China's research on artificial intelligence is moving full steam ahead, as the country's leading Internet company is now assembling a team of experts whose main goal is to turn imagination into reality. Funded by Chinese Internet giant Baidu, the research project dubbed The Verne Plan, named after the French novelist Jules Verne, will be comprised of the world's best science fiction writers and scientists, reported the China Daily. According to the Beijing-based Baidu, it has already invited six people to be part of the team's first group of advisers. The team is composed of Andrew Ng, Baidu's chief scientist, and five science fiction writers, which include Liu Cixin, the first Asian author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel for his book "The Three-Body Problem." Another well-known member of the China-supported study on artificial intelligence is David Brin, an award-winning American author.

Ricky Man, a 42-year-old graphic designer in Hong Kong, spent more than 50,000, and a year-and-a-half designing and constructing an unbelievably lifelike robot...modeled after Oscar-nominated actress, Scarlett Johansson. The robot, who Ricky calls'Mark 1,' has confirmed to be inspired by a "Hollywood star," but Ricky apparently wants to keep the specific name under wraps. Ricky's projection is a culmination of a "childhood dream," and the prototype has, covered in silicone skin, contains a "3D-printed skeleton," which wraps its "mechanical and electronic parts." Despite the isolation in this DIY endeavor, Ricky says he has no regrets, and is hopeful that with the increasing potential of artificial intelligence, he'll be able to sell Mark 1 to a high bidder. Although, something tells me ol' Ricky is going to have a hard time giving up his new friend...

SEOUL – For the past two years, 12-year-old Cho Sung-bin has spent nearly all his waking hours focused on a wooden board covered with black and white stones, honing the skills he hopes to translate into a lucrative career as a professional go player. I never get tired," said Cho, one of dozens of preteens sitting at rows of desks topped with playing boards at the Lee Sedol School of go in central Seoul. Many spend 12 hours a day practicing match play with each other in the small, largely windowless rooms of the school, which is named after the grandmaster they all hope to emulate. Already well known in East Asia, Lee achieved global recognition in March when he took on Google's artificial intelligence AlphaGo program in a five-match showdown. The 33-year-old lost the series, but the battle gave an unprecedented boost to the ancient board game's international profile. Go originated in China 3,000 years ago and has been played for centuries mostly in China, Japan and South Korea, with more than 40 million fans worldwide. Two players take turns placing black or white stones on a square board with a 19-by-19 grid. But the strategies needed to secure victory are complex, with reportedly more possible move configurations than atoms in the universe. "Go is not just an entertainment.

HONG KONG – Like innumerable children with imaginations fired by animated films, Hong Kong product and graphic designer Ricky Ma grew up watching cartoons featuring the adventures of robots, and dreamed of building his own one day. Unlike most of the others, however, Ma has realized his childhood dream at the age of 42, by constructing a life-size robot from scratch on the balcony of his home. The fruit of his labors of a year and a half, and a budget of more than 50,000, is a female robot prototype he calls the Mark 1, modeled after a Hollywood star whose name he wants to keep under wraps but appears to be Scarlett Johansson. It responds to a set of programmed verbal commands spoken into a microphone. "I figured I should just do it when the timing is right and realize my dream. If I realize my dream, I will have no regrets in life," said Ma, who had to learn about fields completely new to him before he could build the complex gadget.

Earlier this month, Google's Go-playing AI wiped the floor with the game's existing world champion. Now, a team of engineers from China plan to challenge AlphaGo with their own artificial intelligence system. Reuters reports that China's state-owned Shanghai Securities News announced the idea yesterday. The report explains that the scientists, who are part of the China Computer Go team, will lay down a challenge for Google before the end of the year. It's not clear what the challenge will be, but presumably it will, you know, involve playing Go.

It wasn't even April 1, but being the overachievers they are, Google had already started releasing its April Fools' Day announcements. Starting yesterday, we spotted a disco-clad pegman on Google Maps, a Google sock-finding app on Google's Australia blog, and a new "Flick" keyboard from Google Japan. There were also two Gmail hacks that rolled out: an emoji-powered smart reply feature and a "Send Mic Drop" option. The Gmail mic drop feature had a number of users up in arms after they unwittingly inserted a mic-dropping Minion gif into emails. By this morning, Google had disabled the prank and apologized for causing more headaches than laughs.

Yann LeCun invited me to speak at this week's inaugural symposium on "The Future of AI" at NYU. It's an amazing gathering of leaders in the field to discuss the state of AI and its continued advancement. Here's what I talked about -- how deep learning is a new software model that needs a new computing model; why AI researchers have adopted GPU-accelerated computing; and NVIDIA's ongoing efforts to advance AI as we enter into its exponential adoption. And why, after all these years, AI has taken off. For as long as we have been designing computers, AI has been the final frontier.

Moviemakers excel at recreating violence and gore on screen. But Will Self asks if we should view fictional violence with more caution. When I was younger I equated viewing such things (and viewing actors performing sexual acts) with some sort of liberty - an existential freedom to be the virile fellow I felt myself to be, and a universal freedom to witness human expression in all its polymorphous perversity. But with age - and possibly, I concede, declining virility - I began to see that pornography entailed the exploitation of vulnerable and mostly young people, while the depictions of violence which bedizen our ubiquitous screens aren't victimless crimes - no matter how enthusiastically those who stage them, may consent. A few years ago Stephen Pinker published a book in which he set out to show that the venerable Dr Pangloss (a character in Voltaire's Candide) was in fact completely right - we are living in the best of possible worlds, while every day, and in every way, things can only get better.

Humans have a long and storied history of freaking out over the possible effects of our technologies. Long ago, Plato worried that writing would hurt people's memories and "implant forgetfulness in their souls." More recently, Mary Shelley's tale of Frankenstein's monster warned us against playing God. Today, as artificial intelligences multiply, our ethical dilemmas have grown thornier. That's because AI can (and often should) behave in ways human creators might not expect.

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during a conference at Buenos Aires' Town Hall, March 23, 2016. WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama acknowledged Friday that "civilians were killed that shouldn't have been" in past U.S. drone strikes, but said the administration is now "very cautious" about striking where women or children are present. Obama was asked at a news conference about an increase in the number of people targeted in drone strikes against extremists in Libya, Syria, Somalia and elsewhere. "In the past, there was legitimate criticism that the legal architecture around the use of drone strikes wasn't as precise as it should have been," Obama said. "There's no doubt that civilians were killed that shouldn't have been."