If the battle between rival digital assistants can be summed up by the NBA championships, then Google's take would be the Golden State Warriors. That's assuming, of course, the record-setting Warriors beat the Cleveland Cavaliers to defend their NBA title. It's the analogy used by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who characterized the competition as more friendly than bloody. "This is not like'Game of Thrones,'" he said Wednesday at Recode's Code conference in Ranchos Palos Verdes, California. Artificial intelligence is already a hot topic at the conference, and it's a big part of Google's future.

Humans just got a step closer to being able to think a message into someone else's brain on the other side of the world: in a first-of-its-kind study, an international team of researchers has successfully achieved brain-to-brain transmission of information between humans. The team, comprising researchers from Harvard Medical School teaching affiliate Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Starlab Barcelona in Spain, and Axilum Robotics in Strasbourg, France, used a number of technologies that enabled them to send messages from India to France -- a distance of 5,000 miles (8046.72km) "We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways," said co-author Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD, director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. "One such pathway is, of course, the internet, so our question became, 'Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing part of internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other in India and France?'" Using a combination of internet-connected electroencephalogram and robot-assisted, image-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (which, as the name suggests, uses electromagnetic induction to stimulate the brain from the outside), the team was able to communicate words from one human to another.

When we were planning our approach this year to covering Computex, the largest IT trade show in Asia, there was some confusion about where exactly Intel had gone. At that point there was a sense that maybe this year would be a little flat. The Taipei show has always been a big song and dance around the latest CPUs (central processing units) from Intel and the changes they'll bring to computing in the years ahead. As it turned out, Computex was fascinating. On day zero, Nvidia and Asus put on a great show that quickly reminded us that the future is moving beyond the CPU, the chip that traditionally has been the brains of the computer.

You can soon expect to see new, interactive gaming experiences developed for Amazon's Alexa-powered smart speakers. Amazon wants more gaming options for its voice-powered virtual assistant Alexa, and today, it's introducing a new set of tools that'll make it easier for developers to bring them to life. The gaming tools are the newest addition to the Alexa Skills Kit, a set of blueprints for creating Alexa's "skills" -- essentially the apps of the Amazon Echo and Amazon's other Alexa-enabled gadgets. Developers already had access to templates for crafting basic command-and-response skills, along with skills that put Alexa in control of smart-home devices like lights and thermostats. Developers have already trotted out games for Alexa, too -- but now, they'll be able to plot out their voice-powered gaming skills in a simplified design interface, with Amazon-approved templates to guide them through the process.

Immediately after 9/11, politicians and pundits slammed the Bush administration for failing to "connect the dots" foreshadowing the attack. For two years now, left- and right-wing advocates have shot down nearly every proposal to use intelligence more effectively--to connect the dots--as an assault on "privacy." Though their facts are often wrong and their arguments specious, they have come to dominate the national security debate virtually without challenge. The consequence has been devastating: just when the country should be unleashing its technological ingenuity to defend against future attacks, scientists stand irresolute, cowed into inaction. "No one in the research and development community is putting together tools to make us safer," says Lee Zeichner of Zeichner Risk Analytics, a risk consultancy firm, "because they're afraid" of getting caught up in a privacy scandal. The chilling effect has been even stronger in government. "Many perfectly legal things that could be done ...

As the truck growled up another rise and started back down again, Zych reached up and flicked a wiper switch to brush away the slurry, then put his hands back in his lap. "We haven't automated those yet," he explained, referring to the windshield wipers, as the robotic truck reached the bottom of the hill and executed a perfect hairpin turn. Ten years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq have put a spotlight on the growing use of unmanned systems in the skies over the battlefield, from the high-flying Global Hawk to the lethal Predator aircraft and the hand-launched Raven. But on the ground, thousands of small, remotely operated robots also have proven their value in dealing with roadside bombs, a lethal threat to U.S. troops in both wars. Of more than 6,000 robots deployed, about 750 have been destroyed in action, saving at least that many human lives, the Pentagon's Robotics Systems Joint Program Office estimates.

Presented at Land-Information Systems: Developments for planning the sustainable use of land resources, Hanover 20-23 Nov. 1996 Proceedings to be published by European Commission. A paper presented at the Management Science/Operations Research Working Group Session at the SAF National Convention, Washington, D.C. Bare, B. and Mendoza, G. 1992. "Ecosystem analysis using fuzzy set theory." "Modelling management of agricultural ecosystems using fuzzy set theory: methodological issues." Paper presented at the joint meetings of the Western Agricultural Economics Association and the Canadian Agricultural Economics and Farm Management Society, 1993, Edmonton, Alberta. A rational method for assessing irrigation performance at farm level with the aid of fuzzy set theory.

Try to book a train ticket on Amtrak's home page and you might just swear off train travel. A recent attempt to book a journey from New York to Boston, for example, required toggling between windows, looking up obscure station codes, and waiting for slow page repaints. When the order was finally submitted, an error message came up noting that, due to technical difficulties, the request could not be processed. If only Amtrak's Web designers were as attentive as the makers of the railroad's telephone self-service system. That system, which features the digitized voice of an operator named Julie, is a primer on good customer service.

S. N. Srihari, C. Huang and H. Srinivasan, "Content-Based Retrieval of Handwritten Document Images," Knowledge Based Computer Systems (KBCS 2004), Hyderabad, India, December 2004. S. N. Srihari, C. Huang and H. Srinivasan, "Content-Based Retrieval of Handwritten Document Images," Knowledge Based Computer Systems (KBCS 2004), Hyderabad, India, December 2004.

Evidence of humans fearing technology dates back to the Industrial Revolution, when what came to be known as "technophobia" was first observed. Eighteenth-century factory workers worried that the development of new machines would take away their livelihoods and ability to survive. As it turns out, some of those fears were justified. Violent man-versus-machine conflicts saw members of the British working class destroying the devices that had replaced their jobs well into the 1800s, setting the stage for centuries of anti-robot rhetoric played out in books, movies and ideological movements. Today, serious fears of a "robot revolution" are only just starting to crystallize for the average person – but it's happening quickly, and spreading far beyond the confines of science fiction.