People in India can now open an account with a bank that's only accessible via mobile devices. Called Digibank, it's staffed by chatbots intelligent enough to answer thousands of questions submitted via chat. The machine-learning-based technology is a product of Kasisto, a New York startup that spun out of the company that created Apple's Siri assistant. Kasisto trained its KAI artificial-intelligence platform with millions of questions asked by customers during their banking experiences. "A lot of the bots that are out there are what we would consider'dumb bots.' It's very easy to break them, and it's very easy to ask an out-of-context question, and they just don't know how to handle it," says Dror Oren, Kasisto vice president of product.

US-based conglomerate GE has signed an agreement with the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT Madras), to set up an Industrial Internet Centre of Excellence. The Centre is being designed to develop applications that will help companies save costs. The first of these will be the Digital Twin of an aluminium smelter. According to senior company officials, GE would invest around Rs 3 crore in the first six months and could commit around Rs 30 crore over five years depending upon the outcome. Aluminium smelters are refineries for extracting the metal from aluminium oxide, separating it from oxygen through a chemical reaction.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers recently developed a tiny robot that can unfold itself from a biodegradable capsule once ingested, and then crawl across the stomach to remove swallowed items like battery buttons. The days of waiting for a swallowed item to pass through the body may soon be gone, thanks to a tiny pill-size origami robot. Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers recently developed a tiny robot that can unfold itself from a biodegradable capsule once ingested, and then crawl across the stomach to remove swallowed items like button batteries. Each year 3,500 button cell batteries are swallowed, according to the National Capital Poison Center. While they typically pass through the body without incident, if they come into prolonged contact with the stomach or esophagus they can cause internal burning, according to an MIT statement.

Yes, that movie based on the classic puzzle game Tetris is really happening. A live-action science fiction movie based on the block-stacking puzzler will be co-produced by Threshold Entertainment Group and China's Seven Star Works, the companies revealed in a joint statement Tuesday. The project, carrying a budget of 80 million, starts shooting in China in 2017. The Tetris film is the first movie in a joint venture between the two companies to produce and finance film under Threshold Global Studios. Threshold Entertainment Group is run by veteran film producer Larry Kasanoff, who worked on another series of notable video game adaptations based on Mortal Kombat.

It is one of the trickiest inflight manoeuvres performed by military fighter pilots, but now drones have shown they too can refuel in mid-air. Engineers in China have developed a way for drones to be able to carry out autonomous aerial refuelling (AAR). It could enable unmanned aircraft to carry out longer missions over greater distances without having to return to base for refueling. Engineers have developed drones that can refuel in midair. The tanker (right) uses cameras and markers to establish the position of the receiver (left).

Peering through wire-rim glasses, he places the black stone on the board, in a mostly empty zone, just below and to the left of a single white stone. In Go parlance it is a "shoulder hit," in from the side, far away from most of the game's other action. Across the table, Lee Sedol, the best Go player of the past decade, freezes. He looks at the 37 stones fanned out across the board, then stands up and leaves. In the commentary room, about 50 feet away, Michael Redmond is watching the game via closed-circuit.

Donald Trump has promised that "we're gonna get Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country, instead of in other countries." He said this at a speech at Virginia's Liberty University and several other events. It is very likely that he is not serious; Trump tends to say things he couldn't possibly mean. But he did raise an intriguing question about whether Apple -- and other American companies -- could bring manufacturing back to the United States. When American companies moved manufacturing to China, it was all about cost.

This article considers the issue of opacity as a problem for socially consequential mechanisms of classification and ranking, such as spam filters, credit card fraud detection, search engines, news trends, market segmentation and advertising, insurance or loan qualification, and credit scoring. These mechanisms of classification all frequently rely on computational algorithms, and in many cases on machine learning algorithms to do this work. In this article, I draw a distinction between three forms of opacity: (1) opacity as intentional corporate or state secrecy, (2) opacity as technical illiteracy, and (3) an opacity that arises from the characteristics of machine learning algorithms and the scale required to apply them usefully. The analysis in this article gets inside the algorithms themselves. I cite existing literatures in computer science, known industry practices (as they are publicly presented), and do some testing and manipulation of code as a form of lightweight code audit. I argue that recognizing the distinct forms of opacity that may be coming into play in a given application is a key to determining which of a variety of technical and non-technical solutions could help to prevent harm. This article considers the issue of opacity as a problem for socially consequential mechanisms of classification and ranking, such as spam filters, credit card fraud detection, search engines, news trends, market segmentation and advertising, insurance or loan qualification, and credit scoring. These are just some examples of mechanisms of classification that the personal and trace data we generate is subject to every day in network-connected, advanced capitalist societies. These mechanisms of classification all frequently rely on computational algorithms, and lately on machine learning algorithms to do this work. Opacity seems to be at the very heart of new concerns about'algorithms' among legal scholars and social scientists. The algorithms in question operate on data. Using this data as input, they produce an output; specifically, a classification (i.e. They are opaque in the sense that if one is a recipient of the output of the algorithm (the classification decision), rarely does one have any concrete sense of how or why a particular classification has been arrived at from inputs.

While companies like Amazon and Google are racing to develop advanced warehouse robots, a small German company believes it has an advantage that these companies don't: Their robots can see. Magazino, established in 2014 and currently backed by Siemens, has created a warehouse robot with advanced computer vision called TORU that can accurately identify and pick items off a shelf, "store them in their little back pack, and bring them to a sorting machine," said Frederick Brantner, CEO and cofounder of the company. Go with TechRepublic's Steve Ranger on an inside look at the gold-plated gadget market that's received a big boost from Apple. At the moment, most warehouse robots, like Amazon's Kiva, can move entire pallets or shelves, but don't have cameras. "They only drive to a fixed point," said Brantner.

Mitsubishi Electric has developed what may be a crucial next step in the development of artificial intelligence systems. Its "compact AI" technology eliminates the need for large servers and can be embedded in a far wider scope of devices and machines than existing AI systems can. The company says that, by filtering information necessary for analysis, the new technology can drastically reduce the processes involved in computation for AI systems. The development can trim the computation needed for certain tasks by as much as 90%, according to Mitsubishi Electric. It plans to start offering applications for compact AI technology, such as autonomous driving systems and smarter industrial robots and machine tools, as early as 2017, a company source said.