For all their brilliance, our phones still have as much emotional intelligence as glue. Yet, as electronics become ever more important in our lives, it may make sense to start teaching them to be more aware of our feelings. Early glimpses of such efforts were afoot at a gathering of artificial-intelligence software developers, academics and researchers this week in Manhattan, where several talks focused on finding ways to add emotion into our robots, voice assistants and chatbots. "People are building these very intimate relationships with these companions, but right now these companions have no empathy," Rana el Kaliouby, CEO of emotional-recognition tech firm Affectiva, said onstage Tuesday at the inaugural O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference. Teaching robots about emotion illustrates both the promise and huge challenges involved in developing AI tools. Artificial intelligence, which lets machines mimic human learning and problem solving, is already used to improve Google searches and scan Facebook photos for faces.

Russia has warned the United States against carrying out any attacks on Syrian government forces, saying it would have repercussions across the Middle East. Russian news agencies quoted Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as saying that a U.S. intervention against the Syrian army "will lead to terrible, tectonic consequences not only on the territory of this country but also in the region on the whole." She says regime change in Syria would create a vacuum that would be "quickly filled" by "terrorists of all stripes." U.S.-Russian tensions over Syria have escalated since the breakdown of a cease-fire last month, with each side blaming the other for its failure. Syrian government forces backed by Russian warplanes have launched a major onslaught on rebel-held parts of the northern city of Aleppo.

With Congress opening the way for Sept. 11 families to sue Saudi Arabia, victims' families are focusing on an unproven theory that a Saudi consular official in Los Angeles and a Saudi intelligence operative in San Diego directly assisted two of the 19 hijackers. The alleged Southern California connection is the key to showing that Saudi Arabia financed Muslim extremists who played a direct role in supporting some of the hijackers, according to lawyers for the families of those killed in the 2001 terrorist attacks. The families contend that lower-level Saudi operatives in Southern California helped find housing for the two hijackers, both Saudi citizens, months before they muscled their way into the cockpit of an American Airlines passenger jet that smashed into the north side of the Pentagon. If a pending lawsuit is allowed to proceed, the families hope to find the evidence in thousands of classified FBI, CIA and Treasury Department documents that could be made public as part of discovery in federal court. Saudi Arabia has repeatedly denied any direct or indirect support for Al Qaeda, the terrorist group that carried out the attacks, or any foreknowledge or involvement in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

Silicon Valley is diving into artificial intelligence technology, with start-ups sprouting up and Google and Facebook pouring vast sums into projects that would teach machines how to learn and make decisions. Now Toyota wants a piece of the action. Toyota, the Japanese auto giant, on Friday announced a five-year, 1 billion research and development effort headquartered here. As planned, the compound would be one of the largest research laboratories in Silicon Valley. Conceived as a research facility bridging basic science and commercial engineering, it will be organized as a new company to be named Toyota Research Institute.

Elon Musk has nightmares about A.I. (2016.1.11)

Jim Andrews is in a medical office wearing just a hospital gown, staring at his doctor of 11 years, who is staring back at him through the sleek, metallic lens of Google Glass. As the doctor examines Andrews, a new kind of medical scribe is watching the examination, transcribing everything he sees. The scribe, named Rahul, is thousands of miles away in India, and he is viewing the office visit live through the pint-size, WiFi-connected camera attached to the doctor's glasses. "When was his last physical?" Rahul's nearly immediate answer pops up in a text bubble display in the right corner of the doctor's field of vision.

Humanoid robots were out of fashion at this year's RoboBusiness, the annual exhibition in San Jose, California, that pegs itself as "the most important robotics event in the world". Make your robot look and sound too much like C3P0, explained Ty Jaegerson of Savioke, and people's "expectations of intelligence go up". The exception to the non-anthropomorphic, however, was the iPal, a child-size robot designed to take on distinctly adult responsibilities. The 3ft tall iPal has wide eyes, working fingers, pastel trimming, and a touchscreen tablet on its chest. It can sing, dance, and play rock paper scissors.

Yahoo is the latest tech company to open source its computer vision code. Yahoo hopes that its convolutional neural net (CNN) will empower others to better guard innocent eyes, but admits that because of the tech's very nature (and how the definition of "porn" can vary wildly), that the CNN isn't perfect. "This model is a general purpose reference model, which can be used for the preliminary filtering of pornographic images," a post on the Yahoo Engineering Tumblr says. "We do not provide guarantees of accuracy of output, rather, we make this available for developers to explore and enhance as an open source project." The code is available on Github at the moment, and if you need any testing material, well, there isn't exactly a shortage of it on Tumblr.

Greg Linden may not be a household name, but he changed the way we interact with culture and transformed retail forever. An engineer at Amazon in the late 1990s, Linden worked on a curious problem: how to recommend books without human intervention. Until then Amazon relied on editors who wrote hundreds of reviews every year. It was a costly and time-consuming process. Automating recommendations proved trickier than anyone expected.

Volvo has decided to join the ranks of automakers with offices in Silicon Valley. The Swedish car company is in the process of opening a research center in Mountain View, Lex Kerssemakers, CEO of Volvo's U.S. division, said in an interview. The company is hiring some 70 engineers for the office, he said. Volvo, which is owned by Chinese automaker Geely but operates largely independently, has had an office in Camarillo for about 30 years that focused on car design, Kerssemakers said. Within the past three to four years, engineers based in that office also started to work on car infotainment systems, he said.