Robotics scientists at the US's Stanford University have achieved a remarkable first: they have successfully sent an automated avatar – which they describe as a robo-mermaid – down to an ancient shipwreck to retrieve a vase from the sunken vessel. La Lune, the flagship of Louis XIV of France, sank 20 miles off the south coast city of Toulon in 1664. Only a few dozen of the hundreds of men on board survived. The wreck, which lies at a depth of 100 metres, had never been disturbed until the OceanOne robot craft reached it two weeks ago and recovered the grapefruit-size vase. The humanoid diving robot was piloted, using virtual reality techniques, by Oussama Khatib, professor of computer science at Stanford.

Currently I'm concerned about incredible overheating of "Artificial Intelligence" boom in Japan - while "Data Scientist" has gone. Google Trends shows Japanese people are getting just less attracted by statistics that is believed to be expertise of Data Scientist, and now they are enthusiastic about Artificial Intelligence. I feel this situation looks much puzzling. So, what's going on in 2015?... yes, I think not a few data science experts in Japan must agree that "Artificial Intelligence" explosively gets popular. Indeed we see a lot of media coverage whose title include "????" (artificial intelligence in Japanese) almost every day.

Ordinarily I greet Facebook events with a big, indifferent yawn. But the Facebook F8 developer show earned my eyeballs (full video replays here). The big question is: why bother? F8's centerpiece announcements pertained to Facebook Messenger – not exactly the app enterprise IT managers are eager to incorporate. But Facebook Messenger is no longer just a place to stalk annoy your old schoolmates. With the debut of several new bot-powered Messenger services, the commercial viability of AI (artificial intelligence) services is a pressing debate.

Forget PC doldrums and waning smartphone demand. Google thinks computers will one day cease being physical devices. "Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the'device' to fade away," Google chief executive officer Sundar Pichai wrote on Thursday in a letter to shareholders of parent Alphabet Inc. "Over time, the computer itself -- whatever its form factor -- will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day." Instead of online information and activity happening mostly on the rectangular touch screens of smartphones, Pichai sees artificial intelligence (AI) powering increasingly formless computers. "We will move from mobile-first to an AI-first world," he said.

It is said of the ancient Chinese game go that the number of possible positions on its board exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe. This is old news, presumably, to masters of go and master mathematicians. To the rest of us it came as something of a shock when it became common knowledge in March, the occasion being the defeat -- shocking in itself -- of a world-ranking go master by a mere (so we would have said, once upon a time) computer. Or perhaps, giving it a positive spin, we should say "victory" instead of "defeat": a computer's victory over a mere human. What is the human brain to make of such facts?

We're made of meat and they're made of silicon, but according to a new study, humans and computers might actually "see" using the same mechanisms. When you break it down, all vision really is, physiologically speaking, the transformation of light into electrical pulses that are then processed in stages by different parts of the brain. Sounds a lot like a computer, doesn't it? But computers aren't as good at reliably "seeing" and recognizing objects as humans are, at least not yet. According to some folks, this is because the brain simply isn't like a computer at all.

We're made of meat and they're made of silicon, but according to a new study, humans and computers might actually "see" using the same mechanisms. When you break it down, all vision really is, physiologically speaking, the transformation of light into electrical pulses that are then processed in stages by different parts of the brain. Sounds a lot like a computer, doesn't it? But computers aren't as good at reliably "seeing" and recognizing objects as humans are, at least not yet. According to some folks, this is because the brain simply isn't like a computer at all.

When Grace Hui moved to Los Angeles from China in 2014 and Googled the Chinese characters for "Los Angeles immigrant," the first result was Chineseinla.com. The Chino Hills-based website, a disorganized Yelp-meets-Craigslist hybrid, was a throwback, and Hui, 29, thought some of the posts were phishing scams. But with more than 680,000 listings, more than 350,000 registered users, 2 million monthly visits and sister sites in 15 cities, Chineseinla.com It's one of the only ways that Hui could connect to a country she couldn't understand. "American Internet is useless to me," said Hui, who used Chineseinla.com

Raibert has been designing walking robots since 1980, when he founded the Leg Lab at Carnegie Mellon University; he later moved the research group to MIT. When I visited the company in 2003, he showed me a video of mountain goats clambering easily up steep terrain and pointed out that "a large part of the earth's surface is inaccessible to vehicles that have wheels or [tank treads]. Yet people and animals can go to all of those places." Boston Dynamics's primary customer was the Pentagon's advanced research arm, known as DARPA. BigDog was pitched as a kind of robotic "pack mule" that would help soldiers carry heavy gear on terrain that was hostile to Humvees.

Taking a break from the tradition where Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin shared the company's progress and vision every year, this time it was Indian-origin CEO Sundar Pichai who updated the world with some of Google's achievements and key highlights. In a letter posted on official Google blog on Friday, Pichai reiterated "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Touching upon artificial intelligence (AI), powerful computing platforms and cloud, he stressed that mobile phone has become the remote control for daily lives and people are communicating, consuming, educating and entertaining themselves on smartphones "in ways unimaginable just a few years ago". "Search -- the very core of Google, comes from mobile and an increasing number of them via voice. The company made this easy and via Google Now, user can get information like the weather in your upcoming vacation spot," he posted.