I've been told it helps to take a deep breath. But unfortunately, I cannot do that." The setting is a competitive debate being held at Watson West, IBM's AI outpost in San Francisco's tech-centric SOMA neighborhood. Noa is Noa Ovadia, a champion debater from Israel. The speaker greeting her is her opponent--whose inability to breathe deeply makes perfect sense given that it's a piece of software, generating Siri-like female speech that emanates from a human-sized black column with a screen on its front. This is indeed the first time that the software in question, Project Debater, has shown its stuff outside of secret trial runs. Since 2012, IBM Research has been teaching it to debate humans on a vast array of subjects--making it a successor to Deep Blue (which beat Garry Kasparov in a six-game chess match in 1997) and Watson (which won a Jeopardy tournament against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011). That was good enough to make the exhibition a success in the eyes of Noam Slonim, a senior technical staff member at IBM's research center in Haifa, Israel and the person who originally proposed the Project Debater idea in 2011. The effort now includes dozens of researchers at multiple IBM labs and is led by Slonim's Haifa colleague Ranit Aharonov. Merely seeing the software keep the audience engaged over a 20-minute debate "was a very positive feeling," he tells me at a post-debate reception. Witnessing a computer thrash the Kasparovs and Jenningses of competitive debating at their own craft would be an epoch-shifting moment, but "our goal is not to develop yet another system that is better than humans in doing something," stresses Aharonov. Instead, IBM wants to create debating software that can spar with "a reasonably competent human, but not necessarily a world champion, and come across holding its own," says IBM director of research Arvind Krishna. Still, even if the company is keeping its aspirations in check, its latest adventure in AI involves challenges unlike any it's tackled before. Soon after Watson bested Jennings and Rutter in a tournament taped at IBM's Yorktown, N.Y. research center in January 2011, the company began to think about how to top that memorable feat of artificial intelligence. "All of the thousands of researchers … got the same email asking what should be the next AI grand challenge that IBM Research should pursue," remembers Slonim. The goal, he explains, was to come up with a project that was "scientifically interesting and challenging and would have some business value.

Malicious, fake versions of Fortnite for Android are spreading through the internet, despite the game not actually being released. The game has now been launched on just about every platform, having come to the Switch this month. But Android phones are still lacking – they won't be getting the game until later this year. That has meant that a rush of apps have been put onto the internet to try and make the most of that demand. Many of them are being advertised on YouTube, to try and trick people who are searching to find out how they can get hold of the game.

It may not feel like it before a morning coffee, but people are most go-getting before 9am. Rush hour is the time when we think most about work, power, money and achievement, a study has found. After dinner, we are more likely to be preoccupied with sex and relationships, and the early hours are when we think about life's problems. That's according to a study of 800 million tweets by people shows how our priorities shift during the day. The study suggests that despite the working day being done, people are more angry at night, which may explain the number of Twitter outbursts after a few glasses of wine and close to bedtime.

Immuta Inc., the data management for AI vendor, said it will use a $20 million funding round to establish a European beachhead in London as it sharpens its focus on helping enterprises develop "ethical" AI algorithms that comply with new European privacy rules as well as possible U.S. data privacy regulations. The Series B funding round announced Wednesday (June 20) was led by DFJ Growth and joined by new investors Citi Ventures and Dell Technologies Capital. The startup's customers include banks such as Barclays (NASDAQ: DTYS), insurers and U.S. intelligence agencies. Immuta's data management platform is designed to provide greater control of the data fed into algorithms, speeding deployment as well as increasing visibility into how automation tools are functioning. The goals include "controls around data science" Immuta CEO Matthew Carroll said in an interview, along with helping enterprises get a handle on what he called "analytics ethics."

