Today's artificial intelligence is certainly formidable. It can beat world champions at intricate games like chess and Go, or dominate at Jeopardy!. It can interpret heaps of data for us, guide driverless cars, respond to spoken commands, and track down the answers to your internet search queries. And as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, there will be fewer and fewer jobs that robots can't take care of--or so Elon Musk recently speculated. He suggested that we might have to give our own brains a boost to stay competitive in an AI-saturated job market.

The launch of the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 is still weeks away, but many of the handsets' details have already been revealed in a series of leaks. Samsung will almost certainly not unveil its new pair of flagships at Mobile World Congress this weekend, and is instead rumoured to be planning a New York event towards the end of March, ahead of an April release. The latest Samsung leak comes from Twitter user @evleaks, who has got his hands on a legitimate-looking specs list for the larger of the two upcoming smartphones. Assuming it is the real deal, the list confirms that the Galaxy S8 will feature an enormous 6.2-inch screen, with a Quad HD resolution. For comparison, the ill-fated Note 7 – Samsung's flagship large-screened handset before it was recalled and discontinued – used a 5.7-inch display, and last year's S7 and S7 Edge used a 5.1-inch screen and 5.5-inch screen, respectively.

Customers trying to delete their Uber account in light of former employee Susan Fowler's sexual harassment allegations have started receiving a notification referencing the incident. The taxi-hailing app company is launching an "urgent investigation" into the workplace issues raised by Ms Fowler, and has hired former US President Barack Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder to lead it. The claims have prompted the latest in a series of backlashes against Uber, with customers urging users to delete their accounts. "Everyone at Uber is deeply hurting after reading Susan Fowler's blog post," reads a message seen by Mashable, which is being sent to users in the process of cutting their ties with Uber. "What she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in."

Poblete demanded the immediate and unconditional release of Zakka, a Lebanese computer expert whose organization previously did contract work for the U.S. government, and all other Westerners held by Iran.

With more than 450 million active China users, Meitu is now also gaining traction abroad. "Our mission is to make the world more beautiful," the IPO prospectus said.

Machine learning- to put it mildly- is an incredibly broad and varied field, with multitudes of applications. Thus, writing a list entitled "10 Machine Learning Experts You Need to Know" proves challenging for a number of reasons. Firstly, I've restricted my ten picks to those currently working in the field- if I extended it to those living and passed, I never would have been able to identify only ten worthy of mention. Secondly, this list is in no way ranked- how would I decide which is more remarkable? Third, this is by no means an exhaustive list of people currently making significant contributions to the field of machine learning, or the wider world.

The whole question of our ability to understand and control the algorithms we're producing has come about precisely because we need to develop models capable of adapting to the correct processing of the data they receive. The validity of the suggestions they come up with has to be checked, and if needs be, invalidated by the human user to avoid any risk of uncontrolled automation. The whole conversation though has now been started as a way of accessing, sharing and developing knowledge. So it seems logical that the first means of interaction with an Artificial Intelligence form and hastening its learning has to be language, whether it's spoken or written. The embedding of specialized software in the form of speech robots for instant messaging looks set to be a promising area.

Any video gamer knows how boring NPCs (non-playable characters) in digital worlds are. Their behavior is simple and predictable and their words entirely scripted by a staff of writers. This makes them uninteresting opponents and unsatisfying companions. We're far more likely to emotionally attach to lifelike characters, like the emo robot sidekicks in the Star Wars franchise, but crafting believable, autonomous entities you can actually interact with is no easy feat. Character models built by artificial intelligence aim to escape the uncanny valley and imbue inanimate objects and digital characters with an aura of realism and life.

Only Homo sapiens, of all the descendants of Homo erectus, survived on earth whereas other species such as homo soloensis, homo denisova, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis faded away more than 40,000 years ago. What advantages did Homo sapiens possess that helped them to flourish while other species are extinct? Apparently a cognitive revolution (according to Prof. Yuval Harari in his famous book Sapiens) triggered by some kind of genetic mutation provided Homo Species with more cerebral power and thus they acquired an ability not possessed by any other species – ability to imagine things that did not exist. This ability helped them to invent things including powerful communicative languages, religion, tools and more. Does current cognitive revolution ushered under various nomenclatures such as artificial intelligence, cognitive computing etc provide more powers, this time to machines and bring in unprecedented progress to human life?

Facebook has scaled back its ambitions and refocussed its application of "artificial intelligence" after its AI bots hit a 70 per cent failure rate. Facebook unveiled a bot API for its Messenger IM service at its developer conference last April. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had high hopes. Although WeChat began life as an instant-messaging client, it rapidly evolved into a major platform for e-commerce and transactions in China. But it largely keeps any AI guesswork away from real users.