An historic milestone in artificial intelligence set by Alan Turing - the father of modern computer science - has been achieved at an event organised by the University of Reading. The 65 year-old iconic Turing Test was passed for the very first time by computer programme Eugene Goostman during Turing Test 2014 held at the renowned Royal Society in London on Saturday. 'Eugene' simulates a 13 year old boy and was developed in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The development team includes Eugene's creator Vladimir Veselov, who was born in Russia and now lives in the United States, and Ukrainian born Eugene Demchenko who now lives in Russia. The Turing Test is based on 20th century mathematician and code-breaker Turing's 1950 famous question and answer game, 'Can Machines Think?'.

Baidu has launched a research project on artificial intelligence (AI) called the Verne Plan, and brings together scientists and science fiction writers to turn imagination into reality. China's Internet giant Baidu has launched on April 1 a plan to set up a consulting team that included science fiction writers in its research on artificial intelligence (AI), China Daily reported. The report said that the Baidu Verne Plan is expected to bring together the world's best science fiction writers and leading scientists with the aim to help turn imagination into reality. According to Baidu, they have already invited six people to be the first group of advisers in the team for the project named after the 19th-century French novelist Jules Verne, adding that some of Verne's ideas, such as helicopters, had been realized in the 20th century. Some of the science fiction writers included in the team of five advisers are Liu Cixin, the first Asian author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel last year for his book "The Three-Body Problem," and David Brin, an award-winning author from the United States.

Imagine a human being born on the cusp of a robotic revolution. At first, when the machines take over the economy, Bill is stoked. He wakes up late every morning, smokes some 22nd century weed and then watches TV. His degree in accounting has become worthless, because there is nothing he could do that couldn't be done better by a machine. Bill plugs his brain into a virtual world, becomes obsessed with killing dragons and winning digital gold, and dies shriveled and alone as a level 900 paladin.

China continues to accelerate its bid to grab the initiative in 21st-century robotics and artificial intelligence development as the next emerging global powerhouse. Small wonder that the world's leading manufacturing giant has already raced past the rest of the world as a major user of robots. According to the China Robot Industry Alliance, the country is already a flourishing hub for consumer robotics and is poised for a radical transition from its human-based workforce to an automated Artificial Intelligence or AI-based alternative. Its recent unveiling of the incredibly adept and efficient personal robot BIG-i is a pertinent example. Dubbed "butler," this humanoid is primarily a service robot with the programmed ability to aid homeowners in the performance of a wide variety of household errands.

A slowdown in tech start-up funding has at least one big beneficiary: Walt Disney Co.'s video games division. The entertainment giant is having an easier time finding partners with whom it can develop mobile games, one of its top executives said last week. Why? Up-and-coming companies are losing access to the cash needed to launch games on their own. "As the venture money has dried up and exits have slowed down and valuations have come down, larger game developers that have one or two hits [but not a big stable of them] are now open to work with us in co-development," said Chris Heatherly, senior vice president and general manager at Disney Mobile Games. The comments came during a discussion last week at the L.A. Games Conference with Michael Metzger of investment bank Houlihan Lokey.

Tech giants are active players at the cognitive technologies scene. Alphabet and Facebook proved themselves active acquirers and investors in cognitive tech. Supercomputers, robots and drones are among themes approached by Internet giants. Microsoft, however, seems to be following a differed path: it integrates cognitive technologies into traditional products and makes them smarter. Bill Gates coined the concept of'digital nervous system (DNS)... that ... [provides] a well-integrated flow of information to the right part of the organization at the right time'.

-- Finding meaningful communities in social network has attracted the attentions of many researchers. The community structure of complex networks reveals both their organization and hidd en relations among their constituents. Most of the researches in the field of community detection mainly focus on the topological structure of the network without performing any content analysis. Nowadays, real world social networks are containing a vast r ange of information including shared objects, comments, following information, etc. In recent years, a number of researches have proposed approaches which consider both the contents that are interchanged in the networks and the topological structures of th e networks in order to find more meaningful communities. In this research, the effect of topic analysis in finding more meaningful communities in social networking sites in which the users express their feelings toward different object s (like movies) by the means of rating is demonstrated by performing extensive experiments. With the emergence of social networks, people have been attracted to them, and have been sharing valuable information by means of communicating with each other. For example, folksonomies are social tagging sites which their users collaboratively express th eir feelings and sentiments toward a special resource like a movie or music by means of descriptive keywords (tags) [1] or ratings. One of the most important issues considered when analyzing these kinds of network s is community detection.

Classification Ensemble, which uses the weighed polling of outputs, is the art of combining a set of basic classifiers for generating high-performance, robust and more stable results. This study aims to improve the results of identifying the Persian handwritten letters using Error Correcting Output Coding (ECOC) ensemble method. Furthermore, the feature selection is used to reduce the costs of errors in our proposed method. ECOC is a method for decomposing a multi-way classification problem into many binary classification tasks; and then combining the results of the subtasks into a hypothesized solution to the original problem. Firstly, the image features are extracted by Principal Components Analysis (PCA). After that, ECOC is used for identification the Persian handwritten letters which it uses Support Vector Machine (SVM) as the base classifier. The empirical results of applying this ensemble method using 10 real-world data sets of Persian handwritten letters indicate that this method has better results in identifying the Persian handwritten letters than other ensemble methods and also single classifications. Moreover, by testing a number of different features, this paper found that we can reduce the additional cost in feature selection stage by using this method.

Buddhist monks in China have harnessed technology to create a robot monk. The 2-foot tall robot is called Xian'er and can chant Buddhist mantras, move via voice command and even hold a simple conversation, according to Reuters. Xian'er resembles a novice monk and "lives" at Longquan temple on the outskirts of Beijing. The cartoon-style robot holds a touchscreen to its chest and can answer about 20 questions on Buddhism and daily life. Master Xianfan, Xian'er's creator, described the robot as the perfect vessel for spreading the wisdom of Buddhism in China, via the fusion of science and Buddhism.

In a small startup space just down the street from UC Berkeley's campus, robotics pioneer Homayoon Kazerooni is bragging about how no-frills his invention is. "We're trying to make the Honda," he says, "not the sportscar." Kazerooni is showing me his latest robotic exoskeleton that gives paraplegics and people with mobility problems the ability to stand up from their wheelchairs and walk again. He's been building such bionic systems for more than a decade, and back in 2005 he cofounded Ekso Bionics, the current market leader for exoskeletons. So it's no surprise that Kazerooni says the new device from his new company, SuitX, is the most advanced yet.