Wrangling a pig--even a virtual one--is much easier if you get a friend to help. This much seems clear from a contest organized by Microsoft researchers to test how artificially intelligent agents could cooperate to solve tricky problems. How best to cooperate with your pig-wrangling pal is another question. The competition addresses an area of artificial intelligence that has had relatively little attention so far. AI researchers often develop software capable of performing a specific human task, such as playing chess or Go, and then measure it according to its ability to defeat a human player.

Robots that sketch, play ping pong, solve mazes, and attempt to juggle strutted their stuff at the annual demo day for Stanford's Experimental Robotics class. Each year, Professor Oussama Khatib's students aim to teach a selection of industrial robots some new skills. The toughest project: teaching a Kuka robot to juggle. The other projects included two robots that had been taught to draw (a Sawyer and a Puma), a Ping Pong–playing robot (the Kuka again) that scored a few points against its human opponents, a cowboy hat–wearing Sawyer robot that shot at a moving target, a Puma 500 robot that manipulated a maze to send a ball along the correct path, and a drone-loading Sawyer robot that tracked a less-than-stable hovering drone. Check them all out in the video below.

A drunk man reportedly ran into an armless K5 robot in the Knightscope parking lot in Mountain View, California and met his match. The April incident occurred after 41-year-old Jason Sylvain tipped over the 300-pound robot. Unfortunately, when the roving security robot found itself off-balance, the K5 called the police and signaled for help. The company spokesman Stacy Dean Stephens said that members of the robot company Knightscope -- which developed the robot that appears similar to the iconic Star Wars Droid R2D2 -- came out and detained Sylvain as the police came. Robo-Cops Are Now A Reality! Silicon Valley Gets KnightScope K5 Patrolling Robot… https://t.co/BiytOrxpPU

Those fretfully debating artificial intelligence (AI) might best start by appraising the half dozen general pathways under exploration in laboratories around the world. While these general approaches overlap, they offer distinct implications for what characteristics emerging, synthetic minds might display, including (for example) whether it will be easy or hard to instill human-style ethical values. Most problematic may be those efforts taking place in secret. The "Moore's Law crossing" argument is appraised, in light of discoveries that brain computation may involve much more than just synapses. Will efforts to develop Sympathetic Robotics tweak compassion from humans long before automatons are truly self-aware? It is argued that most foreseeable problems might be dealt with the same way that human versions of oppression and error are best addressed -- via reciprocal accountability. For this to happen, there should be diversity of types, designs and minds, interacting under fair competition in a generally open environment. As varied concepts from science fiction are reified by rapidly advancing technology, some trends are viewed worriedly by our smartest peers. Portions of the intelligencia -- typified by Google's Ray Kurzweil [1] -- foresee AI, or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as likely to bring good news, perhaps even transcendence for members of the Olde Race of bio-organic humanity 1.0. Others, such as Stephen Hawking and Francis Fukuyama, warn that the arrival of sapient, or supersapient machinery may bring an end to our species -- or at least its relevance on the cosmic stage -- a potentiality evoked in many a lurid Hollywood film. Swedish philosopher Nicholas Bostrom, in Superintelligence [2], suggests that even advanced AIs who obey their initial, human defined goals will likely generate "instrumental subgoals" such as self-preservation, cognitive enhancement, and resource acquisition. In one nightmare scenario, Bostrom posits an AI that -- ordered to "make paperclips" -- proceeds to overcome all obstacles and transform the solar system into paper clips. A variant on this theme makes up the grand arc in the famed "three laws" robotic series by science fiction author Isaac Asimov [3]. Taking middle ground, SpaceX/Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk has joined with YCombinator founder Sam Altman to establish OpenAI [4], an endeavor that aims to keep artificial intelligence research -- and its products -- accountable by maximizing transparency and accountability. As one who has promoted those two key words for a quarter of a century, I wholly approve [5].

Apple and Amazon are fierce competitors, especially now that the iPhone maker has released its own home speaker. However, the companies seem to have been putting their differences aside lately. This year, Amazon and Apple introduced changes that goes beyond their rivalry, with the most recent move announced this week at the Worldwide Developers Conference. The Apple logo is displayed at a store in the central business district of Sydney, April 6, 2017. Apple announced the Amazon video app will finally come to the Apple TV worldwide this year.

Artificial Intelligence systems are becoming the new warriors in disease diagnosis and can even accurately predict when you are going to die. Scientists at the University Of Adelaide in Australia have developed an Artificial Intelligence system that can accurately predict a human's life expectancy. The system was developed through research that examined the CT scan of 48 patients. Looking at the scans, the deep learning algorithms gave a'diagnosis' of whether the patient would die within 5 years. The prediction has a 69% accuracy rate, a score'similar' to the accuracy of human doctors.

Amazon's Alexa voice assistant is rolling out to your Amazon Fire tablet, allowing you to get similar functionality of the Amazon Echo speaker but on your tablet instead. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Amazon's Alexa voice assistant is rolling out to your Amazon Fire tablet, allowing you to get similar functionality of the Amazon Echo speaker but on your tablet instead.

A major part of the strategy should include machine learning (ML) solutions. The implementation of these solutions could change how these enterprises view customer value and internal operating model today. If you want to stay ahead of the game, then you cannot afford to wait for that to happen. Your digital business needs to move towards automation now while ML technology is developing rapidly. Machine learning algorithms learn from huge amounts of structured and unstructured data, e.g.

Just 200 face cells are required to identify a face, the biologists say. After discovering how its features are encoded, the biologists were able to reconstruct the faces a monkey was looking at just by monitoring the pattern in which its face cells were firing. The finding needs to be confirmed in other laboratories. But, if correct, it could help understand how the brain encodes all seen objects, as well as suggesting new approaches to artificial vision. "Cracking the code for faces would definitely be a big deal," said Brad Duchaine, an expert on face recognition at Dartmouth.

Consumers are still mixed about Siri, but according to an exclusive new poll for USA TODAY, they like her more than other personal assistants.