The Drone Racing League flew in to the capital this week as machines soared around Wembley Stadium at speeds of 75mph (120km/h). Drones buzzed around the iconic venue and further proved why the sport of drone racing is gaining popularity. The racing was live streamed to spectators for the first time over EE's 4G network at the stadium, with 4G cameras attached to the drones giving people a drone's-eye-view. The event was attended by 16-year-old Luke Bannister, from Somerset, who recently won 174,000 ( 250,000) in the Drone Grand Prix in Dubai. First Person View (FPV) drone racing involves live video being streamed to the pilot's headset to enable split-second manoeuvres. This perspective is usually only available to the team controlling the drone, however for the first time spectators in the stadium and online were also able to'ride' around the stadium.

A Russian photographer has proved how easy it is to track down people on social media using facial recognition software. Yegor Tsvetkov took photos of strangers on St Petersburg's metro and used a facial recognition app which trawls through profiles on VKontakte, Russia's biggest social network, to track down their online profiles. Named "Your Face is Big Data", the series of photographs shows how powerful facial recognition software has become, to the point that a complete stranger can find you at the click of a button. Tsvetkov told the Guardian the project aimed to show technology can affect privacy, particularly if you don't activate the relevant settings on your social media profiles. "Nobody noticed that I photographed them, but I used a simple camera and I didn't try to hide it," he said.

The cutest robo-smartphone ever made is hitting shelves in Japan next month - but is it cute enough to drop almost 1,300? RoBoHoN (which translates roughly as "heart moving phone") is an adorable tiny robot, which doubles up as a smartphone. Or is it a smartphone that doubles up as a robot? Either way, the happy little bot is a surprisingly powerful piece of technology in its own right. Created by Japanese electronics firm Sharp, RoBoHoN is a 20cm tall robot phone. It'll read out phone messages, announce phone calls and even shout at you when it's time to wake up.

The idea that humans are on the verge of developing an artificial intelligence whose abilities far outstrip our own is ridiculous, said Chris Bishop, Microsoft's director of research at Cambridge, highlighting the many limitations of AI systems today. "This is a good moment for a little reality check," he told a public discussion hosted by The Royal Society in London this week. While recent breakthroughs in machine learning have allowed computers to become as adept as the average person at recognising faces and objects and to make huge strides in areas such as voice recognition, Bishop cautioned against assuming that machines are outstripping human performance across the board. "Yes, deep learning has achieved human-level performance in object recognition but what does that mean? It means the machine makes about the same number of errors as the human. "The reason the machine is as good as the human at this is because it can distinguish between 157 varieties of mushroom, whereas it makes all kinds of stupid mistakes that humans wouldn't make." Even some of the most celebrated examples of machine intelligence, such as a Google DeepMind system beating a world champion in the notoriously complex game of Go, need to be understood in context of the time and effort that went into building the system, he said. In 2015, GE inaugurated a new, Multi-Modal manufacturing facility in Chakan, India. If the company's ambitions for the space are realized, it could drive a massive change in global manufacturing. "[Take] the Go example, where the machine has just about crept ahead of the best human.

For the consumer & retail and banking industries, standard features can be configured into customer interaction templates for use in attending to customers or for marketing activities. In addition, Pepper can store information from interacting with customers on the cloud for future analysis, and the data can then be visualized, providing an integrated streamflow through to customer support. Pepper also has sensors to detect anyone approaching it, which enables interaction with that individual. Following the interaction, the new customer information can be reviewed through Interactive Analytics. "We need to know more about Pepper. In ten years, Pepper will be used in ways we never imagined. Accenture is working together with Softbank Robotics to take it to another level, thinking about how it can help solve our client's challenges and how it can be used to provide better customer services."

Saqib Shaikh is a software developer from London, England who is currently working for Microsoft on the firm's Bing search engine. Shaikh lost his sight when he was seven years old. Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) has strived to be a leader in the artificial intelligence arena, developing advanced AI theories and applications that permit machines to learn, evolve and make independent decisions. Microsoft's AI research team is building … Microsoft certainly hasn't been scared off doing further experiments with artificial intelligence after the whole racist bot debacle. The tech firm is back with an AI powered API that can identify (or at least try) what's in a picture.

Iran concluded a major, three-day military exercise Friday intended to review the readiness of its armed forces. The drills, called "Great Prophet," also field-tested new military technology, including the Iranian-made Karrar tank and the Hamasseh drone, Middle East Monitor reported. The Iranian air force, elite units and local forces were involved in the exercise. The drills covered four provinces in Iran's southeast region near the border with Pakistan. The exercises came amid growing tensions in the area over the protracted civil war in Syria and the threat posed by the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS.

In fact, some of Weizenbaum's colleagues and students exhibited very strong emotional connections to the program. As the preceding passage suggests, Weizenbaum discovered something disturbing: people approached the bot as if it were a real, intelligent entity who was genuinely interested in their condition -- even when they knew that it was a computer program. This condition is now referred to as the "Eliza Effect", and although the behaviour of its sufferers isn't always as extreme as the case above (alone time with robots is not consistently requested), it propelled Weizenbaum to become a staunch critic of AI. The Eliza Effect is a prime example of how an object, in this case a typewriter, can form a visceral connection with just a few rudimentary human elements. All it took to elevate a keyboard and screen to a human level was a basic conversational program.

Yemeni government troops newly-trained by a Saudi-led coalition battling Yemen's Shiite rebels routed al-Qaida militants on Friday from a city in the country's south, military officials said. Houta, the capital of Lahj province, is now firmly under government control, the officials said. The coalition-trained troops, which are loyal to Yemen's internationally recognized government, were based in the southern Al-Anad base from where they launched the fight to retake the provincial capital, they added. The officials said the militants fled on Friday from Houta to nearby towns and farmland. The assault came at a time the coalition helicopters and U.S. drones have waged series of airstrikes targeting al-Qaida hideouts and strongholds across Yemen's southern region.

At Facebook's F8 conference in Silicon Valley, David Marcus, the company's head of messaging, proudly demonstrated its new suite of chatbots. Users can now get in a conversation with the likes of CNN, H&M, and HP, and ask for help shopping, or the latest headlines. The chatbots aren't very good, but that doesn't mean Facebook isn't proud of them anyway: "I guarantee you're going to spend way more money than you want on this," Marcus chuckled on stage. But even though Facebook might want to sell itself as the pioneer of chatbots, the real leaders in the field aren't working in the AI research teams of silicon valley; they're collaborating at events like last week's BotSummit in the V&A, or this weekend's Art of Bots exhibition in Somerset House. Move over chatbots: it's time to meet the artbots. BotSummit, now in its fourth year but held outside the US for the first time, is the creation of internet artist Darius Kazemi, whose medium he describes as "bots and generators and other weird internet stuff".