There's huge progress in AI, or at least huge interest in AI--a bigger interest than there's ever been in my lifetime. I've been interested in AI since I was a little kid trying to program computers to play chess, and do natural language databases, and things like that, though not very well. I've watched the field and there have been ups and downs. There were a couple of AI winters where people stopped paying attention to AI altogether. People who were doing AI stopped saying that they were in the field of AI. They say, "Yes, I do artificial intelligence," where two years ago they would have said, "I do statistics." Even though there's a lot of hype about AI and a lot of money being invested in AI, I feel like the field is headed in the wrong direction. There's been a local maximum where there's a lot of low-hanging fruit right now in a particular direction, which is mainly deep learning and big data. People are very excited about the big data and what it's giving them right now, but I'm not sure it's taking us closer to the deeper questions in artificial intelligence, like how we understand language or how we reason about the world. The big data paradigm is great in certain scenarios. One of the most impressive advances is in speech recognition. You can now dictate into your phone and it will transcribe most of what you say right most of the time. That doesn't mean it understands what you're saying. Each new update of Siri adds a new feature. First, you could ask about movie times, then sports, and so forth. The natural language understanding is coming along slowly. You wouldn't be able to dictate this conversation into Siri and expect it to come out with anything whatsoever. But you could get most of the words right, and that's a big improvement. It turns out that it works best with a lot of brute force data available. When you're doing speech recognition on white males, who are native language speakers, in a quiet room, it works pretty well.

Humanity may be wiped out by machines this century – leading AI scientist. It took millions of years of evolution for nature to come up with something that changed the face of the planet forever – the human brain. Now, the new mind is to be born, and the best cyber scientists will be its midwife. Artificial Intelligence is said to be just decades away from creation, and it will probably change life on Earth entirely. Some predict the coming of Utopia, where machines will help humanity fight disease, poverty and even death. But that's as others see a way more darker future, with machines rising up to eradicate humankind once and for all.

Merging beliefs requires the plausibility of the sources of the information to be merged. They are typically assumed equally reliable in lack of hints indicating otherwise; yet, a recent line of research spun from the idea of deriving this information from the revision process itself. In particular, the history of previous revisions and previous merging examples provide information for performing subsequent mergings. Yet, no examples or previous revisions may be available. In spite of the apparent lack of information, something can still be inferred by a try-and-check approach: a relative reliability ordering is assumed, the merging process is performed based on it, and the result is compared with the original information. The outcome of this check may be incoherent with the initial assumption, like when a completely reliable source is rejected some of the information it provided. In such cases, the reliability ordering assumed in the first place can be excluded from consideration. The first theorem of this article proves that such a scenario is indeed possible. Other results are obtained under various definition of reliability and merging.

For someone who is in need of an organ transplant, every second counts. To save more lives, a group of scientists in India have designed a new method of transportation that is much faster than hauling them in the back of an ambulance. Called, Rs 100-crore National Programme for Micro Air, the project is set to use unmanned aerial vehicles to delivery of hearts and other vital organs, cutting time by more than 50 percent. A group of scientists from India are working on a way that will transport hearts and vital organs much faster than hauling them in the back of an ambulance. Currently the team has two options: design a drone with technology to preserve organs or variants that are able to carry the organ in a special box.

In an effort to make its apps more conversational, Google fed its AI engine a whopping 2,865 romance novels so it can improve its understanding of language. The idea is to improve the way Google products respond to users. Software engineer Andrew Dai, who led the project, told BuzzFeed News that this sort of work could help make the responses from the company's search app, as well as the'Smart Reply' feature in Inbox, more natural and varied. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching! Dai added that romance novels are great for training AI because they mostly follow the same plot – allowing the AI to focus on picking up nuances of language.

Very interesting data compiled and analyzed by O'Reilly, using statistical models such as Lasso regression to predict salary based on different factors. It reminds me our own analysis based on simulated (but realistic) data, to assess whether having Python or R (or both) commands a bigger salary, and what is the extra boost provided by these skills, individually. The statistical model used was Jackknife regression, and it was designed for tutorial purposes. The O'Reilly survey is much bigger, based on real data, and it includes many factors, as well as factor selection. It uses standard statistical techniques which might be less robust than Jackknife regression.

SpaceX has successfully landed a rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean, for the second month in a row, following a Japanese satellite mission. The unmanned SpaceX rocket blasted off from Florida early this morning to put the communications satellite into orbit, with the launch vehicle's main-stage booster completing a quick return landing on the floating platform. Due to the high altitude of the mission, SpaceX did not expect a successful landing, but the Falcon 9 rocket touched down on the drone platform - nicknamed Of Course I Still Love You - just over eight minutes after launching. SpaceX has successfully landed a rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean after a delivering a Japanese satellite into orbit early this morning, and is the second rocket to successfully land in the space of a month. A company webcast showed the 23-story-tall rocketsoaring off a seaside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air ForceStation at 1:21 am EDT (06:21 BST).

For over 60 years, KFC restaurants have been serving the same secret original recipe to patrons. But Colonel Sanders is going against tradition with a new concept store located in Shanghai, China that lets customers order fried chicken from a voice activated robot. Dubbed'Dumi', the robot is smart enough to handle order changes and substitutes, but its creators say it cannot distinguish other dialects or accents. Colonel Sanders is going against tradition with a new concept store located in Shanghai, China that lets customers order fried chicken from a voice activated robot. Dubbed'Dumi', the high-tech automation can handle order changes, as well as substitutes – but it cannot distinguish other dialects or accents Dumi is a voice activated robot employed at a concept KFC store called'Original '.

If the BA incident had involved a drone, I might have had mixed feelings. Last summer, I was testing a drone. To evaluate the device and its camera, I wanted to find a safe, yet picturesque place to fly. I chose a quiet stretch of beach, a short bus ride south of where I live in Spain. I say quiet: That was until two police officers rolled over the sand dunes on quad bikes and told me to stop.

Mario the plumber may have got there first, but Sonic was always going to catch up. The Strong museum in Rochester, New York, has announced the latest six inductees to its video game hall of fame – and Sega's iconic hedgehog is among them. Also making the grade for this renowned collection of seminal game titles is interactive soap opera The Sims, gangster adventure Grand Theft Auto III, role-playing favourite Legend of Zelda, educational title Oregon Trail and one of the titles that helped kickstart the video gaming industry, Space Invaders. Strong began its world video game hall of fame last year, introducing the concept with the opening six entrants: Doom, Tetris, Pac-Man, Pong, Super Mario Bros and World of Warcraft. The nomination process is open to the public, but the final annual inductees are chosen by a panel of journalists and game scholars.