Computer scientists at MIT and the National University of Ireland (NUI) at Maynooth have developed a mapping algorithm that creates dense, highly detailed 3-D maps of indoor and outdoor environments in real time. The researchers tested their algorithm on videos taken with a low-cost Kinect camera, including one that explores the serpentine halls and stairways of MIT's Stata Center. Applying their mapping technique to these videos, the researchers created rich, three-dimensional maps as the camera explored its surroundings. As the camera circled back to its starting point, the researchers found that after returning to a location recognized as familiar, the algorithm was able to quickly stitch images together to effectively "close the loop," creating a continuous, realistic 3-D map in real time. The technique solves a major problem in the robotic mapping community that's known as either "loop closure" or "drift": As a camera pans across a room or travels down a corridor, it invariably introduces slight errors in the estimated path taken.

A century and a half ago, French physician Pierre Paul Broca found that patients with damage to part of the brain's frontal lobe were unable to speak more than a few words. Later dubbed Broca's area, this region is believed to be critical for speech production and some aspects of language comprehension. However, in recent years neuroscientists have observed activity in Broca's area when people perform cognitive tasks that have nothing to do with language, such as solving math problems or holding information in working memory. Those findings have stimulated debate over whether Broca's area is specific to language or plays a more general role in cognition. A new study from MIT may help resolve this longstanding question.

MIT researchers have built a wearable sensor system that automatically creates a digital map of the environment through which the wearer is moving. The prototype system, described in a paper slated for the Intelligent Robots and Systems conference in Portugal next month, is envisioned as a tool to help emergency responders coordinate disaster response. In experiments conducted on the MIT campus, a graduate student wearing the sensor system wandered the halls, and the sensors wirelessly relayed data to a laptop in a distant conference room. Observers in the conference room were able to track the student's progress on a map that sprang into being as he moved. Connected to the array of sensors is a handheld pushbutton device that the wearer can use to annotate the map.

Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor emeritus of computer science at MIT who grew skeptical of artificial intelligence after creating a program that made many users feel like they were speaking with an empathic psychologist, died March 5 in Berlin. Weizenbaum, who was Jewish, fled Nazi Germany with his parents and arrived in the United States in the mid-1930s. At the beginning of his career with computers, in the early 1950s, he worked on analog computers; later, he helped design and build a digital computer at Wayne University in Detroit. In 1955, Weizenbaum became a member of the General Electric team that designed and built the first computer system dedicated to banking operations. Among his early technical contributions were the list processing system SLIP and the natural language understanding program ELIZA, which was an important development in artificial intelligence and cemented his role in the folklore of computer science research.

Google's search algorithm has been changed over the last year to increasingly reward search results based on how likely you are to click on them, multiple sources tell Business Insider. As a result, fake news now often outranks accurate reports on higher quality websites. The problem is so acute that Google's autocomplete suggestions now actually predict that you are searching for fake news even when you might not be, as Business Insider noted on December 5. There is a common misconception that the proliferation of fake news is all Facebook's fault. Although Facebook does have a fake news problem, Google's ranking algorithm does not take cues from social shares, likes, or comments when it is determining which result is the most relevant, search experts tell Business Insider. The changes at Google took place separately, experts say, to the fake news problem occurring on Facebook.

"Wear that blue-colored dress today, it matches your new shoes." "Go to Tahiti on vacation, there is a good price now for tickets for this destination." All of these pieces of advice and more come from AI assistants. A wide range of these assistants have emerged to make our lives better: big ones like Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and SoundHound and multiple startups that are trying to conquer the market. Alterrа, for example, will help you choose the country for your next vacation.

Stuart Russell is a leading researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. He is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, Associate Editor of the Journal of the ACM, and author of "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (Prentice Hall, 1995, 2003), the leading textbook in the field. His research interests include machine learning, limited rationality, real-time decision-making, intelligent agent architectures, autonomous vehicles, search, game-playing, reasoning under uncertainty, and commonsense knowledge representation. UBIQUITY: The original grand vision of artificial intelligence (AI) in the 1950s and '60s seemed to dissipate into many small, disparate projects. Should this fragmentation be written off as an inevitable Humpty-Dumpty problem or is it possible to bring the fragments back together into a single field? RUSSELL: I think we can put it back together in the sense of being able to join the pieces.

Carl Doersch, a doctoral student studying machine learning, and his colleagues have developed new graphical software capable of identifying stylistic features of cities. The team, composed of researchers from both Carnegie Mellon and the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, has published its work in the computer graphics journal ACM Transactions on Graphics. The process of finding related patterns between images is known as visual data mining. Project collaborator Alexei Efros, an associate professor of robotics and computer science at Carnegie Mellon, pointed out that the science is still relatively new. "The field of visual data mining is still in its infancy, but I believe it holds a lot of promise," he said in a university press release.

Qrio – short for quest for curiosity – is Sony's 58-centimetre-tall, all-dancing, bipedal humanoid robot. Qrio is famous for such feats as conducting the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in a unique rendition of Beethoven's 5th symphony, navigating an assault course, and even roller-skating. See footage of four QRIOs performing a complicated dance routine, (Windows Media Player required) recorded in December 2003. Starting in 2002, MIT spin-off iRobot, of Massachusetts, US, finally brought domestic robots to the masses, with their small and affordable Roomba and Scooba vacuuming and mopping robots – retailing at less than $200. Sales of all household robots have boomed, and in 2005 more than a million were thought to be in operation worldwide.

A pneumatic robot that positions patients' limbs inside an MRI scanner allows physicians to exploit a bizarre phenomenon where hard-to-see tendons jump into sharp focus when held at the right angle. That "magic angle" effect happens when a tendon is at 55 to a scanner's powerful magnetic field and can help with diagnosing tendon injuries. Nuclei are pinged with radio waves to momentarily shove them out of the field's grip, and they emit their own radio waves as they settle back into place. Those signals reveal their position and are translated into a 3D image. Different tissues can be identified because the density of hydrogen nuclei varies from one to the other.