arms draped forwards, almost like you're going to get a shoulder massage. Except this is not a moment for relaxation. Through a VR headset, you see flashes of color, an unfamiliar view of the world, a group of red lines that looks something like a person. And now you have to make a decision, because you're rolling forward, head first, and your right hand is wrapped around the joystick that determines which way you're going. Do you continue forward, and risk hitting that blob that might be a human being?