At the Detroit Auto Show last week, Volkswagen hoped to escape the present with a nod to the past, introducing a revamped version of its iconic flat-faced, boxy Microbus, the vehicle that shepherded the counterculture across the interstates some five decades ago. The bus's reincarnation is a battery-propelled, self-driving vehicle called ID Buzz. But nostalgic wing-vent windows and chrome trim could not distract from the company's current predicament. Barely had the auto show kicked off when the Justice Department announced that VW had pleaded guilty to criminal and civil charges related to its efforts to cheat on U.S. emissions standards. The company agreed to pay $4.3 billion in penalties, the largest fine ever levied by the U.S. government on an auto company, dwarfing both Toyota's $1.2-billion settlement for vehicle-safety problems involving unintended acceleration and GM's nine-hundred-million-dollar settlement for ignition-switch defects.

An app meant to make people more "beautiful" is taking over people's phones and feeds. The Meitu app has been around for years. But it is surging in popularity as people brighten up their skin, turn their eyes huge and perform other makeovers on themselves. The app claims to be a "one touch photoshop for enhancing your beauty and putting the finishing touches on your photos", and the results are dramatic. Any picture can be plugged into it and the app will recognise its users' face and then perform changes to it.

Babies are remarkable at taking in knowledge about the language they hear. Even in the first few months of their lives, children begin to learn about how to pronounce words – and it seems this is a skill they never forget. A new study has shown even if a baby moves country at a young age and never learns its birth language; it will always retain some hidden knowledge of the words it heard in its early life. Babies are remarkable at taking in knowledge about the language they hear. Dr Jiyoun Choi and colleauges at Hanyang University in Seoul tested Dutch-speaking adults adopted from South Korea.

If arranging meetings have become a bothersome chore, Mimetic.ai's Evie could be just the thing. Evie, a virtual personal assistant, is capable of talking to the other party and scheduling the right meeting time convenient for both parties without your direct intervention. I found it ridiculously easy to use. After signing up on the Singapore-based firm's website, I was prompted to connect my calendar, either Google's or Office365, thereafter which I simply selected the time slots where I'd be available for meetings.

The CIA is putting its secret history online, uploading millions of newly declassified documents. The documents include previously unseen information about the agency's hunt for UFOs and its work on the "Star Gate" project, which tried to teach humans to become psychic and see through walls. One document, for instance, describes that project in detail. It shows how the CIA recruited volunteers to go through a programme of training that would let people access information without any of the usual means, and which would be used as a weapon for which there is "no known defense". The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Microsoft is buying a deep learning startup based in Montreal, a global hub for deep learning research. But two years ago, this startup wasn't based in Montreal, and it had nothing to do with deep learning. Which just goes to show: striking it big in the world of tech is all about being in the right place at the right time with the right idea. Sam Pasupalak and Kaheer Suleman founded Maluuba in 2011 as students at the University of Waterloo, about 400 miles from Montreal. The company's name is an insider's nod to one of their undergraduate computer science classes.

When the world's smartest companies such as Microsoft, Google, Alphabet Inc., and Baidu are investing heavily in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the world is going to sit up and take notice. Chinese Internet giant Baidu spent USD1.5 billion on research and development. And as proof of China's strong focus on AI and Machine Learning, Sinovation Ventures, a venture capital firm, invested USD0.1 billion in "25 AI-related startups" in the last three years in China and the U.S. Research shows that although genuine intelligence may still be a bit far off, AI and Machine Learning technologies are still expected to reign in 2017. Try reading up on Microsoft Project Oxford, IBM Watson, Google Deep Mind, and Baidu Minwa, and you'll understand what I am trying to get at. In 2015, Gartner's Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies introduced Machine Learning (ML), and the graph showed (Figure 1) that it would reach a plateau in 2 to 5 years.

Married couples will only have sex on special occasions, turning to robots to satisfy their day-to-day needs, experts have predicted. Speaking at an international robotics conference, those working in the field predicted that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) devices in the bedroom will be the norm within 25 years. Dr Trudy Barber, an expert in the relationship between technology and sexual intercourse, compared the rise of sex robots to that of the e-book and said the machine would would allow people to appreciate'the real thing' more. Douglas Hines, Engineer-inventor poses with his company's'True Companion' sex robot, Roxxxy, which is one of the options that is already on the market At the International Congress of Love and Sex with Robotics, Dr Barber yesterday said that society's readiness to embrace technology means it was only a matter of time before it also plays a significant role in people's sex lives. She said: 'It could be that we are so busy with our lives, we are so embedded in our technological narrative that the idea of engaging in long-distance sex and robot sex is actually a natural process in our evolutionary cycle.

At the beginning of the year, a mysterious Go player (the famous Chinese board game) appeared on 2 of the biggest online gaming platforms, Tygem and FoxGo, under the name of "Master". Over the last two days, "Master" has crushed 50 players, including world ranked players from Japan (5th in the world ranking by Go Ratings), South Korean (3rd) and Chinese (1st). This has provoked more than 27,000 discussions, 160 million media impressions and a lot of speculation around the identity of the "Master". Many observers immediately suspected a robot controlled by artificial intelligence but no one knows who would be able to develop it. After the 59th victory against Nie Weiping, a 60-year-old Chinese champion, the "Master" account revealed that he was in fact a researcher of the AlphaGo team.

In an ordinary conference room in this city of start-ups, a group of engineers sat down to order pizza in an entirely new way. "Get me a pizza from Pizz'a Chicago near my office," one of the engineers said into his smartphone. It was their first real test of Viv, the artificial-intelligence technology that the team had been quietly building for more than a year. Everyone was a little nervous. Then, a text from Viv piped up: "Would you like toppings with that?"