The year of AI: Major developments in 2016 could pave the way for a future where'intelligent machines are omnipresent in our daily lives' Artificial intelligence or AI is getting a foothold in people's homes, starting with the Amazon devices like its Echo speaker (pictured) which links to a personal assistant'Alexa' to answer questions and control connected devices such as appliances or light bulbs Donald Trump claims torture ¿works¿ ¿ but what does the... South Korea comes a step closer to LIMITLESS energy:... Facebook Messenger launches an in-app camera and... The shoes that will tell you if you're too tired to run:... Donald Trump claims torture ¿works¿ ¿ but what does the... South Korea comes a step closer to LIMITLESS energy:... Facebook Messenger launches an in-app camera and... The shoes that will tell you if you're too tired to run:... Analyst Carolina Milanesi of the research firm Creative Strategies said that '2016 was the year about raising awareness, and exposing consumers to the idea of AI in a more mass market way.' Google Home (pictured) is the small speaker will be able to play music and access Google Assistant, a new AI system the search giant unveiled at I/O in May. It's believed Apple has been working on their smart-home device for at least 2 years The first virtual family portrait: Mark Zuckerberg showed off the firm's software for the Oculus Rift headset at the Oculus Connect conference in San Francisco. Tragic video shows a man filming himself smoking Ice Amir Khan's wife Faryal was called'Michael Jackson' by family Epic fight!

The 6-foot, unmanned submarine is known as an LBS-Glider System and was operating from the USNS Bowditch on Thursday 50 miles from Subic Bay, gathering unclassified information for Navy charts and other maritime data like water temperature and sound speed, the Pentagon says. It surfaced and set a radio frequency for its home ship to pick it up, when a Chinese navy Dalang III-Class ship that had been shadowing the Bowditch launched a boat and intercepted it first.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. At least they have robots to get some actual work done. If anyone can use some automation to boost production, it's Santa: That must have taken a ridiculous amount of helium.

What are the new priorities for the connected business? First: businesses need to think differently about the types of connections they will need to make - these span well beyond the traditional app to app into more modern forms of integration including SaaS integrations, mobile integrations, APIs, device integration and Big Data integration. It's important these are unified together vs. doing them all piecemeal. Second, these types of connections need to be simple to design, adapt and configure. Plus, with the proliferation of IoT, there is an explosion in the number of devices requiring interconnection - both in terms of asset monitoring and spatial analytics.

On Tuesday, Microsoft introduced Zo, the next evolution in chatbots; shared how Cortana, in partnership with Harman Kardon, will be present in a new way in your home; and announced that more than 67,000 developers are now using Microsoft's Bot Framework and Cognitive Services. "We're really moving from a world where we have to understand computers to a world where they will understand us and our intent, from machine-centric to human-centric, from perceptive to cognitive and from rational to emotional," Harry Shum, executive vice president of Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research group, said at a small gathering on AI in San Francisco. Zo is a social chatbot, built upon the technology stack that powers Xiaoice and Rinna -- successful Microsoft AI chatbots in China and Japan. You can engage with Zo on Kik now in the same way you would interact with a friend. In the future, Microsoft plans to bring her to other social and conversational channels such as Skype and Facebook Messenger.

Apple will charge £69 to replace one of its new earphones. The company's tiny, wireless new headphones were released this week and are being hailed as a leap forward for the technology. But those same features mean that they are easily lost – they are small and light, and there's no simple way of finding out where they are if they go missing. Apple has now confirmed what it will do if that does happen. It will sell people a new AirPod for £65, it said, and it will replace the charging case that they come in for the same price.

ARM servers are devalued partly because many applications don't work with the chips. But ARM has acquired Allinea Software with the hope of partially resolving the compatibility issue. Allinea provides software development, debugging, and porting tools, which should make it easier for people to write applications for ARM-based servers and supercomputers. The acquisition will "provide a channel to thousands of developers using supercomputers and give us better first-hand knowledge of the issues being addressed as software is ported to new ARM-based systems," Javier Orensanz, general manager of the development solutions group at ARM, said in a blog entry. The development tools will also be used for ARM chips in deep-learning systems, which require large-scale server deployments for analytics. ARM's competition will come from deep-learning and HPC software tools offered by Intel, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, and more recently, AMD.

DeepMind, a research lab that was acquired by Google for £400 million, has become a well known entity in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) for building agents that can learn and master games such as arcade classic "Space Invaders" and the ancient Chinese board game of "Go". Over the last year, the five-year-old company, which employs approximately 250 people in London, has been branching out and applying its self-learning algorithms to fields such as healthcare and energy. On the latter, it's helped Google to slash the electricity bill in its data centres worldwide and it's now exploring how it can help the National Grid to predict demand. But Demis Hassabis, DeepMind's cofounder and CEO, announced on Sunday that the company isn't about to turn its back on the gaming field any time soon. In fact, Hassabis wrote on Twitter that DeepMind has been busy improving the AlphaGo [AG] agent that beat Lee SeDol, the world's best Go player, earlier this year.

You could have walked there faster! Amazon's much-hyped first ever drone delivery was to the company's next door neighbour just 765 yards away (so no wonder it only took 13 minutes) Amazon boss Jeff Bezos announced firm completed first drone delivery in Cambridge on December 7 Amazon Air debut took just 13 minutes from order to delivery destination, with drone travelling at 400ft But it emerged the delivery was sent to the company's next door neighbour - just 765 yards away Drones will only be used during daylight and in sunny conditions and will not fly in rain, ice or strong winds But it emerged the delivery was sent to the company's next door neighbour - just 765 yards away Watch video Caught on camera: Checkout line fight erupts over couponing Watch video GRAPHIC CONTENT: Suspect shoots Georgia police officers Watch video Dangerous Porsche driver cuts up fellow motorists in Liverpool Watch video Lamborghini shredded by Taiwan government for illegal importation Watch video ...

Walter Pitts was used to being bullied. He'd been born into a tough family in Prohibition-era Detroit, where his father, a boiler-maker, had no trouble raising his fists to get his way. One afternoon in 1935, they chased him through the streets until he ducked into the local library to hide. The library was familiar ground, where he had taught himself Greek, Latin, logic, and mathematics--better than home, where his father insisted he drop out of school and go to work. Outside, the world was messy. Inside, it all made sense. Not wanting to risk another run-in that night, Pitts stayed hidden until the library closed for the evening. Alone, he wandered through the stacks of books until he came across Principia Mathematica, a three-volume tome written by Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead between 1910 and 1913, which attempted to reduce all of mathematics to pure logic. Pitts sat down and began to read. For three days he remained in the library until he had read each volume cover to cover--nearly 2,000 pages in all--and had identified several mistakes. Deciding that Bertrand Russell himself needed to know about these, the boy drafted a letter to Russell detailing the errors.