Retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn gestures as he arrives at Trump Tower, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2016, in New York. Retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn gestures as he arrives at Trump Tower, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2016, in New York. FILE- In this file photo taken on Thursday, Dec. 10, 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin, center right, with retired U.S. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, center left, and Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, obscured second right, attend an exhibition marking the 10th anniversary of RT (Russia Today) 24-hour English-language TV news channel in Moscow, Russia. Flynn is widely reported Thursday Nov. 17, 2016, to be a potential contender to become national security advisor to U.S. president elect Donald Trump, although his appointment may be controversial. Retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn walks through the lobby at Trump Tower, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2016, in New York.

The days of having to remember to your ID with you could soon be a thing of the past. The famous tourist town of Wuzhen, China, is now using face recognition technology to act as its entry pass through the gates of the attraction. The system uses cameras to spot people as they approach the entry, and checks these against a database of registered visitors within a few seconds. The facial recognition technology is thought to be up to 99.77 per cent accurate and able to distinguish people better than a human. Chinese web firm Baidu's system is based on neural networks, which can process huge amounts of data – more than one billion faces – with 99.8 per cent accuracy.

Artificial intelligence, intelligence as exhibited by machines, is not something that is new to this world. Nearly twenty years ago IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov. The win was symbolically significant and a sign that artificial intelligence was catching up with human intelligence. Fast forward 20 years and the application of AI technologies is something we encounter on a regular basis. For example, manufacturing and the use of robots in assembly and packaging has revolutionised how our favourite products are made.

Investors believe it is'inevitable' that artificial intelligence will destroy millions of jobs and that governments are unprepared for such an impact, according to a new survey. Artificial intelligence (AI), or the process by which computers or robots take on tasks that need human intelligence, is one of the key themes of this week's Web Summit in Lisbon. The poll among 224 venture capitalists attending the conference showed 53 percent believed AI would destroy millions of jobs and 93 percent saw governments as unprepared for this. The poll among 224 venture capitalists attending the Web summit in Lisbon found 53 percent believed AI would destroy millions of jobs and 93 percent saw governments as unprepared for this. The survey also found that 83 percent of the investors canvassed expect Britain's exit from the European Union to damage Europe's economy and 77 percent believe it will damage British startups.

"I don't want to be remembered as the guy that put a train in a tube" is the quote du jour from Hyperloop One's Josh Giegel. Giegel and co-founder Shervin Pishevar have been showing off a revised vision for how the future of public transportation will operate that moves far beyond intercity travel. But does this level of futurism run the risk of alienating governments and regulators who just want a cheap alternative to high-speed rail? We sat down with the pair to ask them to justify their even more utopian vision for the future of travel. The company's latest pitch video demonstrates this, showing how a route between Dubai and Abu Dhabi would work. In it, an Abu Dhabi-based individual is reminded that he needs to be back in Dubai within half an hour.

When the engineers had at last finished their work, Eugenia Kuyda opened a console on her laptop and began to type. "This is your digital monument." It had been three months since Roman Mazurenko, Kuyda's closest friend, had died. Kuyda had spent that time gathering up his old text messages, setting aside the ones that felt too personal, and feeding the rest into a neural network built by developers at her artificial intelligence startup. She had struggled with whether she was doing the right thing by bringing him back this way. At times it had even given her nightmares. But ever since Mazurenko's death, Kuyda had wanted one more chance to speak with him. A message blinked onto the screen. "You have one of the most interesting puzzles in the world in your hands," it said. Born in Belarus in 1981, Roman Mazurenko was the only child of Sergei, an engineer, and Victoria, a landscape architect. They remember him as an unusually serious child; when he was 8 he wrote a letter to his descendents declaring his most cherished values: wisdom and justice. In family photos, Mazurenko roller-skates, sails a boat, and climbs trees. Average in height, with a mop of chestnut hair, he is almost always smiling.

Sundar Pichai is huddling with five Google staffers in a room next to his office that's known--appropriately enough--as "Sundar's Huddle." The employees are members of the Google Photos team, and they're here this morning to update Pichai on something they've been working on for months. The group has barely begun its presentation when Pichai starts peppering them with questions, opinions, and advice. For half an hour, the discussion careens from subject to subject: the power of artificial intelligence, the value of integrating Google Photos with other products such as Google Drive, the importance of creating an emotional bond with the users of an app. After the team shows Pichai a rough cut of a promotional video, his feedback is unguarded and heartfelt: "That's awesome!" Google's bearded, 44-year-old CEO is, unmistakably, in his element. "Nothing makes me happier than a product review in which I can sit with the team and they're showing me something they're building," Pichai had told me a few days earlier. "Being able to react to it and think through, 'When users get this, what will their feedback be?' I'm always on a quest to do that better and do more of it."

GUANGZHOU/WUZHEN, China German automaker BMW and Chinese internet giant Baidu will end their joint research on self-driving cars, executives for the two firms said on Friday, with Baidu now searching for new global research partners.

Bengaluru: Infosys Ltd has invested 14.92 millon Danish krone (Rs14.5 crore) from its "innovation fund" in UNSILO, a Danish artificial intelligence start-up focused on advanced text analysis. The deal comes at a time when companies around the globe, including Infosys clients, are trying to find better ways to make sense of a large amount of unstructured text. UNSILO uses a unique combination of machine-learning and natural language processing to analyse large quantities of text. This is Infosys's 11th investment in a start-up from its $500 million innovation fund, its fourth in the calendar year. Indian IT firms have been increasingly investing in futuristic start-ups to get products based on new technologies faster to the market and serve the emerging needs of their customers.

The dream of creating intelligent computers has inspired the development of exotic chips based on the structure of the brain, which operates in mysterious ways. Some researchers are making such chips from components found in today's computers. Using components pulled off store shelves, researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, have made a chip for intelligent computers that can learn. The chips are structured to discover patterns through probabilities and association, helping with decision making. The researchers are using off-the-shelf, reprogrammable circuits called FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) to simulate the way neurons and synapses in a brain operate.