It might not be obvious to a human, but an artificial intelligence programme sees distinct similarities in, say, the composition of the subjects, or colour of their outfits. Called Recognition, the AI programme compares current photojournalism provided by Reuters with works from the Tate's collection to find its best match. It pairs the images based on image recognition techniques that analyse objects, faces, composition, and context gleaned from metadata. The AI matches a photo of eunuchs putting on makeup in Mumbai (Image: REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY) with Sir Peter Lely's Two Ladies of the Lake Family c.1660 (Image: Tate) "We wanted to understand how we could bring artificial intelligence into a museum, and how rational and objective thinking could be applied to a subjective thing like art," said Angelo Semeraro of Italian research centre Fabrica. He and teammates Coralie Gourguechon, Monica Lanaro, and Isaac Valentin created the project to enter (and win) the Tate's 2016 IK Prize for digital innovation, which is run in partnership with Microsoft.

SHANGHAI, CHINA--Networks will need to keep pace with increasingly connected societies and the need for deeper insights to improve service delivery and support digital transformation. With the Internet of Things (IoT) era beckoning, everything soon would be connected and data-driven and customers would no longer look to simply buy a platform or individual parts, said Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, during his keynote at Huawei Connect 2016 held here this week. They would be looking for an experience and no activity would occur in isolation, he said. Intel describes the phenomenon as a virtuous cycle, in which all things that are connected including wearable devices, autonomous vehicles, and M2M systems will require connectivity to send data through to the cloud to be analysed and push back down the analytics so experiences can be changed. Supporting this continuous feedback loop also would require collaboration between multiple companies, since no one organisation would be capable of producing all the ingredients needed, Krzanich said.

It's a modest test, but it's ramping up to something much more impressive: In December, the robot is scheduled to return to the airport as a guide. Visitors will be able to ask for directions to say, the currency exchange counter, and EMIEW3 will physically lead them there. Neat! Hitachi's bot is particularly well suited to the task because of it's mobility: it can zip along at a steady 3.7MPH and even pick itself up if it falls down. Just don't ask it to take you directly to your gate -- airport security probably isn't used to clearing robots.

Getting lost in an international airport is never fun -- but if you're lost in Japan's Haneda this month, you'll at least be able get help from an adorable talking robot. From now until the 14th, Hitachi is testing its EMIEW3 humanoid robot in the airport's passenger terminal. Over the course of two weeks, EMIEW3 will direct visitors to an information display and answer questions in both English and Japanese. It's a modest test, but it's ramping up to something much more impressive: In December, the robot is scheduled to return to the airport as a guide. Visitors will be able to ask for directions to say, the currency exchange counter, and EMIEW3 will physically lead them there.

While perception tasks such as visual object recognition and text understanding play an important role in human intelligence, the subsequent tasks that involve inference, reasoning and planning require an even higher level of intelligence. The past few years have seen major advances in many perception tasks using deep learning models. For higher-level inference, however, probabilistic graphical models with their Bayesian nature are still more powerful and flexible. To achieve integrated intelligence that involves both perception and inference, it is naturally desirable to tightly integrate deep learning and Bayesian models within a principled probabilistic framework, which we call Bayesian deep learning. In this unified framework, the perception of text or images using deep learning can boost the performance of higher-level inference and in return, the feedback from the inference process is able to enhance the perception of text or images. This paper proposes a general framework for Bayesian deep learning and reviews its recent applications on recommender systems, topic models, and control. In this paper, we also discuss the relationship and differences between Bayesian deep learning and other related topics like Bayesian treatment of neural networks.

Hitachi Ltd. started trials of its EMIEW3 humanoid robot at Tokyo's Haneda airport on Friday to aid foreign visitors to Japan. During the trials through December in the airport's domestic Terminal 2, the robot will communicate with passengers in Japanese and English at a designated information center as well as display information. The industrial conglomerate is hoping to enable the 90-centimeter-tall humanoid robot with autonomous capabilities to guide users to destinations starting around December. At a demonstration on Friday morning, a female foreign passenger asked EMIEW3 for directions to a foreign exchange counter. The humanoid robot at the information center called another EMIEW3 robot to take her to the location.

Michael B. Jordan scored with a breakthrough role in a football series and took a swing at movie stardom in a boxing flick. The "Creed" star has transitioned to basketball for his latest -- though virtual -- role in the "NBA 2K17" video game. Jordan performs in the game's MyCAREER storyline in the latest edition of the hoops hit. "NBA 2K11" and "NBA 2K16" are widely considered among the best basketball video games. Jordan hoped another role in a continuation of a popular sports anthology would add this year's version to the list of best basketball games.

Isaac Asimov publishes Pebble in the Sky, his first science-fiction novel. And Earth enters a brand new epoch – according to some geologists. Now the idea of the Anthropocene – the period in which human activity profoundly shapes the environment – has taken an important step closer to general acceptance. A working group of scientists has been mulling over the subject for seven years. This week 30 of its 35 members recommended adding the Anthropocene to our standard geological timescale. The ultimate decision rests with the International Commission on Stratigraphy.

After months of cancer treatment at the University of Tokyo Hospital, the patient – a woman in her 60s – was not getting much better. So the medical team plugged the woman's symptoms into IBM's Watson, the supercomputer that once famously trounced human champs in the TV quiz show Jeopardy! Watson rifled through its storehouse of oncology data and announced that she had a rare form of secondary leukemia. The team changed the treatment, and she was soon out of hospital. Watson spotted in minutes what could otherwise have taken weeks to diagnose, one doctor told The Japan Times. "It might be an exaggeration to say AI saved her life, but it surely gave us the data we needed in an extremely speedy fashion."

They say'beauty is in the eye of the beholder', but in a new event the beholders are robots. The Beauty.AI beauty contest used five algorithms to evaluate youthfulness, face symmetry, skin and other parameters, and then compare them to models and actors in a database. Now, the systems have announced the winners from more than 6,000 user-submitted selfies of individuals who live all over the world and range in ages of 18 to 69. The Beauty.AI beauty contest put together of robot judges to determine the winners. More than 6,000 people from around the world submitted head shots to be analyzed by the algorithms.