A robot is invading a popular reality TV show in China that tests people's brainpower. The smart, AI-powered bot, Xiaodu, will take on human competitors in complex trials involving face and voice recognition. The AI robot built by search engine giant Baidu is one of the contestants, facing off against four people and other clever computer programs. Baidu first showed off a small version of Xiaodu in 2015. After working on the AI in the interim – and building a giant version just for TV – the gadget now faces its biggest ever battle.

Jefferson Graham and his camera walks you through the busy, ultra-crowded booths in the CES Central Hall. The high-tech show is notorious for making it hard to get online and draining batteries. LAS VEGAS--CES teaches hard lessons about preserving a phone, tablet or laptop's battery life and connectivity, starting with this: If you value those things, don't go to CES. Having 175,000-plus people swarm around the city while constantly on e-mail, the Web, navigation apps and social networks will crumple wireless networks and leave batteries in the red. Getting through all this takes advance preparation--the kind that can also help you get through lesser battery and bandwidth challenges.

Autonomous vehicles have infiltrated much of the military, from airborne surveillance to all manner of ground-based operations. But the Navy remains a mostly human-controlled operation--with the demand for robotic tech focused on conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, it simply hasn't trickled down to aquatic operations yet. But the Office of Naval Research thinks autonomous boats can have a major impact on the military's ocean-going efficiency and effectiveness. In a demonstration conducted this fall in the lower Chesapeake Bay, a fleet of small, human-free boats collectively patrolled a harbor, detected intruders, and even chased them away from the area they were protecting. The Navy first demonstrated the swarm in 2014, when the vessels were tasked with protecting a single ship.

Emotion-recognition technology is emerging as one of the top AI trends this year, enabling brands to build on consumers' emotions to deliver customised services and products, according to a report publishd by Zenith. According to the report, Artificial Intelligence: Powering the Consumer Journey, the mood-sensing devices that consumers carry in their pockets--smartphones--and the continuous progression of customised triggers enabled by emotion-detection tech will allow brands to make more emotionally relevant recommendations and enhance programmatic advertising. Bentley has used such technology in the Bentley Inspirator, an app that concocts a Bentayga SUV for order based on a consumer's reaction to a film. The report also cites the ability of IOT household devices (such as Amazon's Alexa) to deliver services and recommendations tailored to consumers' emotions. "Human decisions are heavily influenced by emotion," said Hugo Pinto, IBM Interactive Experience's innovation officer, in an interview published in the Zenith report.

The whole technology landscape is changing and is ushering in new ways to put it to use. The way things have been run in the past 20 years no longer holds water and we need to change to adapt and be relevant. At the Bengaluru ITE.BIZ 2016, Bhaskar Ghosh, Group Chief Executive, Accenture Technology Services, shed light on what the next wave in the IT sector would be. "We went through several waves - IT services, e-commerce, cloud, artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing. New tech is maturing faster and the time to learn and execute in the market is short. We need to learn to master the speed. Every business is a software business. Even manufacturing is driven by software," he explained.

Everyone today talks about AI, big data and machine learning, yet most do not delve into the fundamental properties of how they will operate and how they might be an actual threat to asset managers. Some view technological methods as tools to assist them instead of being such a threat, and it would help provide both perspectives of the argument. Deep learning is a branch of machine learning that uses particular architectures of neural networks. These are artificial networks that attempt to actually replicate how the neural structures in human brains operate. Such methods have successfully been applied to areas such as computer vision – i.e. image processing and classification – as well as speech recognition. The techniques are readily available to any undergraduate student willing to learn the process.

Recently, I stumbled upon a very interesting video by one of my favorite music composers -Hans Zimmer. It was an introductory clipping of his online music tutorial -MasterClass, where he was trying to explain to his prospective students how composing music is a fairly simple journey (a modest claim indeed). He described how each musical note is a question and the one that follows it, is the answer. Effectively, the entire composition is nothing else but a seamless conversation turning into a beautiful symphony. Although, on several occasions art does imitate life or perhaps life imitates art? There is no doubt about the fact that we are at the cusp of a revolutionary change in the field of technology.

Chatbots are automated text conversation computer programs that use artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing to talk to customers/users. Want to disappear from a fleeting relationship? Ghostbot is a burner text messaging bot that will ghost you away. Need something to do to pass the time? Send a text to the Casper mattress company's chatbot and talk about anything and everything.

The partnership between car brands and their timepiece counterparts extends longer than you and I can even imagine. We've seen these partnerships manifest themselves in one form or another, with some even taking the form of obscenely expensive, limited edition watches. If there ever was a new frontier for the partnership between these two industries, Swiss watchmaker Swatch may have opened that door. A report from watch-dedicated website TwentyTwoTen revealed Read More ... Places: Americas North America United States The two models posed near their flashy cars as they reunited for the sexy photo op. Both Chyna and Amber posted the three photos to their Instagram accounts as they showed off their curves and cars.

An unusual fleet of self-driving cars will take to the road in coming months. Unlike most automated vehicles, which are programmed to deal with the situations they may encounter, these cars will have taught themselves, in simulation, how to handle tricky scenarios safely. The cars will learn to navigate busy intersections, crowded highways, and packed rotaries using reinforcement learning, an approach inspired by the way animals learn to associate a reward with the behavior that led to it. Mobileye, an Israeli company that provides vehicle safety systems to many carmakers, announced at CES in Las Vegas last week that it will test the approach on the road, in collaboration with the German automaker BMW and the chip company Intel, in the second half of this year. In reinforcement learning, a computer is not hand-coded, or given specific examples to learn from; instead, it experiments, altering its own programming in light of the behavior that most reliably leads to a certain result.