For developers of artificial intelligence, the goal does not get much more grandiose than successfully creating a machine capable of feeling "real emotion". And according to Moscow-based Professor Alexei Samsonovich, Russia is on the verge of doing just that. Samsonovich recently announced that he expects a breakthrough in the next several years which will see the rise of "free thinking" machines capable of understanding human emotions, as well as feeling their own emotions. The human brain is devastatingly complex and machines are currently not capable of expressing what we would consider to be "human emotion". The announcement hints at robots ultimately being able to understand narratives of thinking, as well as being developed enough to foster their own narratives.

Three tech startups look to shake up the floral industry with apps, higher quality and eco-friendly stems that spotlight local florists. LOS ANGELES -- A new iPhone won't be out until September, but that hasn't stopped analysts from weighing in on new features. We begin with that new iPhone, one that could come in three different models, have wireless charging, an OLED display screen and cost over $1,000. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the iPhone. The first was announced in January, 2007 and released in June of that year, before Apple moved to a September schedule.

AI might be a hot topic but you'll still need to justify those projects. The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) just announced its technology leadership team at CES. In November Toyota announced an initial five-year, $1 billion investment in TRI, which will be a research and development enterprise designed to bridge the gap between fundamental research in robotics and artificial intelligence and product development. In other words, the mandate is to develop all the cool AI stuff happening in labs and DARPA-backed research projects and bring it to market. Comparisons have been drawn to famous industrial laboratories like Bell Labs and PARC, which are jointly responsible for an impressive chunk of silicon-age advances. Some of TRI's specific mandates are to enhance the safety of automobiles, with the ultimate goal of creating a car that is incapable of causing a crash; to increase access to cars to those who otherwise cannot drive, including the handicapped and the elderly; to help translate outdoor mobility technology into products for indoor mobility; and to accelerate scientific discovery by applying techniques from artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said the partnership illustrates the commitment both companies have made to advancing the use-cases of AI. Nvidia and Chinese search engine giant Baidu are teaming up to develop a cloud-based platform for use in artificially intelligent, self-driving cars. See how the cloud is disrupting traditional operating models for IT departments and entire organizations. The partnership combines Nvidia's self-driving computing platform with Baidu's cloud and mapping technology to develop an algorithm-based operating system capable of powering complex navigation systems in autonomous vehicles. The open platform will be available for branded car OEM consumer vehicle offerings, as well as fleets of driverless commercial vehicles.

This is a guest post by Open Source Robotics Foundation CEO Brian Gerkey. AI might be a hot topic but you'll still need to justify those projects. Eight years ago, Morgan Quigley, Eric Berger and Andrew Ng published a paper that was not about ROS. It was about STAIR, the STanford Artificial Intelligence Robot, which used a library called Switchyard to pass messages between software modules to perform complex manipulation tasks like stapler grasping. Switchyard was a purpose-built framework that was designed to be modular and robot-independent, and it was such a good idea that in 2009, "ROS: An Open-Source Robot Operating System" was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Japan.

When Japanese mobile phone company SoftBank offered 1000 of its emotionally intelligent Pepper robots for the consumer market last summer, the entire run sold out in under a minute. At CES this year, SoftBank announced that IBM would be bringing Watson's artificial intelligence to Pepper, a bid to ready the robot for broad adoption in the home. Now SoftBank is planning to branch into the U.S. At Google IO today, the company announced that it's opening up a new developer portal and adding SDK Android Studio to enable the development of custom applications for Pepper, continuing to evolve it's capabilities ahead of its U.S. launch, which it's planning later this year. "We'll also be announcing the opening of SoftBank's U.S. office, headquartered in San Francisco, which will be driving the efforts surrounding the launch of Pepper in the U.S.," a company spokesman told me. Today's announcement came along with a demonstration of Pepper's functionality and features for developers.

Andrew Moore, the Dean of the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science and a former Vice President at Google, just told me something exciting. Moore predicts that 2016 will see a rapid proliferation of research on machine emotional understanding in machines. Robots, smart phones, and computers will very quickly start to understand how we're feeling and will be able to respond accordingly. AI might be a hot topic but you'll still need to justify those projects. "There will be immediate positive uses," he explains over the phone.

Late last week, NASA delivered a version of its six-foot-tall, 300-pound humanoid to MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). In November, NASA announced that it would give one Valkyrie humanoid, also called R5, to MIT and one to Northeastern University, along with $250,000 each, to advance the capabilities of the massively complex system. Valkyrie had a disappointing showing at the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge trials and didn't qualify for the finals, so its makers are looking for some outside help to get the robot, which has cost about $6M to develop so far, closer to mission-ready. The space agency hopes R5 will serve on long haul space missions, including those to Mars, both independently and alongside crew. A team of CSAIL researchers will program their new toy to autonomously perform a variety of tasks that would allow it to help or even replace astronauts on missions.

TEHRAN, Iran – An Iranian semi-official news agency is reporting that a drone belonging to the Iranian navy has crashed in the southern port town of Jask. The Sunday report by Tasnim, which has ties to the military, said thick smoke rose from the crash site in downtown Jask, some 930 miles southeast of the capital Tehran. The report gave no additional details. Reports of crashed drones and ultralight planes are not uncommon in Iran, where weather conditions are often bad and safety measures often ignored.

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