Human beings who design intelligent computers have a long history of getting those computers to beat other humans at games to prove how great their computers are. Think IBM's Deep Blue taking down chess legend Garry Kasparov, or the same company's Watson cleaning house on Jeopardy! But there is one game that artificial intelligence has long struggled to master: Go, a board game with roots in ancient China. Go players pick either black stones or white stones, with each player placing one stone of their color every turn. The idea is to capture and remove an opponent's stones by surrounding them with your own.

For human lip readers, context is key in deciphering words stripped of the full nuance of their audio cues. But a technology model for lip-reading developed at the University of East Anglia in the UK has been shown to be able to interpret mouthed words with a greater degree of accuracy than human lip readers, thanks to the application of machine learning tech to classify the visual aspect of sounds. And the kicker is the algorithm doesn't need to know the context of what you're discussing to be able to identify the words you're using. While the model remains a piece of research at this stage, there are scores of potential applications for technology that could automagically transform visual cues into accurate speech -- whether it's helping people who have audio impairments, or enhancing audio-less security video footage with additional speech data -- or even to try to figure out exactly what charged word one footballer spat at another in the heat of a match… Such a tech could also be applied as a fallback for poor audio quality on a mobile or video call. Or even perhaps to power a front-facing camera-based mobile'voice' assistant which you wouldn't actually have to speak to but could just discreetly mouth commands at (how cool would that be?).

Lee Sedol had seen all the tricks. He knew all the moves. As one of the world's best and most experienced players of the complex board game Go, it was difficult to surprise him. But halfway through his first match against AlphaGo, the artificially intelligent player developed by Google DeepMind, Lee was already flabbergasted. AlphaGo's moves throughout the competition, which it won earlier this month, four games to one, weren't just notable for their effectiveness.

LONDON/BRUSSELS – Facial recognition software, scanners that detect weapons and cameras that spot nervous people are some of the technologies that could be used more widely to secure public places, but some would require greater acceptance of surveillance in Europe. The deadly attacks in Brussels on Tuesday highlighted the vulnerability of Europe's airports and transport systems. European Union officials, grappling with the conundrum of how to increase security while retaining the openness of society, have convened meetings to discuss aviation and land transport security. Their goal is to be able to monitor passengers unobtrusively while minimizing additional hold ups that create crowds, which can themselves become new targets. Experts say technology cannot solve the problem on its own, but techniques such as facial recognition able to pick out known suspects can help if Europeans decide they want more surveillance.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The seven Iranian hackers charged with attacking dozens of banks and a small dam near New York City may never see the inside of a courtroom, but U.S. officials hope their "name and shame" tactic sends a message to foreign governments that support such attacks. Indictments announced Thursday by the Justice Department portrayed Tehran-linked hackers reaching into the U.S. infrastructure and disrupting its financial system. It was the first time the FBI attributed a breach of a U.S. computer system that controls critical infrastructure to a hacker linked to a foreign government. None of the individuals is in American custody and it's unclear if they'll ever be arrested or whether criminal indictments in absentia effectively combat such crimes. Publicly naming and shaming such crimes linked to foreign governments is a tactic focused on by the Justice Department since 2012.

New lip-reading technology developed at the University of East Anglia (UEA) could help in solving crimes and provide communication assistance for people with hearing and speech impairments. The visual speech recognition technology, created by Dr Helen L. Bear and Prof Richard Harvey of UEA's School of Computing Sciences, can be applied "any place where the audio isn't good enough to determine what people are saying," Dr Bear said. Dr Bear, whose findings will be presented at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Shanghai on March 25, said unique problems with determining speech arise when sound isn't available - such as on CCTV footage - or if the audio is inadequate and there aren't clues to give the context of a conversation. The sounds '/p/,' '/b/,' and '/m/' all look similar on the lips, but now the machine lip-reading classification technology can differentiate between the sounds for a more accurate translation. Dr Bear said: "We are still learning the science of visual speech and what it is people need to know to create a fool-proof recognition model for lip-reading, but this classification system improves upon previous lip-reading methods by using a novel training method for the classifiers. "Potentially, a robust lip-reading system could be applied in a number of situations, from criminal investigations to entertainment.

TayAndYou was supposed to be a Teenage Girl-like AI for twitter. Microsoft's proof it could create chat bots to do customer service. The problem was Microsoft didn't leave on any training wheels, and didn't make the bot self reflective. We have all had a bad day, and wanted to tell the person who is bugging us that they are acting like a Nazi. Tay, on the other hand, didn't know that she should just ignore the people who act like Nazi's, and so she became one herself.

Soccer aficionados will never forget the headbutt by French soccer great Zinadine Zidane during the 2006 World Cup final. Caught on video camera, Zidane's attack on Italian player Marco Materazzi after a verbal exchange got him a red ticket. He left the field, making it easier for Italy to become world champions. The world found out later about Materazzi's abusive words of Zidane's female relatives. "If we had good lip-reading technology Zidane's reaction could have been explained or they would've both gotten sent out," says Helen Bear, a computer scientist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. "Maybe the match outcome would be different."

Empowering the data-driven organization is a core element of our strategy at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. This can sound like just another fancy marketing campaign – unless you were in a seat at the Seize the Data Analytics World Tour event in Palo Alto. DreamWorks Animation's Jeff Wike presenting at the Silicon Valley event As I sat smiling through the Kung Fu Panda 3 trailer and watched Jeff Wike, Head of Technology for Film and TV Production at DreamWorks Animation, take the stage, I expected to hear how analytics helped DreamWorks Animation analyze how many people watched the film and how they chose to do so - in the theater, on demand, on what device. That information is foundational to any organization in the media industries these days. I didn't expect to hear that the HPE Vertica Advanced Analytics database improved the ability of artists to iterate design and even render panda fur by minimizing compute resources, or how the studio was able to quickly redesign the characters' facial movements when the movie was translated to Mandarin, also due to the power of analytics.

Vinith Misra is one of the funnier people in tech. As a consultant for the hit HBO show Silicon Valley, he's best known for having crafted a mathematically complex dick joke. At IBM, where he works full-time on Watson, part of his job is to figure out how to give a robot a sense of humor. AI "is not about replacing humans, but interacting with them," Misra told me. "That's where humor is super valuable." We're going to be interacting with machines more and more, as robots and smart devices enter our homes, offices, cars, schools, hospitals and workplaces.