Earlier this month, headlines were made around the world when Google's artificial intelligence, dubbed AlphaGo, was able to beat the current world champion in four out of five matches of the ancient board game Go. Now the bot may have to face an opponent of its own type: a group of Chinese computer engineers have announced that they plan to challenge Google, pitting AlphaGo against their own AI program. The scientists are part of the China Computer Go team, and the announcement was made at an event hosted by the Chinese Go Association and the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence. It was said that the challenge will be made before the end of 2016, but exact details of what that will include weren't mentioned, other that the fact that it will involve the game of Go. AlphaGo's win over 33-year-old Lee Sedol came as a bit of a surprise, as the Go champion was seen as a much stronger opponent and expected to win, despite the fact that the program had become the world's first AI to defeat a human in the game last year when it bested a professional player.

WIRED Health 2016 takes place on 29 April in London. IBM's Watson supercomputer is perhaps best known for winning the gameshow Jeopardy, but its expertise is now being applied to healthcare Kyu Rhee will be speaking at WIRED Health 2016 on 29 April in London. From helping humans live longer to understanding the brain, WIRED Health will hear from the innovators transforming this critical sector. You might know IBM's Watson best for its victory on US game show Jeopardy!, or perhaps for its cookery prowess, or even the campaign to elect it to the US presidency. But IBM hopes that its supercomputer can also change the way doctors diagnose their patients, putting vast quantities of data at a physician's fingertips.

If you've seen the movie Her, or perhaps Iron Man, you'll know what the future of tech looks like. AI is coming and it's coming in a big way. It's here to make our lives easier and simpler, or at least, that's what all the big tech giants would have us believe. AI is nothing new, IBM has been experimenting with Watson for a couple of years. But powerful, enormous tech such as Watson is far removed from the lives of everyday people like you or me.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your fluid-filled Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few 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. MIT has developed a 3D printer that can mix solids and liquids. With "printable hydraulics," an inkjet printer deposits individual droplets of material that are each 20 to 30 microns in diameter, or less than half the width of a human hair.

A senior Egyptian al-Qaida figure fighting in Syria was killed in a U.S. drone strike this week, the latest to be killed in such attacks in Syria, a Syrian opposition monitoring group and relatives said Friday. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Rifai Ahmad Taha was killed in a strike Tuesday in the northwestern Idlib province. Before joining al-Qaida, Taha was a top figure in Egypt's notorious militant group Gamaa Islamiya, which massacred 58 foreign tourists in the ancient Egyptian city of Luxor in 1997. He was also allied with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. The Observatory's chief Rami Abdurrahman said several al-Qaida members, including Taha, were killed in Tuesday's strike.

Synopsis: There is more to Text Mining than TDM and TF-IDF. Come explore the world of Sentiment Analysis using Advanced Text Mining techniques with cutting edge tools like Stanford's CoreNLP and analysing it's output using Python. Speaker: Aditya Shankar is a Lecturer in the Intelligent Systems practice at the Institute of Systems Science in the National University of Singapore. He started his career consulting for Microsoft in Redmond, WA, Nike in Portland, OR and T-Mobile in Seattle, WA. He then moved on to work for companies in the Healthcare domain, mostly healthcare providers in Tennessee.

The U.S. unveiled the prototype of an autonomous, experimental warship Thursday that would drastically reduce the cost of operations at sea and mark progress in the move toward robotic warfare. It comes as the military has increasingly aimed to boost unmanned technology to counter Chinese and Russian investments. "This is an inflection point," Deputy U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Work told Reuters in an interview. "This is the first time we've ever had a totally robotic, trans-oceanic-capable ship." Work said he hoped unmanned ships would be stationed in the western Pacific within as few as five years.

The US has officially christened its experimental self-driving warship designed to hunt for enemy submarines for months at a time. The 132ft-long (40-metre) unarmed prototype, dubbed Sea Hunter, is the naval equivalent of Google's self-driving car, designed to cruise on the ocean's surface without a crew. The ship's projected 20 million ( 14.2 million) price tag and its 15,000 ( 10,650) to 20,000 ( 14,300) daily operating cost make it relatively inexpensive for the navy. The 132ft-long (40-metre) unarmed prototype, dubbed Sea Hunter, is the naval equivalent of Google's self-driving car, designed to cruise on the ocean's surface without a crew. The ship's projected 20 million ( 14.2 million) price tag and its 20,000 ( 14,300) daily operating cost make it relatively inexpensive for the navy The vessel was unveiled by Deputy US Defense Secretary Robert Work and has been developed by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).

In an age when technology companies routinely introduce new forms of everyday magic, one problem that remains seemingly unsolved is that of long-form transcription. Sure, voice dictation for documents has been conquered by Nuance's Dragon software. Our phones and smart home devices can understand fairly complex commands, thanks to self-teaching recurrent neural nets and other 21st century wonders. However, the task of providing accurate transcriptions of long blocks of actual human conversation remains beyond the abilities of even today's most advanced software. When solved on a broad scale, it is a problem that might unlock vast archives of oral histories, make podcasts easier to consume for speed-readers (tl;dl), and be a world-changing boon for journalists everywhere, liberating precious hours of sweet life.

In what they called a milestone achievement for artificial intelligence, scientists said on Wednesday they have created a computer program that beat a professional human player at the complex board game called Go, which originated in ancient China. The feat recalled IBM supercomputer Deep Blue's 1997 match victory over chess world champion Garry Kasparov. But Go, a strategy board game most popular in places like China, South Korea and Japan, is vastly more complicated than chess. "Go is considered to be the pinnacle of game AI research," said artificial intelligence researcher Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, the British company that developed the AlphaGo program. "It's been the grand challenge, or holy grail if you like, of AI since Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess."