He moves," said Dunham, 54, who bought the 7,200-square-foot Calabasas home with his wife two years ago. Bookshelves house rows of toys; some are keepsakes from Dunham's childhood and college years, others are more recent purchases to replace toys he always wanted or those that were lost to time or one of his mother's decluttering sprees. The puppeteer was named Forbes' fourth-highest-grossing comedian last year and is currently on tour, performing 10 to 12 shows a month. Many of the jokes I write and the bits and the routines I come up with are born in this office. The dummies are created here.

Talking to WIRED before his speech at WIRED Health, Kyu Rhee, IBM's chief health officer, took from his pocket one of the iconic pieces of medical equipment: the stethoscope. The stethoscope is celebrating its 200th anniversary – the first, monaural version was created by the French doctor René Laennec. Despite technical advances – and the rise of other non-invasive techniques for internal examination – the stethoscope still means "doctor": according to a 2012 research paper, carrying a stethoscope makes a practitioner seem more trustworthy than any other piece of medical equipment. "It's amazing how medicine in some ways still leverages this piece of technology," said Rhee. "But I believe that in the next 200 years a cognitive system like Watson will be a part of every healthcare decision, for every stakeholder." IBM Watson's cognitive approach to computing absorbs data – structured and unstructured – and produces answers.

Artificial intelligence is making rapid progress and has the potential to bring huge benefits to many aspects of our lives, including improved services for sick, elderly or disabled people, disease diagnosis, development of new medicines, perfecting driverless vehicles and resolving problems related to climate change. While AI is expected to contribute to enhancing people's well-being and happiness, it has the potential of doing harm or being used for unethical purposes. The government, scientists, engineers and businesspeople involved in applying AI should push discussions on such questions as the relationship between AI and people and society, and ethical issues involved in the use of AI. Particularly important will be to deepen discussions on how to prevent harm caused by the wrongful use of AI. Such discussions will be indispensable to building public trust in AI and robots.

A group of researchers from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, have created a novel solution for large-scale Android malware detection. It's called DroidOL, and it's an adaptive and scalable malware detection framework based on online learning. "DroidOL's achieves superior accuracy through extracting high quality features from inter-procedural control-flow graphs (ICFGs) of apps, which are known to be robust against evasion and obfuscation techniques adopted by malware," the researchers explained. They used the Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) graph kernel to extract semantic features from ICFGs, and finally, online learning to distinguish between benign and malicious apps. They attribute much of the success of their technique to the use of a scalable online learning classifier instead of batch-learning classifiers (which are not).

Japan is one of the world's most advanced countries in the field of artificial intelligence and robot industries. At the Group of Seven summit Japan hosted in May, world leaders looked amused and fascinated as they watched a robot performing at the International Media Center. At the same time, because of the technological advances and advent of robots, the leaders are concerned that many people in their countries will lose their jobs and cry out for assistance from governments. This kind of downside to innovation has always been a part of modernization. Innovation brings fundamental change, but the impact of AI will be on a far larger scale than ever before. The most visible sector in which robots are bringing considerable change in Japan is the carmaker industry.

BMW, Intel and computer vision firm Mobileye have signed a deal to develop autonomous vehicles. The three firms will collaborate on the systems needed to make cars that can navigate without any help from a human driver. The vehicles will be capable of driving safely along major roads as well as in suburban and inner city areas. BMW said it hoped the collaboration would mean it could put robot cars into production by 2021. The research partnership was announced on the day when US officials begin an investigation into a fatal car crash involving a Tesla Model S, to which self-driving technology could have contributed.

Picture the scenario: you've been asked to prepare an analysis on whether you have the best people in the right roles in your company and identify where there may be knowledge gaps within the organisation. If your company has offices in New York, London, Berlin and Singapore, that's a huge HR challenge. But what if an artificial intelligence tool can produce in minutes a detailed "knowledge map" based on analysis of employee skills and interests to pinpoint gaps where new hires are needed to fill those holes. British companies are now being offered such "brain technology". Computer software, called Starmind, uses machine learning to understand queries – even anonymously – then source answers from previous staff conversations on a subject or track down experts within the company who are able to help.

WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO – Tesla Motors Inc. says the self-driving feature suspected of being involved in a fatal crash on May 7 is experimental, yet it's been installed on all 70,000 of its cars since October 2014. For groups that have lobbied for stronger safety rules, that's precisely what's wrong with U.S. regulators' increasingly anything-goes approach. "Allowing automakers to do their own testing, with no specific guidelines, means consumers are going to be the guinea pigs in this experiment," said Jackie Gillan, president for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a longtime Washington consumer lobbyist who has helped shape numerous auto-technology mandates. "This is going to happen again and again and again." Tesla's use of a technology still in development, while common in its Silicon Valley home, contrasts with the cautious method of General Motors Co. and other automakers that have restricted their semi-autonomous cars to test tracks and professional drivers.

The problem of how to defend a country changes when your attacker isn't acting rationally. Terrorists put their causes above their home country and don't necessarily fear death or retaliation. So shortly after 9/11, Milind Tambe, a professor of computer science and engineering at USC, proposed a radical new style of protection: Why not use artificial intelligence to make your own targets harder to attack? By matching predictive algorithms with machine learning and some massive processing power, you could create a computer program capable of figuring out how to deploy limited security forces around sensitive places most effectively. The trick would be for those schedules or formations to remain unpredictable.

A burger-flipping robot invasion is headed to the Bay Area. A few years ago, startup Momentum Machines unveiled a robot that could churn out 400 burgers an hour, and now, Tech Insider reports, the company is creating a restaurant concept around it. The robot can slice toppings, grill a patty, assemble, and bag the burger without any help from humans. A Craigslist job ad says the restaurant will open at 680 Folsom St. in the SoMa (South of Market) neighborhood; the ad doesn't specifically mention robots, instead reading, "This location will feature the world-premiere of our proprietary and remarkable new advances in technology that enable the automatic creation of impossibly delicious burgers at prices everyone can afford." The restaurant will still need to employ a human for tasks such as payroll and taking out the trash, however.