The world's climate could soon resemble the urban smog shown in the popular science fiction movie Blade Runner, suggests a report by UN scientists working for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Blade Runner - the story of a policeman on the trail of four murderous genetically-engineered androids - was one of the first sci-fi blockbusters to paint a dystopian (i.e. Although set in 2019, the film deals with issues and problems familiar to us today, says Ed Lawrenson from Sight and Sound magazine. "Blade Runner was always a film that is very much about'now'. It shows a future that can be recognised by people, because it is based on trends that we can see around us." Director Ridley Scott took issues already noticeable in the 1980s, such as urban development, genetic engineering, and, of course, climate change, and took them to what he thought was their next logical stage.

On a summer day four years ago, a Stanford University computer-science professor named Andrew Ng held an unusual air show on a field near the campus. His fleet of small helicopter drones flew under computer control, piloted by artificial-intelligence software that could teach itself to fly after watching a human operator. By the end of the day, the copters were hot-dogging--flipping, rolling, even hovering upside down. It was a milestone for the field of "machine learning," the same area of artificial intelligence that lets Amazon recommend books based on a shopper's previous habits and helps Google tailor search results to a user's behavior. Mr. Ng and his team of graduate students showed that artificial-intelligence software could control one of the hardest-to-maneuver vehicles and keep it stable while flying at 45 miles an hour.

What was your background prior to entering this challenge? We are a team of computer science and statistics academics. Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Geoff Hinton are professors at the University of Toronto. George Dahl and Navdeep Jaitly are Ph.D. students working with Professor Hinton. Christopher "Gomez" Jordan-Squire is in the mathematics Ph.D. program at the University of Washington, studying (constrained) optimization applied to statistics and machine learning.

Tony Tether has headed up the Pentagon's way-out research arm, Darpa, since 2001. That makes him the longest-serving director in the agency's nearly 50-year history. He sat down with me for an interview in his office, on the top floor of a blandly menacing Northern Virginia office building, last December. For my story in the March issue of Wired (online next Tuesday), Tether and I talked about everything from bio-terrorists to zombie rodents to thinking machines to the golf courses in Iraq. Let's start with the big picture and talk a little bit about 9/11 -- it'?s been five years now -?-? and how, obviously, that has affected defense research hugely. What do you see as Darpa's big contributions to the war on terror? What do you think has been contributed so far, and what do you think is on the horizon that might be the most valuable? Tony Tether: We have several efforts in use in Iraq and Afghanistan today. There's been somewhat of a misunderstanding that when 9/11 unfolded that Darpa suddenly turned totally toward supplying things for the war. Now, of course, the war made us a great deal more interested in trying to find out what the issues and problems were over there so that we could develop programs along that line. Those programs are long-range and, for the most part, they'?re things that won't really come to fruition for several years. On the other hand, Darpa had started many things in the '90s, because we've been looking at this global terrorist war since probably 1994. At that time we called it the transnational threat –?? you know, a threat without a country. At the same time, there was a great push to look at the way our forces were developed and move them from huge divisions, force on force, to small units of action, back to the squad… As it turned out, 2001 came and we went into war in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and, after the major conflict in Iraq, really small units became the way we were orchestrating that war. And it was probably that way from the very beginning in Afghanistan. So the technologies that we have been developing for four or five years, some of them were already ready to go. TT: One of the major things we knew a small unit would need, especially in a city, was situational awareness. So we developed â?? we already had been developing -- a small platform that we call Wasp.

Unconscious bias is exactly what it sounds like: The associations we make whenever we face a decision are buried so deep (literally--the gland responsible for this, the amygdala, is surrounded by the brain's gray matter) that we're as unaware of them as we are of having to breathe. So it's not much of a surprise that Ilit Raz, cofounder and CEO of Joonko, a new application that acts as diversity "coach" powered by artificial intelligence, wasn't even aware at first of the unconscious bias she was facing as a woman in the course of a normal workday. Raz's experience coming to grips with that informs the way she and her cofounders designed Joonko to work. The tool joins a crowded field of AI-driven solutions for the workplace, but most of what's on the market is meant to root out bias in recruiting and hiring. Joonko, by contrast, is setting its sights on illuminating unconscious bias in the types of workplace experiences where few people even think to look for it.

An orangutan has been captured performing DIY better than some humans. The incredible new footage reveals a female great ape using a saw to skilfully divide a branch in two. The talented ape uses her right hand to hold the tool and her feet to grip the tree branch like a vice. She even blows away the sawdust to inspect her work like a true craftsman. An orangutan has been captured performing DIY better than some humans.

'In god we trust, everyone else please bring data' Analytics can perhaps be taken to be the basis of building the foundation of a society based on reason and logic, not just feelings or gut. It not only helps in finding patterns through an iterative process but also in making predictions on never before seen data. Marketing has a great deal to benefit from this field which is still in its budding phase. The main trigger of such frenzy over data science and analytics can be owed [1] to not only modern cheaper sources of data storage but also to high processing power of systems, ease of internet connectivity and enhanced security features. There are numerous models and algorithms [2] for implementation of machine learning, however the coverage of the article is around the future possibilities of analytics applications, especially with a marketing perspective.

It is essential for Indian industries to understand the worth of amalgamating Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence together. This symbiotic mashup has a string of industrial advantages which should be explored, as India moves towards the next industrial revolution. Entrepreneur spoke to Babu Narayanan, Senior Principal Scientist, Software & Analytics at General Electric on the benefits of integrating artificial intelligence with Internet of Things, in the industrial context. When asked about the novelty of this phenomenon, Narayanan said that the concept of integration of AI and IoT in the industrial context is new throughout the world. "The Digital Twin is the foundational concept here – a continuously improving digital replica of a physical system that can predict future events and help optimize operations. We want to push the industry towards zero unplanned downtime & always optimized systems.

"Alexa, why are you winning the smart home market?" It seems every appliance that's any appliance is adding Alexa support at CES 2017, giving Amazon a commanding lead in the race to become the de facto smart home standard. As someone who lives in Australia, where Amazon Echo hasn't launched, though, I'm left wondering when we'll get to join Alexa's gang. In the battle to become the brand that's synonymous with the smart home experience, building a global footprint will become important very soon. In a global market, selling to two of 200 countries won't keep you in the driver's seat for long.

As AI continues its spread into business, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty laid out three ethical principles for responsible AI development in a panel discussion on Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland. "We call them principles for AI, for a cognitive era, to guide what you do," Rometty said. "It's frankly our responsibility as leaders out there that are putting these technologies out to guide them in their entry into the world in a safe way." IBM has placed its big bet on the idea that data will become the basis of competitive advantage for companies worldwide, and will require AI tools that reason and learn to interpret it and gain insights, Rometty said. With AI, "the basis is that we would be so overwhelmed with information that it would be impossible for us to internalize it, and use it to what its full value could be," Rometty said.