Oussama Khatib held his breath as he swam through the wreck of La Lune, 100 meters below the Mediterranean. The flagship of King Louis XIV sank here in 1664, 20 miles off the southern coast of France, and no human had touched the ruins – or the countless treasures and artifacts the ship once carried – in the centuries since. OceanOne, a humanoid robotic diver from Stanford, allows new underwater exploration capabilities. With guidance from a team of skilled deep-sea archaeologists who had studied the site, Khatib, a professor of computer science at Stanford, spotted a grapefruit-size vase. He hovered precisely over the vase, reached out, felt its contours and weight, and stuck a finger inside to get a good grip.

Editor's note: This is the first of two articles exploring the role of the IT channel in robotic process automation. Part one provides an overview of how IT services firms expect to benefit from software robots, while part two examines deployment models, labor issues and the technology's future. This expert handbook explores opportunities in enterprise mobility market, delving into detail on those with the greatest potential return for VARs, systems integrators and IT consultants. This email address is already registered. By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent.

On a very warm afternoon in April, the image of a bald young white man's head floated on a gray screen at the Kitchen, in Chelsea. The man spoke in a tone that shifted worryingly between aggressive and confessional, punctuating his lines with two disembodied hands. "And I could have been your haruspex, sexy," he said at one point, snarling. "I could have read omens in your extricated liver." There were pale red marks beneath his eyes, a five-o'clock shadow on his jaw.

An internet pioneer who first taught the world how to find friendship, love, and sex online a quarter century ago is trying to determine at what point artificial intelligence develops emotional intelligence, and he thinks he can do it with an art contest. About 31 different robots competed for 100,000 in prizes at the first annual International Robot Art Competition. The vote was based on 2,200 votes cast on Facebook as well as judgment from six art critics who have experience working with technology. The fan and judge favorite was TAIDA from the National Taiwan University. TAIDA won first place and 30,000 for several Pointillism-style works, including a still life of fruit, landscape of the Taiwan coast, and a portrait of Albert Einstein.

The artificial intelligence revolution is clearly happening. A.I. will transform medicine, give us all super-smart virtual assistants, fight crime and a thousand things more. In order for A.I. to work its miracles, it's going to need data. And I'm predicting that we'll willingly give that data. Do you use Siri, Google Now, Cortana or Alexa?

Spring may finally have arrived for artificial intelligence, Google executives said Friday. Speaking at the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, executives said that artificial intelligence and machine learning have advanced to the point where they are proving genuinely useful, through such technologies as speech recognition and language translation. But there remains great room for improvement. "We've seen extraordinary results in fields that hadn't really moved the needle for many years," said John Giannandrea, vice president of engineering for Google. "I think we're in an AI spring right now."

Deep conditional generative models are developed to simultaneously learn the temporal dependencies of multiple sequences. The model is designed by introducing a three-way weight tensor to capture the multiplicative interactions between side information and sequences. The proposed model builds on the Temporal Sigmoid Belief Network (TSBN), a sequential stack of Sigmoid Belief Networks (SBNs). The transition matrices are further factored to reduce the number of parameters and improve generalization. When side information is not available, a general framework for semi-supervised learning based on the proposed model is constituted, allowing robust sequence classification. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art predictive and classification performance on sequential data, and has the capacity to synthesize sequences, with controlled style transitioning and blending.

Life would be pretty dull without imagination. In fact, maybe the biggest problem for computers is that they don't have any. That's the belief motivating the founders of Vicarious, an enigmatic AI company backed by some of the most famous and successful names in Silicon Valley. Vicarious is developing a new way of processing data, inspired by the way information seems to flow through the brain. The company's leaders say this gives computers something akin to imagination, which they hope will help make the machines a lot smarter.

Google's gumdrop-shaped autonomous car looks like something you'd see in a Pixar movie, a cute and cuddly machine that makes the future look fun--until it ambushes you in a crosswalk, traps you like a fly in a web, and whisks you away. That horrific scenario comes to mind reading Google's recently approved patent for what amounts to slathering its cars in glue. To be fair, this has less to do with collecting humans than protecting them. Autonomous vehicles absolutely will reduce collisions and fatalities, but even the most ardent advocates concede one of them eventually will hit a pedestrian. Google engineers believe coating the front of a car with adhesive could prevent someone from bouncing onto the windshield, sliding under the wheels, or flying into the air and landing in the road.

Spring may finally have arrived for artificial intelligence, Google executives said Friday. Speaking at the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, executives said that artificial intelligence and machine learning have advanced to the point where they are proving genuinely useful, through such technologies as speech recognition and language translation. But there remains great room for improvement. "We've seen extraordinary results in fields that hadn't really moved the needle for many years," said John Giannandrea, vice president of engineering for Google. "I think we're in an AI spring right now."