In December 2016 a new venue opened up in London, UK called the Realities Centre, focused on promoting virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) technology. THe last couple of months have seen several conferences and hackathons taking place and now the venue has revealed its latest events. Taking place in March 2017, the Realities Centre will be hosting another conference and hackathon, this time dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI) and VR. Held on 16th March will be the AI VR Conference, featuring an evening of discussions exploring the two fields, namely how AI machine learning and natural language processing can be used in VR. Speaking at the event will be Rob Whitehead, co-founder and CTO of Improbable, whose talk will be on'A high level introduction of the AI and VR industry'.

Many technological trends come and go; the great ones last forever, and the not so great fade away, barely remembered as a fad. Not all technologies are purposeful, but when they are, they make our lives easier, neater, and smarter. This article presents an honest evaluation on conversational agents (bots) and where (we think) they stand in the future. Whether you are a business owner or simply a customer, you must have encountered bots in your daily life. From online shopping (conversational commerce) to asking Siri a simple question, bots are everywhere.

Almost every machine learning breakthrough you hear about (and most of what's currently called "artificial intelligence") is supervised learning; where you start with a curated and labeled data set. But another technique, reinforcement learning, is just starting to make its way out of the research lab. Reinforcement learning is where an agent learns by interacting with its environment. It isn't told by a trainer what to do and it learns what actions to take to get the highest reward in the situation by trial and error, even when the reward isn't obvious and immediate. It learns how to solve problems rather than being taught what solutions look like. Reinforcement learning is how DeepMind created the AlphaGo system that beat a high-ranking Go player (and has recently been winning online Go matches anonymously). It's how University of California Berkeley's BRETT robot learns how to move its hands and arms to perform physical tasks like stacking blocks or screwing the lid onto a bottle, in just three hours (or ten minutes if it's told where the objects are that it's going to work with, and where they need to end up).

Search in an environment with an uncertain distribution of resources involves a trade-off between exploitation of past discoveries and further exploration. This extends to information foraging, where a knowledge-seeker shifts between reading in depth and studying new domains. To study this decision-making process, we examine the reading choices made by one of the most celebrated scientists of the modern era: Charles Darwin. From the full-text of books listed in his chronologically-organized reading journals, we generate topic models to quantify his local (text-to-text) and global (text-to-past) reading decisions using Kullback-Liebler Divergence, a cognitively-validated, information-theoretic measure of relative surprise. Rather than a pattern of surprise-minimization, corresponding to a pure exploitation strategy, Darwin's behavior shifts from early exploitation to later exploration, seeking unusually high levels of cognitive surprise relative to previous eras. These shifts, detected by an unsupervised Bayesian model, correlate with major intellectual epochs of his career as identified both by qualitative scholarship and Darwin's own self-commentary. Our methods allow us to compare his consumption of texts with their publication order. We find Darwin's consumption more exploratory than the culture's production, suggesting that underneath gradual societal changes are the explorations of individual synthesis and discovery. Our quantitative methods advance the study of cognitive search through a framework for testing interactions between individual and collective behavior and between short- and long-term consumption choices. This novel application of topic modeling to characterize individual reading complements widespread studies of collective scientific behavior.

The Orangutan looked quite magnificent. From her inquisitive eyes to her distinctive orange fur, she was just the sort of creature nature lovers adore watching on TV. But a closer inspection revealed something a little different about her. That's because she is actually an undercover robot, fitted with high-definition cameras behind her glass eyes and used to infiltrate the animal kingdom. The orangutan, as well as an adorable wolf-cub, an utterly convincing meerkat and an incredible floating otter are among 34 animatronic beasts created for the BBC's new series, Spy In The Wild.

At some online publications, financial summaries and sports recaps are written by artificial intelligence (AI), not humans. In the medical field, thanks to "computer-assisted diagnosis," a computer was able to spot 52% of breast cancers based on mammography scans up to one year before the women were officially diagnosed. In some organizations, AI decides which sales opportunities are worthy of a salesperson's time. Gartner client inquiry on topics closely related to AI tripled from 2015 to 2016. As organizations recognize the potential for AI to disrupt business, interest is growing rapidly.

In fact, in many countries, the internet, the very thing that was supposed to smash down the walls of authoritarianism like a sledgehammer of liberty, has been instead been co-opted by those very regimes in order to push their own agendas while crushing dissent and opposition. And with the emergence of conversational AI -- the technology at the heart of services like Google's Allo and Jigsaw or Intel's Hack Harassment initiative -- these governments could have a new tool to further censor their citizens. Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, India and Uganda have all shut off internet access when politically beneficial to their ruling parties. Nations like Singapore, Russia and China all exert outsize control over the structure and function of their national networks, often relying on a mix of political, technical and social schemes to control the flow of information within their digital borders. The effects of these policies are self-evident.

Facebook has been ordered to pay $500 million in damages in a lawsuit claiming the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset was based on stolen technology. A Texas jury awarded the sum to video game publisher ZeniMax Media Inc after determining Oculus executives violated a ZeniMax non-disclosure agreement in the early days of building the Oculus headset. However, the jury decided Oculus was not guilty of misappropriating trade secrets. Oculus told the site they would be appealing the verdict. 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.

Researchers have unveiled what they say is the first practical blueprint for the'holy grail' of computing - a quantum computer. Researchers from the University of Sussex led the team from around the world, including a team from Google, and say their work has the potential to revolutionise industry, science and commerce on a similar scale as the invention of ordinary computers. If it works, it will be a real-life version of Deep Thought, the supercomputer programmed to solve the'ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything' in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Researchers from around the world, including a team from Google, have unveiled what they say is the first practical blueprint for the'holy grail' of computing - a quantum computer. Pictured, the prototype of the core of a trapped ion quantum computer, which the team now says could be operational within two years.

Automation replaced 17,000 people's jobs at one of the world's largest professional services and tech firms Accenture over the last 18 months, but no one actually lost their job. Richard Lumb, CEO of financial services at Accenture told Business Insider at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday that while greater automation and the rapid development and implementation of artificial intelligence and robots certainly can eliminate jobs in the workforce, companies can also make sure those employees do not become displaced. "Over the last 18 months, automation replaced 17,000 jobs in back office processing. But actually, we haven't laid those people off. We are fortunate enough to reskill and reposition them. We took that approach when we were going to bring in greater automation at scale. Not [every company] is going to be able to do that and not every company is able to grow and expand like we do," said Lumb to BI. Accenture is one of the largest professional services companies in the world and as of 2016, has 394,000 employees with clients from 200 cities across 120 countries worldwide.