Building things with robots is a nice idea, especially if robots are doing what they're best at: predictable, repetitive tasks like you get with bricklaying. When humans build structures, however, we can be a bit more creative, adapting on the fly to the sizes and shapes of materials available. This is one of those robotic paradoxes--building something that's easy for robots, like an exactly spaced curvy brick wall, is tricky for humans, while building something that's easy for humans, like a wall made out of pile of random rocks that doesn't spontaneously fall over, is tricky for robots. At ICRA this week, researchers from ETH Zurich are presenting a robot that's able to handle some of that variability that humans are so good at effortlessly coping with. With careful planning and a delicate touch, this robot arm is learning to autonomously build towers out of balanced pieces of limestone.

The parents of a girl who died after being hit by a subway train have lost their appeal for access to her Facebook account. The 15-year-old died in Berlin in 2012, and her parents say they want to use her Facebook messages to work out if she was a victim of online bullying, and if she took her own life. Berlin's court of appeals has rejected their claim and ruled in favour of the social media site, which has repeatedly rejected their requests. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

The New York Times published a provocative article on Friday, asking in the headline "Is China outsmarting America in A.I.?". But depending on how you define "outsmarting," and the context in which the question is asked, the answer might not even matter much. The answer might matter very much in terms of geopolitics and national security. Just like with supercomputing, quantum computing and other areas of deep computer science research, having better capabilities in artificial intelligence can arguably lead to an edge in areas like military, energy and climate science that can shift the world-power balance. But if we're talking about consumer or enterprise AI, then comparing China and the United States is kind of like comparing apples and oranges.

The chatbots hype seems to keep growing. Now that the leading messaging platforms, including Messenger (Facebook), Telegram or Slack offer bot-related services, the remaining question may become: are chatbots living up to their promises? While on the technical side bot-building frameworks, services, and libraries keep getting better, chatbots' ability to understand their users and express themselves needs to be more refined for mass adoption. Let's dig in to figure out the underlying challenges of natural language processing and achieving a natural-like expression. Essentially, there are two ways to build a chatbot: rule-based bots and chatbots relying on Artificial Intelligence (AI). Natural language processing (NLP) is a way for computers to analyze, understand and derive meaning from human language.

Artificial intelligence or "AI" for short: Will machines soon be more intelligent than we are? Michael Blätter, Senior IT Architect at Munich Re, discusses the concept of artificial intelligence and offers a realistic look at the digital advances. Michael, you sometimes seem a little uncomfortable about the topic of artificial intelligence. Yes, that always happens when I talk about the sheer pace of digital progress. We often seriously underestimate the short time it takes nowadays for some exotic-sounding technology to become perfectly mainstream.

In the evolution to humanize technology, Affectiva is carving a niche. Its software development kit (SDK) and cloud-based API allow developers to enrich digital experiences by adding "emotion awareness" to apps from games to medical devices. And that means that machines can collect data and respond to users' emotions in real time, mostly based on facial recognition techniques. It's what the company calls, Emotion AI. As noted in a recent Forbes article: "Affectiva's technology has proven transformative for industries like automotive, market research, robotics, education, and gaming, but also for use cases like teaching autistic children emotion recognition and nonverbal social cues." Demand is flourishing: Fortune 500 brands such as Kellogg's want a more data-driven way to test advertising, consumer behavior, and marketing campaigns beyond the limitations of focus groups or surveys.

Although modern AI systems still have trouble deciding whether or not to flip that stranded tortoise in their path, they're already outpacing the intellectual capabilities of their creators in a wide variety of fields. From beating grandmaster Go players to outguessing cardiac surgeons, lipreading to audio transcription, neural networks and machine learning have already surpassed humans -- and that list is only going to grow longer. In fact, SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son told attendees at Mobile World Congress in February that he fully expects computers running AI to exceed human intelligence within three decades. "I really believe this," he said, joking that soon even a pair of sneakers will possess more computational power than the person wearing them. "I believe this artificial intelligence is going to be our partner," Son said.

There is a 50 per cent chance that machines will outperform humans in all tasks within 45 years, according to a survey of more than 350 artificial intelligence researchers. AI will master many activities a lot sooner, though. Machines are predicted to be better than us at translating languages by 2024, writing high-school essays by 2026, driving a truck by 2027, working in retail by 2031, writing a bestselling book by 2049 and surgery by 2053. In fact, all human jobs will be automated within the next 120 years, say respondents. The survey, by the University of Oxford and Yale University, was sent to AI researchers who published in 2015 at one of two big conferences in the field – the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems and the International Conference on Machine Learning. In total, 352 people responded.

When equally qualified women are unequally represented, the astronomy community as a whole suffers, as does our understanding and exploration of worlds beyond our own. Subscribe to Science Solved It, Motherboard's new show about the greatest mysteries that were solved by science.

The days of eagerly waiting for the postman to deliver your package could soon be a thing of the past. Amazon has patented a bizarre new system that adds a parachute to a shipping label. The device could help to make sure that packages delivered by drone or other airborne crafts make a soft landing. Amazon has patented a bizarre new system which appears to be shipping label with a built in parachute. Amazon's patent shows a shipping label that conceals a parachute as well as a system of cords and a harness to keep the package in place.