Microsoft and Facebook have teamed up with US university researchers to train a computer to simulate that same human curiosity and ask similar questions when presented with photos. Their results varied, with some systems better at generating human-like questions than others. At their best, a system asked, "Was anybody hurt in this accident?" At their worst, another posited the nonsensical, ''What caused the fall?' when shown the aftermath of a hurricane. You can see other examples of the machine-generated questions below, labelled GRNN and KNN.

Baidu has made progress in voice recognition, a key branch of AI research, as proven by its voice search function's increasing popularity in China. It is also making headway in developing driverless cars, which involves many AI technologies such as visual and image recognition, decision-making and map navigation, Zhang said.

A drone flies Feb. 27, 2015, over Reims, northwestern France. SAN FRANCISCO -- The national group that represents companies that make and sell drones has split, with those focused on consumers leaving to form their own organization. Four drone companies left the Small UAV Coalition on Thursday. While still tightly aligned with the coalition on big issues, the break-away companies plan to create a still-unnamed group to very specifically focus on consumer issues, said GoPro spokesman Jeff Brown. As the drone market matures, a shifting of needs was inevitable. Larger companies such as Amazon's Prime Air, Alphabet's Google X and others are looking more at drones for delivery, cargo and more commercial uses.

The war film is one of cinema's most enduring genres; nearly every major conflict of the past century has been depicted on screen--multiple times. Films that wrestle with the rapidly changing nature of war, though, are rarer. As drone warfare continues its slow march into public consciousness, Eye in the Sky is the best movie yet to tackle the legal and moral quagmire surrounding modern technological warfare. To do that, Eye in the Sky goes granular, telling the story of one particular mission on one particular day. In the movie, opening wide today, British colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) oversees a secret operation to capture a terrorist cell in Nairobi, Kenya.

With its Colonial-era street patterns, icy winters, notoriously aggressive drivers and high-tech talent, the Boston region would seem the perfect place to test self-driving cars and ensure they can handle anything thrown at them. But the area, and indeed the entire Northeast, has no law outlining how the technology should be driven and tested. And lawmakers who want to respond are being spurned by leaders of the fast-growing industry, who would rather have no rules than a patchwork of state laws getting in their way. "I'm hoping that the New England states will make it possible for us to do this work right at home very soon," said Daniela Rus, a professor who directs the artificial intelligence laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has partnered with Toyota to advance autonomous driving. "We have more flexibility testing our algorithms and self-driving vehicles in Singapore than we do here. It's really onerous to pack up your research and move to a place to test it."

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, however, Ma has realised his childhood dream at the age of 42, by successfully constructing a life-sized 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, modelled after a Hollywood star whose name he wants to keep under wraps. It responds to a set of programmed verbal commands spoken into a microphone. Ma's journey of creation was a lonely one, however.

"I had a half-cup of oatmeal, with two-tablesoons of maple syrup and a cup of coffee. Oh, I put a handful of blueberries in the oatmeal, and there was milk in the coffee. Ask someone what they had for breakfast, and this is the kind of description you might get. And that's one of the reasons keeping track of food intake is such a problem for tech that's meant to help a person lose weight or stick to a diet for other reasons. Logging food for nutrition and calories is important to sticking to a diet, according to Susan Roberts, director of the Boston-based Energy Metabolism Lab at Tufts University. "It makes people more self-aware about the junk they are eating and how little they actually enjoy it, and the shock of huge portions, et cetera.

People often ask how we've been able to learn about and cover so many different and diverse topics in machine learning (using at least three different programming languages - Python, Matlab, and R) and generally achieve such prominence in the community, all this in a relatively short time. Today we finally give a definitive answer. There's no Zygmunt the Polish economist ever willing to relocate to San Francisco. And the "we" that we always use in the posts is not majestic plural. We are three Chinese PhD students: Ah, Hai and Wang.

As cloud computing continues to disrupt traditional business models and big data continues to grow exponentially, techies and investors alike are looking for the top trends that will change how we do business in 2016 and beyond. Hybrid and public cloud services continue to rise in popularity, with investors claiming their stakes. Venture capital firms are investing most heavily in SaaS companies, proving that cloud solutions will be even more lucrative in the future. Don't miss our biggest TNW Conference yet! While some have doubted Dropbox's ability to go public based on its 10 billion valuation, the fact that this leading SaaS company has raised 1.1 billion in six rounds of funding is pretty impressive.

At the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week, MIT researchers presented a new chip designed specifically to implement neural networks. It is 10 times as efficient as a mobile GPU, so it could enable mobile devices to run powerful artificial-intelligence algorithms locally, rather than uploading data to the Internet for processing. Neural nets were widely studied in the early days of artificial-intelligence research, but by the 1970s, they'd fallen out of favor. In the past decade, however, they've enjoyed a revival, under the name "deep learning." "Deep learning is useful for many applications, such as object recognition, speech, face detection," says Vivienne Sze, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at MIT whose group developed the new chip.