Silicon Valley is in the middle of an awakening, the dawning but selective realization that their products can be used to achieve terrible ends. In the past few months, this growing unease has bubbled up into outright rebellion from within the rank and file of some of the largest companies in the Valley, beginning in April when Google employees balked at the company's involvement with a Pentagon artificial intelligence program called Project Maven. On Monday, Amazon shareholders sent an open letter asking CEO Jeff Bezos to halt a program developing facial recognition software for governments pending a review by the board of directors. Also this week, as general horror built up over the Trump administration's new "zero tolerance" immigration policy, which has led to the separation of more than 2,000 children from their parents, Microsoft employees objected to their company's contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use Microsoft's Azure cloud services. "We are part of a growing movement, comprised of many across the industry who recognize the grave responsibility that those creating powerful technology have to ensure what they build is used for good, and not for harm," reads an open letter posted to the company's internal message board Tuesday.

Dana Bowman, 56, expresses gratitude for fresh produce at least 10 times in the hour and a half we're having coffee on a frigid spring day in Lindsay, Ontario. Over the many years she scraped by on government disability payments, she tended to stick to frozen vegetables. She'd also save by visiting a food bank or buying marked-down items near or past their sell-by date. But since December, Bowman has felt secure enough to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. She's freer, she says, to "do what nanas do" for her grandchildren, like having all four of them over for turkey on Easter.

Companies like Nvidia and Intel are battling to build processors that act like the brains of autonomous cars, making decisions based on their surroundings to enable advanced driver assistance systems like automatic braking or adaptive cruise control and eventually to safely navigate city streets as well as highways. NXP Semiconductors is trying to turn those thoughts into action. On Monday, the Eindhoven, Netherlands-based company announced a new microcontroller to manage the systems that accelerate, steer and brake vehicles safely. The hardware, called S32S, can act on commands not only from a driver's turn of the steering wheel and foot pressing on the brake pedal but also from a car's central computer. It will compete with rival chips from the likes of Renesas and Infineon. The announcement reflects the understated role the world's largest maker of automotive chips is playing in the driverless car industry.

The first Stakeholder Summit on Artificial Intelligence, organised by the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) and the European Commission, stressed that the EU must ensure that artificial intelligence is safe, unbiased and in line with European values. The event, which aimed to discuss the next steps to advance the EU strategy on artificial intelligence, took place on 18 June in Brussels. The key EU policy-makers on artificial intelligence and European stakeholders who gathered for the first stakeholder summit agreed that artificial intelligence held great promise in terms of addressing societal issues, but also raised a number of challenges with regard to privacy, security, labour, education and ethics. "Artificial intelligence is a technology which does not have to overcome and overwhelm us," said Catelijne Muller, President of the EESC Thematic Study Group on Artificial Intelligence, adding that humans should stay in command of artificial intelligence and be able to determine "if, when and how we want to use these technologies in our daily lives." Artificial intelligence is one of the main political priorities of the EESC's current presidency.

The mystery of a strange Martian rock formation that has baffled scientists for decades has now been solved. Since its discovery in the 1960s, researchres have been trying to work out exactly what causes the undulating hills and sharp ridges of the Medusae Fossae formation. The formation covers an area of about 2 million sq km (770,000 sq miles) around the Martian equator and is described by Nasa as an'enigmatic pile of eroding sediments'. In the absence of any scientific explanation, conspiracy theorists have said that at least some of the exotic shapes found in the area belong to a'crashed UFO'. But a new study claims the rocks in this area of Mars are in fact the remains of volcanic eruptions that would have changed the climate of the red planet 3 billion years ago.

With a report by Tractica forecasting that native speech recognition will grow from 45% of all mobile devices to 82% by 2020, there seems to be nothing stopping the technology from reaching virtually everyone. How can a technology that individuals have grown to rely on for instant information move into other industries with ease? The use of voice activation technology has its place at the helm of business, providing the assistance that workers need to manage the customer experience and boost productivity all around. Its use is growing, and soon it will be a part of the daily workplace, offering a plethora of support and resources that were previously unavailable. To give you an idea of what to expect from the technology, 12 members of Forbes Technology Council weigh in on the way they are using (or are excited about the prospect of using) voice-activated technology in the workplace.