When you move to another country as an adult, the language flows around you like a river. Perhaps a child can immediately abandon himself to the current, but most older people will begin by picking out the words and phrases that seem to matter most, which is what I did after my family moved to Cairo, in October of 2011. It was the first fall after the Arab Spring; Hosni Mubarak, the former President, had been forced to resign the previous February. Every weekday, my wife, Leslie, and I met with a tutor for two hours at a language school called Kalimat, where we studied Egyptian Arabic. At the end of each session, we made a vocabulary list. In early December, following the first round of the nation's parliamentary elections, which had been dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, my language notebook read: On many days, I went to Tahrir Square, to report on the ongoing revolution. If I heard unfamiliar words or phrases, I brought them back to class. The following month, I learned "tear gas," "slaughter," and "Can you speak more slowly?" "Conspiracy theory" appeared in my notebook on the same day as "fried potatoes." Sometimes I wondered about the strangeness of Tahrir-speak, and what my Arabic would have been like if I had arrived ten years earlier. But it would have been different at any time, in any place: you can never step into the same language twice. Even eternal phrases took on a new texture in the light of the revolution. After I could understand some of the radio talk shows that cabbies played, I realized that callers and hosts exchanged Islamic greetings for a full half minute before settling down to heated arguments about the new regime. Our textbook was entitled "Dardasha"--"Chatter"--and it outlined set conversations that I soon carried out with neighbors, using phrases that would never be touched by Tahrir: "May peace, mercy, and the blessings of God be upon you." One of our teachers, Rifaat Amin, prepared a five-page handout entitled "Arabic Expressions of Social Etiquette." This supplemented "Dardasha," which also featured some lessons about social traditions, including the evil eye, the belief that envy can cause misfortune. In "Dardasha," icons of little bombs with burning fuses had been printed next to the kind of phrase that, even during a revolution, qualified as explosive: "Your son is really smart, Madame Fathiya."

Jude Ower loved playing video games as a child, but this daughter of a monk from Dundee never dreamed that her passion would eventually become a force for good and win her accolades and honours. After 12 years making games for education and training, she went on to create a games platform with a social conscience - Playmob. "After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Zynga, the creator of Farmville, launched a campaign to raise funds for the victims by selling an in-game item, with a percentage of each purchase going to help the victims," she explains. "It was massively successful and raised over $1m in a matter of days. It was then I thought: 'Maybe I could make a platform that connected games and causes?'"

This robot is the work of a team of researchers at Zhejiang University in China. It's got a soft body, it's all-electric, and it can move at over 12 feet per minute. "The robot is mainly for the exploration of ocean, rivers and lakes, and to monitor the data like temperature, water density and chemical components," says Tiefeng Li, principle author of the study. Beyond that, Tiefeng envisions the robot as a tool to "explore the bottom of the ocean, investigate shipwrecks,look for planes that have crashed into the ocean, and to monitor creatures under the sea." And when built with a transparent body, the robot becomes almost invisible in the process. That, combined with a body so soft it won't damage coral, means robots like this could be invaluable scientific tools for exploring the nooks and crannies under the surface of the ocean.

ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN – Investigators are still trying to solve many questions behind a plane crash in Ontario that involved a University of Michigan student who is currently listed as missing. Xin Rong, 27, a doctoral student from China studying artificial intelligence, is a certified pilot who flew out of Ann Arbor March 15 with Harbor Springs as his charted destination, investigators said. After authorities were notified that the rented plane was long overdue for its return, they discovered the crash site in a forest near Manitouwadge, Ontario, just before midnight. Investigators from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada did not find a body in the plane. There were no footprints in the snow near the plane, and the passenger-side door was found unlatched.

With a few exceptions, references to AI are typically related to breakthroughs in Silicon Valley or the impact to developed markets. But what about Asia, a region that includes over half of the world's population and produces over one-third of the world's economic output? According to Zinnov, China and India are attracting the most AI-based capital outside of the US, underscoring Asia's significant potential in this field. And given the possibilities, Asian governments and corporates are becoming much more proactive in developing their AI capabilities. There is a lot going for the region in terms of its ability to shape the global AI movement.

China is pouring resources into artificial intelligence to nurture world-class companies that can compete with the likes of Google and IBM in building intelligence machines.(AP In China's quest to shed its reputation as a land of copycats, the world's second-biggest economy is pouring resources in to the hottest area in technology innovation: artificial intelligence. With the goal of nurturing world-class companies that can compete with the likes of Google and IBM in building intelligent machines, the Chinese leadership singled out AI as a key area of development in a report released during the National People's Congress in March. Soon after, the country's biggest technology companies -- Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent -- announced plans for AI laboratories and projects worth billions of dollars. Many analysts believe AI is one area China can excel.

As expected, the latest poker-playing bot powered by an artificial intelligence designed by a duo from Carnegie Mellon University beat a team of some of the best poker players in China. Lengpudashi, the AI developed by Professor Tuomas Sandholm and Noam Brown, a graduate student at CMU, finished five days of Heads-Up, No-Limit Texas Hold'em with nearly $800,000 in chips and walked away with $290,000. "We all knew the outcome. There was little chance for the humans," said Kai-Fu Lee, head of Sinovation Ventures, a Chinese venture capital firm that organized the winner-take-all exhibition match in Hainan, China. Lee, himself a CMU alum who worked on speech recognition in Pittsburgh in the 1990s, challenged Lengpudashi to about 30 hands in a celebrity match during the exhibition.

WASHINGTON – The United States has concluded Russia knew in advance of Syria's chemical weapons attack last week, a senior U.S. official said Monday. The official said a drone operated by Russians was flying over a hospital as victims of the attack were rushing to get treatment. Hours after the drone left, a Russian-made fighter jet bombed the hospital in what American officials believe was an attempt to cover up the usage of chemical weapons. The official said the presence of the surveillance drone over the hospital couldn't have been a coincidence, and that Russia must have known the chemical weapons attack was coming and that victims were seeking treatment. The official, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly on intelligence matters and demanded anonymity, didn't give precise timing for when the drone was above the northern Syrian town of Khan Sheikhtoun, where more than 80 people were killed.

This paper presents an automated supervised method for Persian wordnet construction. Using a Persian corpus and a bi-lingual dictionary, the initial links between Persian words and Princeton WordNet synsets have been generated. These links will be discriminated later as correct or incorrect by employing seven features in a trained classification system. The whole method is just a classification system, which has been trained on a train set containing FarsNet as a set of correct instances. State of the art results on the automatically derived Persian wordnet is achieved. The resulted wordnet with a precision of 91.18% includes more than 16,000 words and 22,000 synsets.

People's passwords could be exposed with just a tilt of their phone, according to a new study. Research from Newcastle University shows that PINs and passwords can be found just by watching how a phone moves when it is being held. And they warn that same information could be used by malicious websites and apps, to gain access to the most personal parts of people's lives. In the study, researchers were able to guess a password just by watching the movement of a device. They had 70 per cent accuracy on the first guess, and 100 per cent by the fifth.