At a theoretical level, the concept of artificial intelligence has fueled and sharpened the philosophical debates on the nature of the mind, intelligence, and the uniqueness of human beings. Insights from the field have proved invaluable to biologists, psychologists, and linguists in helping to understand the processes of memory, learning, and language. Today, we're continuing our Q&A with Maggie Boden, Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, and one of the best known figures in the field of Artificial Intelligence, answers four more questions about this developing area. ANNs are computer systems made of large number of interconnected units, each of which can compute only one (very simple) thing. They are (very broadly) inspired by the structure of brains.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here. If you are reading this post, some kind of AI has decided it's worth your while. On social media, algorithms learn to know you intimately. They study what you like and compare your interests to a huge pool of users. And almost magically, platforms like Instagram then shows you a selection of photographs you find surprisingly pretty.

Even in the highly technical world of brain surgery, the success of an operation still depends largely on the experience and ability of surgeons. But this may change dramatically with the introduction of "smart" surgical care units, in which everything from computer monitors, robotic arms, microscopes and sensors are connected via the internet to help doctors follow the right course of action. A prototype of an advanced version of such units, the Smart Cyber Operating Theater (SCOT), was showcased Thursday at Tokyo Woman's Medical University in Shinjuku Ward. The project was funded by the state-backed Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED). Development of such units is expected to push forward the advent of so-called Medicine 4.0, a paradigm shift in the medical industry built on advanced information communications technology, said Yoshihiro Muragaki, a brain surgeon and professor at the university who is leading the project.

With everyone from Google to Elon Musk warning about artificial intelligence or AI, this story is especially timely. A Russian robot learning to promote a company's products and'automatic movement profiles' escaped from its testing grounds in Perm, Russia, near the Ural mountains. The machine made it to a busy intersection, snarled traffic, and the police were called. "The robot was learning automatic movement algorithms on the testing ground, these functions will feature in the latest version of the Promobot." The co-founder of the robot's maker, Oleg Kivokurtsev, told ura.ru news agency.

In 2012 they went bankrupt. And according to a recent post by Dr Robert Goldman when technological singularity really kicks in, the same fate awaits many industries over the next decade. Self-proclaimed "Antiaging & Sports Medicine Pioneer" Dr Bob is a rather exuberant character and seemingly a big friend of the stars (he is pictured on the home page of his website with the likes of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger). Yet I'm far more interested in his recent Facebook / LinkedIn post entitled'Future Predictions' which has gone viral and already been shared well over 100,000 times. Dr Goldman initially asks us to go way back to 1998 (where is the Doc's DeLorean when you need it?) It's interesting given that digital cameras had actually been invented over 20 years earlier.

One of five Hong Kong booksellers who went missing in mysterious circumstances last year has said he had been detained for more than eight months by Chinese authorities. Lam Wing-kee announced on Thursday that he was arrested in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen and that his colleague, Lee Bo, who went missing from Hong Kong in December, had also been abducted. Following months of speculation about the circumstances surrounding the disappearances, Lam called a surprise press conference just two days after being released. Lam said he was taken on a 14-hour train journey to the eastern city of Ningbo following his arrest. There, he was kept in a small room by himself, and repeatedly interrogated about the selling of banned books on the mainland.

Machines are going to take over the world and leave us humans without jobs. This is the meme going around in mainstream business books on the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is understandable as the number of things that machines2 can do better than humans is increasing: diagnosing medical conditions, analyzing legal documents, making parole decisions, to name a few. But doing something better doesn't necessarily make machines an alternative to humans. If machines and humans each contribute differently to a capability, then there is opportunity to combine their unique talents to produce an outcome that is better than either one could achieve on their own.

To pitch its cloud storage business, Google is leaning on its artificial intelligence features. Amazon, the market leader, is too. Now Amazon has recruited a leading expert in the field to up its game. Alex Smola, a top machine learning scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and research alum of Google and Yahoo, is moving over to run the "Cloud Machine Learning Platform" at AWS, he wrote in a post. Leaving CMU - Dear Friends, As some of you may have already heard, I'm leaving CMU to join Amazon.

A robot escaped from a science lab and caused a traffic jam in one Russian city, it's reported. Scientists at the Promobot laboratories in Perm had been teaching the machine how to move around independently, but it broke free after an engineer forgot to shut a gate, says the local edition of the Argumenty i Fakty newspaper. The robot found its way to a nearby street, covering a distance of about 50m (164ft), before its battery ran out, the daily says. An eyewitness video posted online shows a vaguely humanoid machine standing in the middle of a busy road, guarded by a traffic policeman. It is then wheeled off by a human, presumably an engineer from the company that developed the robot.

This is seven tons of semi-autonomous machine with sensors and a gun. This week, war robots came to Paris. On display at the Eurosatory 2016 Land and Airland Defence and Security tradeshow, RoBattle is a modular machine from defense firm Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). Seven tons itself, it can carry three tons of sensors, weapons, and other tools it may need for fighting. And much like the first tanks that were built for the difficult war-scarred muddy ground of the Western Front, the RoBattle can climb over difficult terrain.