Just months after Microsoft's Tay artificial intelligence sent racist messages on Twitter, another AI seems to have followed suit. More than 6,000 selfies of individuals who live all over the world and range in ages of 18 to 69 were judged by a robot in a beauty contest last week. But when the results came in, there was something missing - it turned out the robots did not like people with dark skin. The Beauty.AI beauty contest put together of robot judges to determine the winners. Beauty.AI used five algorithms to act as judges in a beauty contest.

This robot dives to depths humans dare not attempt - and it can bring people along for the ride without them getting wet. The Stanford-built OceanOne is filled with compressible oil to offset the crushing pressures experienced when 100 metres underwater, and AI-assisted navigation steers it clear of obstacles. Its operators remain on land, observing on screen everything the robot captures, using joysticks to drive it and guiding its hands through a feedback mechanism that relays tactile sensations. "It's impossible to let a robot act alone in such an environment: it will fail," says Professor Oussama Khatib, OceanOne's creator. "The only way you can guarantee success is connecting a worker through a haptic device to the robot.

On a summer day in 1968, professor Julian Stanley met a brilliant but bored 12-year-old named Joseph Bates. The Baltimore student was so far ahead of his classmates in mathematics that his parents had arranged for him to take a computer-science course at Johns Hopkins University, where Stanley taught. Having leapfrogged ahead of the adults in the class, the child kept himself busy by teaching the FORTRAN programming language to graduate students. Unsure of what to do with Bates, his computer instructor introduced him to Stanley, a researcher well known for his work in psychometrics -- the study of cognitive performance. To discover more about the young prodigy's talent, Stanley gave Bates a battery of tests that included the SAT college-admissions exam, normally taken by university-bound 16- to 18-year-olds in the United States. Bates's score was well above the threshold for admission to Johns Hopkins, and prompted Stanley to search for a local high school that would let the child take advanced mathematics and science classes.

Philosophers of science are not known for agreeing with each other--contrariness is part of the job description. But for thousands of years, from Aristotle to Thomas Kuhn, those who study what science is have roughly categorized themselves into two basic camps: "realists" and "anti-realists." In philosophical terms, "anti-realists" or "empiricists" understand science as investigating the properties of observable objects via experiments. Empirical theories are constrained by the experimental results. "Realists," on the other hand, speculate more freely about the possible shape of the unobservable world, often designing mathematical explanations that cannot (yet) be tested. Isaac Newton was a realist, as are string theorists. Most scientists do not lose sleep worrying about philosophical divides. But maybe they should; Albert Einstein certainly did, as did Niels Bohr, and Erwin Schrödinger.

The first international beauty contest judged by "machines" was supposed to use objective factors such as facial symmetry and wrinkles to identify the most attractive contestants. After Beauty.AI launched this year, roughly 6,000 people from more than 100 countries submitted photos in the hopes that artificial intelligence, supported by complex algorithms, would determine that their faces most closely resembled "human beauty". But when the results came in, the creators were dismayed to see that there was a glaring factor linking the winners: the robots did not like people with dark skin. Out of 44 winners, nearly all were white, a handful were Asian, and only one had dark skin. That's despite the fact that, although the majority of contestants were white, many people of color submitted photos, including large groups from India and Africa.

Could robots be carrying out the most crimes by 2040? RoboCop, Chappie, the Terminator movies and i,Robot - there have been many films where we have been encouraged to respect, love but also fear robots – and I for one can say I will never be trusting them! And apparently I am right not to after researchers have found robots could be the offenders committing most crimes by 2040. Tracey Follows from The Future Laboratory, which helps businesses plan for the future through its research and consultancy experts, has been looking at the issues after more and more robots could be used in industries replacing humans on jobs. Ms Follows, chief strategy and innovation officer at, speaking to the Times Raconteur: 'Futurists have been forecasting a sharp rise in lone-wolf terror attacks for years.

Mercedes-Benz is experimenting with small cargo bots to carry cargo over that last, pesky mile to the customer, using a human-driven van to ferry the them over the previous stretch. The two kinds of bots, aerial and terrestrial, are being supplied by companies we've already written about. Matternet is providing its slick M2 quadcopter, several of which would perch on the van's roof. Starship Technologies is providing its six-wheel robot, eight of which can fit inside a van. The idea is that the man in the van--a Mercedes Sprinter--would load up the bots with their various payloads, take an optimized route from one customer to the next, and unleash the automatons.

Three military veterans once involved in the U.S. drone program have thrown their support behind a Yemeni man's legal fight to obtain details about why his family members were killed in a 2012 strike. The former soldiers' unusual decision to publicly endorse the lawsuit against President Obama and other U.S. officials adds another twist to Faisal bin Ali Jaber's four-year quest for accountability in the deaths of his brother-in-law and nephew, who he believes needlessly fell victim to one of the most lethal covert programs in U.S. history. The former enlisted service members told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a recent filing that they believe the 2012 drone strike serves as a case study of how mistakes frequently occur in the nation's targeted-killing program, where life-or-death decisions are based upon top-secret evidence. The veterans say they "witnessed a secret, global system without regard for borders, conducting widespread surveillance with the ability to conduct deadly targeted killing operations." Though the veterans did not disclose any personal knowledge of the strike that is alleged to have killed Jaber's relatives, they claim the military frequently labels the deaths of unknown victims as "enemy kills."

With the increasing need for individualized, context-rich Customer Care Banks are increasingly investing into service automation. That's why Chatbot is a revolution in banking. Bots help serve Clients faster, at lower costs, wherever they are and whenever they wish. Co-called'chatbots' are computer systems that simulate human conversations. They represent a text-based dialog system.

The U.S. has been using drones more and more frequently since the Sept. 11 attacks. They have been highly effective on the battlefield, but have raised legal and ethical issues. The U.S. has been using drones more and more frequently since the Sept. 11 attacks. They have been highly effective on the battlefield, but have raised legal and ethical issues. Today in the skies over New Mexico, Air Force students are practicing for the kill.