Have you ever begun a Google search, only to click on the words the box lays before you? Tagged a friend's face when Facebook prompted it? Have you spoken to your iPhone? The artificial intelligence technology behind these tools is neither self-aware nor homicidal. But they are driven by a computational technique called machine learning, which is, at its simplest, a way to teach machines to teach themselves.

On The Tonight Show, in March 1978, the late astronomer Carl Sagan had lots to talk about. He had just published Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence--which would win the Pulitzer Prize--and Star Wars, released the year before, still captivated the public's imagination. When Johnny Carson, the show's then-host, asked Sagan to expand on some comments he'd made prior to the evening, about the film's indifference to scientific accuracy, Sagan said the "11-year-old in me loved" it, but it "could have made a better effort to do things right." His critique would resonate today: After making the biological point that the Star Wars scenario--humans evolving long ago, in a faraway galaxy--is vastly improbable, Sagan said there's another problem: "They're all white." Carson, pushing back a bit, said, "They did have a scene in Star Wars with a lot of strange characters."

Recent advances in neural variational inference have spawned a renaissance in deep latent variable models. In this paper we introduce a generic variational inference framework for generative and conditional models of text. While traditional variational methods derive an analytic approximation for the intractable distributions over latent variables, here we construct an inference network conditioned on the discrete text input to provide the variational distribution. We validate this framework on two very different text modelling applications, generative document modelling and supervised question answering. Our neural variational document model combines a continuous stochastic document representation with a bag-of-words generative model and achieves the lowest reported perplexities on two standard test corpora. The neural answer selection model employs a stochastic representation layer within an attention mechanism to extract the semantics between a question and answer pair. On two question answering benchmarks this model exceeds all previous published benchmarks.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your edgy Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. IHMC has managed to get their ATLAS balancing on the edge of cinder blocks, balancing itself with outstretched arms as it does so. The robot is able to detect and explore partial footholds (in this case line contacts).

Google's secretive AI division is working on a'big red button' that can halt its artificial intelligence software. Researchers have previously warned that AI could threaten humanity, with doomsday scenarios of AIs taking over, with one expert involved in the new paper admitting Google's historic win over Go world champion proves AI can be'unpredictable and immoral'. Now the DeepMind team say they have the answer - an off switch. Google's DeepMind team say AI agents are'unlikely to behave optimally all the time' and have called for'safe interruptibility' to be built into systems. Google has set up an ethics board to oversee its work in artificial intelligence.

Almost two decades ago, Google was just a search engine with a textbox and a promising algorithm that curated the ever growing internet into a list of blue links. As technology paced further, the Mountain View based company invested in a bunch of rising platforms and ideas that revolved around the future of the World Wide Web. Spreading across soon enough, their growth skyrocketed eliminating major tech leaders from the market. Moreover, industry's dependencies grew more on Google when they inhibited the responsibility of improving 80% of the smartphones around the globe. However, in the past year or so, smartphone manufacturers have been unable to maintain the wow factor in their products.

"About 6,000 languages are currently spoken in the world today," says Elizabeth Salesky of MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Human Language Technology (HLT) Group. "Within the law enforcement community, there are not enough multilingual analysts who possess the necessary level of proficiency to understand and analyze content across these languages," she continues. This problem of too many languages and too few specialized analysts is one Salesky and her colleagues are now working to solve for law enforcement agencies, but their work has potential application for the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community. The research team is taking advantage of major advances in language recognition, speaker recognition, speech recognition, machine translation, and information retrieval to automate language processing tasks so that the limited number of linguists available for analyzing text and spoken foreign languages can be used more efficiently. "With HLT, an equivalent of 20 times more foreign language analysts are at your disposal," says Salesky.

Awesome Con is a place to celebrate comic books, movies, television, toys, and games – and beginning this year, science and technology are joining the party at the inaugural Awesome Con Science Fair presented by Science Channel! Maybe you wanna learn more about cloning. You're probably terrified of robotics. The worlds of science fiction and science fact overlap, and we're excited to now expand Awesome Con and create new awareness, advocacy, and interest in all things nerdy, techy, wonky, and smart! The Awesome Con Science Fair presented by Science Channel's participants include Science Channel (obviously), NASA, the Smithsonian, the Department of Energy, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office, the Society for Science and the Public, and Nerd Nite!

Creators of the popular game revealed this week that Minecraft has now been sold more than 100 million times – and a few copies have even made it to Antarctica. The figures combine sales from PC, console, and mobile versions of the game to create a user-base that'includes folks from every country and territory on the planet.' Creators of the popular game revealed this week that Minecraft has now been sold more than 100 million times – and a few copies have even made it to Antarctica. The figures combine sales from PC, console, and mobile versions of the game to create a user-base that'includes folks from every country and territory on the planet' Minecraft was created in 2009. At the start of the game, a player is put into a'virtually infinite game world.'

Mandarin Chinese is a notoriously difficult language to learn -- a labyrinth of semantic tones, elaborate characters and obscure idiomatic phrases. And in China, a land of infinite linguistic diversity, the government has spent decades struggling to unify the country under that one language, not without some controversy. David Moser, the author of "A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language," who has lived in China for more than two decades, talks about the thorny politics of Mandarin Chinese, which is known in Chinese as Putonghua. There are aspects of Chinese that make it hard for foreigners to learn, and there are aspects that make it difficult for native Chinese. I think the one that gets the most press -- and is in some sense the most controversial -- is the Chinese characters.