Founded in 2011, HackRead is based in Dubai, UAE.

Apple has revealed a 29 armed robot that can rip apart an iPhone in 11 seconds for recycling. It is hoped the machine will help recycle silver, tungsten and other metals from the handsets. The system started to operate at full capacity last month and can take apart one iPhone 6 every 11 seconds to recover aluminum, copper, tin, tungsten, cobalt, gold and silver parts, according to Apple. The system started to operate at full capacity last month and can take apart one iPhone 6 every 11 seconds to recover aluminum, copper, tin, tungsten, cobalt, gold and silver parts, according to Apple. It has already been installed near Apple's HQ in Cupertino, and it plans to build a second in Europe.

Engineers are testing a new robot rescue system in the Greek islands, hoping it will be able to save some refugees while trying to cross from Turkey to Greece.

"I wish I could touch you," Theodore says, laying in bed. Until she speaks up, tentatively. "How would you touch me?" It's a famously poignant scene from the movie Her, as the character Theodore is about to make vocal love to an artificial intelligence living in his ear. But according to half a dozen experts I interviewed, ranging from industrial designer Gadi Amit to the usability guru Don Norman, in-ear assistants aren't science fiction. In fact, a notable pile of discreet, wireless earbuds enabling just this idea are coming to market now. Sony recently released its first in-ear assistant, the Xperia Ear. Intel showed off a similar proof-of-concept last year. The talking, bio-monitoring Bragi Dash will be reaching early Kickstarters soon, while fellow startup Here has raised 17 million to compete in the smart earbud space.

When a person's intelligence is tested, there are exams. When artificial intelligence is tested, there are games. But what happens when computer programs beat humans at all of those games? This is the question AI experts must ask after a Google-developed program called AlphaGo defeated a world champion Go player in four out of five matches in a series that concluded Tuesday. Long a yardstick for advances in AI, the era of board-game testing has come to an end, said Murray Campbell, an IBM research scientist who was part of the team that developed Deep Blue, the first computer program to beat a world chess champion.

Google's AlphaGo computer program has won a third and decisive encounter with a top-ranked player of the Chinese board game Go in a victory marking significant developments in artificial intelligence. Lee Sedol, who is the world's second best player of the strategy game, lost three games in a row in Seoul this week, with the latest AlphaGo victory on Saturday handing Google the best-of-five match. "I've never played a game where I felt this amount of pressure, and I wasn't able to overcome this pressure," Lee said at a post-game press conference. Go has simple rules, but is highly intuitive and complex in practice. Mastering it has been an exceptionally difficult task for even the world's best IT designers.

China's leading Internet-search company, Baidu, has developed a voice system that can recognize English and Mandarin speech better than people, in some cases. The new system, called Deep Speech 2, is especially significant in how it relies entirely on machine learning for translation. Whereas older voice-recognition systems include many handcrafted components to aid audio processing and transcription, the Baidu system learned to recognize words from scratch, simply by listening to thousands of hours of transcribed audio. The technology relies on a powerful technique known as deep learning, which involves training a very large multilayered virtual network of neurons to recognize patterns in vast quantities of data. The Baidu app for smartphones lets users search by voice, and also includes a voice-controlled personal assistant called Duer (see "Baidu's Duer Joins the Personal Assistant Party").

Fighting cyber attacks with artificial intelligence The next frontier of anti-virus software is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to not only predict what threats are out there, but to also actively fight back before they strike. This is according to American-based Cylance's chief marketing officer, Greg Fitzgerald, speaking at the NetEvents Press and Analyst Summit in Rome, Italy.The company says it is "revolutionising cyber security through the use of AI and machine learning to proactively prevent advanced persistent threats and malware". Cylance today announced it is expanding into the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) with the establishment of a London-based team led by Evan Davidson, former enterprise sales director at FireEye. It also established a channel partnership with CoreSec Systems, which supplies cyber security and networking solutions in Sweden and Denmark.

It was hailed as the most significant test of machine intelligence since Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess nearly 20 years ago. Google's AlphaGo has won two of the first three games against grandmaster Lee Sedol in a Go tournament, showing the dramatic extent to which AI has improved over the years. That fateful day when machines finally become smarter than humans has never appeared closer--yet we seem no closer in grasping the implications of this epochal event. Late last year, SpaceX co-founder Elon Musk warned that AI could take over the world, sparking a flurry of commentary both in condemnation and support. For such a monumental future event, there's a startling amount of disagreement about whether or not it'll even happen, or what form it will take.

Social networking giant Facebook is using its artificial intelligence (AI) technology and resources to map the entire Earth and launch the world's most detailed population maps that will help it beam cheap internet to remote areas. To begin with, the Facebook AI team crunched 14.6 billion images of maps from across 20 countries, including India, covering 21.6 million sq kms to come up with the first detailed map of human settlement for these countries. "This is an impressive project from our team developing solar-powered planes for beaming down internet connectivity and our AI research team. Many people live in remote communities and accurate data on where people live doesn't always exist," wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a latest post. The 20 countries mapped were Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Madagascar, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.