It all began from a research project of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) conducted by a group of scientists from the electric and computer engineering department. In collaboration with the British University of Sheffield and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, they have created a mini origami-robot. Obviously, this invention has nothing to do with paper. The name should evoke its ability to bend and unfold. In fact, this tiny technological invention owes its success exactly to this ability to shrink, turn in on itself and fit into a digestible casing and be swallowed.

The Science Council of Japan, the nation's largest and most powerful group of scientists, has launched a panel to discuss whether the group should drop its long-standing vow that scientists will not take part in defense-related research. That policy is an important principle that Japan's scientists have upheld for decades in view of the history of academic institutions cooperating with the military during the nation's past wars and the massive damage the wars brought to the people of Japan and other countries. The group should not tinker with the principle. Doing so would lead to a change in the basic nature of scientific research in this country. The SCJ decided last month to set up the 15-member panel following heated discussions at a plenary meeting.

The Viacom saga continues: National Amusements, the holding company through which Sumner Redstone controls Viacom, is looking for new Viacom board members. This isn't a shocker--speculation of a board shake-up began after George Abrams and Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman were removed from National Amusements' board a few weeks ago. On the list of potential board replacements, reports the Wall Street Journal, are former Time Warner exec Kenneth Lerer, ex-Sony Entertainment President Nicole Seligman, and former Discovery Communications CEO Judith McHale. Don't mess with Texas (drivers): Former Lyft and Uber drivers in Austin, TX say Uber and Lyft broke federal law when they abruptly stopped operations in the city. Drivers filed a suit in San Francisco (where the companies are based) saying the two ride-sharing services violated a law stating they needed to give sixty days' notice to employees before a'mass layoff'.

Microsoft has released the newest version of its Security Intelligence Report which analyzes the threat landscape of exploits and vulnerabilities the industry faced in the second half of 2015. For the very first time the report, now in its tenth year, includes security data from the Microsoft cloud. "We're pretty excited about this volume because it's the first one we've ever released with data from our cloud services and there are a lot of customers including CISOs and CIOs that are interested in the data we have from our cloud," Tim Rains, chief security advisor at Microsoft, told Infosecurity. By implementing their machine learning system capable of processing ten terabytes of data every day, the firm has been able to leverage its widespread cloud data to create an extensive, intelligent security graph to help protect its customers. "The intelligent security graph is our attempt to collect trillions of signals from billions of data sources so that we can triangulate what the bad guys are doing and where they're at. The graph allows us to put a great deal of data together, analyze it and make changes to our security posture," Rains said.

Artificial intelligence has been around since 1956 and has made some giant leaps in that time: beating the best human at chess, the best human at US gameshow Jeopardy and recently beating the best human at complex strategy game Go. Brands have only recently started adopting artificial intelligence for core consumer services. Google's voice recognition technology now claims 98% accuracy and Facebook's DeepFace is said to recognise faces with a 97% success rate. IBM's Watson, which uses artificial intelligence to perform its question-answering function, is 2,400% "smarter" today than when it achieved the Jeopardy victory five years ago. There is no doubt that the relationship between men and machines is changing, and brands are on the cusp of making artificial intelligence an everyday element of their customer offerings.

"The emerging threat is: It is not the guy sitting in Bangalore but the robot next door which is going to take your job, and this creates enormous anxiety among the middle class. You can see this in the political dialogue that is taking place in the US as well as in the run-up to Brexit in Britain." What will happen to countries like Vietnam, the Philippines and India if that ladder for steady growth is removed, when its export-driven aspect is just taken away because industrialized countries can produce things just as cheaply? The worry is that if a large segment of the middle-class becomes disempowered and is looking for easy solutions in country after country, could it create conditions for more political turmoil? " asked Rajan. Rajan's statement is being taken seriously in India as well, because despite growing at a pace of almost 7.6% in 2015-16, the Labour Bureau reported that job growth had slumped to a six year low: only 100,100 million in 2015. Siri also tells 17.9 million jobless people in India.. How to address them!! https://t.co/PhzLxP3GWZ However, Secretary of Economic Affairs Shaktikanta Das told Sputnik, "I will not go into the numbers, but when the manufacturing, industry and services sectors are growing then I think it's a positive development.

There is no need to worry about whether robots might start taking our jobs. Three of the world's 10 largest employers are already replacing tens of thousands of their workers with robots: That is likely the tip of the iceberg. This deliberately scruffy chart from CSLA of the 10 largest global employers shows the world's biggest workforces shows the potential for axing workers in favour of machines: Of those 10, only the UK's National Health Service - with its massive army of doctors and nurses doing unrepetitive, unique tasks - looks like hostile territory for robots. The other nine are rich with rote, repetitive tasks that might be better performed by software. Foxconn's 60,000 robots are only a small fraction of its 1.3 million total workers.

While companies such as Squarespace Inc. or Weebly Inc. will help you craft an attractive modern website, it's still up to the user to create the content. Wouldn't it be faster if an artificial intelligence could write it for you? Israel's Wix.com Ltd. announced Tuesday it's enabling a technology to do just that. It's baking an AI into its web development platform that trawls the open internet for person-specific information to create a unique, individual website with images, video and text. Pages can be expanded to include e-commerce elements, blogs or appointment bookings.

Machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence tools are receiving a lot of attention in the analytics world these days, and industry experts and experienced users say the plaudits are well deserved. "These models are making a big difference, and if you're not considering how to use them in your product, you probably should," said Jeff Dean, a senior fellow at Google who helped lead development of TensorFlow, the company's open source machine learning platform. Machine learning has come to play a central role in the majority of new products Google develops, Dean said in a presentation at Spark Summit 2016 in San Francisco. For example, it's at the core of training speech recognition tools used in the Android mobile operating system. Machine learning technology also helped Google create a tool that automatically tags photos uploaded by users by examining what's happening in the photo.

Ari Roisman, CEO and cofounder of Glide, a video-messaging app that hopes to capitalize on the coming transition away from texting and towards a voice-and-video interaction future. SAN FRANCISCO - Typing is so ... 20th century. And soon texting is likely to join it in that same communication dustbin. That's a view Ari Roisman, CEO and cofounder of video messaging app Glide, shares with some of the titans of tech ranging from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. "We're at the beginning of a new era of human computer interaction," says Roisman during a podcast Friday with USA TODAY.