Robots have learned to outsmart humans in a number of common games – and now, if your skills aren't up to par, they just might get'upset' with you. Interactive designer Alexia Léchot has developed a robot that uses iPads to compete with humans in small mimicking games. But according to the creator, 'Deltu' is very demanding, and will change its mind during gameplay and instead begin to take selfies if the participating person displeases it. The robot creates patterns by pressing particular tiles on an iPad, as seen above. The robot creates patterns by pressing particular tiles on an iPad.

A palm-sized robot that can hold conversations will go on sale in Japan next year, developer Toyota has announced. Kirobo Mini, who was 10cm (4in) high, had been designed to provide companionship, the company said. And it could tailor conversations to include comments about journeys based on data from its owner's vehicle. It also has childlike attributes, but a robotics expert told the BBC a robot could not be a substitute for a child. "He wobbles a bit, and this is meant to emulate a seated baby, which hasn't fully developed the skills to balance itself," Fuminori Kataoka, Kirobo Mini's chief design engineer, told the Reuters news agency.

Benjamin Graham, Director of Communication at personalised marketing app Clemmie, looks at how marketers can make the most of AI. If you believe the blogs, magazine features and tabloid news stories, AI is a revelation, and it's going to change everything. From op-eds predicting humanity's end at the hands of superior intelligence to scientists feverishly discussing the future of medical care, AI is on everyone's lips. Reporting on AI often seems to focus on the worst-case scenario, but AI can change our lives for the better and revolutionise the way we interact with technology, the world, and even each other. The ways in which we perceive the world around us is in a constant flux as technology develops.

Amazon has been busy testing out its new Prime Air initiative at a secret location in the English countryside. The service's promise of a 30-minute delivery by specially designed drones may look like click-bait PR, but it's an early sign of the significant changes coming to cities around the world. For the moment, much of the hype around drones is full of caveats: safety is always the first priority, and nobody quite knows the full extent of what's possible. Amazon has been busy testing out its new Prime Air initiative at a secret location in the English countryside. This undated image provided by Amazon.com

In the burgeoning field of computer science known as machine learning, engineers often refer to the artificial intelligences they create as "black box" systems: Once a machine learning engine has been trained from a collection of example data to perform anything from facial recognition to malware detection, it can take in queries--Whose face is that? Is this app safe?--and spit out answers without anyone, not even its creators, fully understanding the mechanics of the decision-making inside that box. But researchers are increasingly proving that even when the inner workings of those machine learning engines are inscrutable, they aren't exactly secret. In fact, they've found that the guts of those black boxes can be reverse-engineered and even fully reproduced--stolen, as one group of researchers puts it--with the very same methods used to create them. In a paper they released earlier this month titled "Stealing Machine Learning Models via Prediction APIs," a team of computer scientists at Cornell Tech, the Swiss institute EPFL in Lausanne, and the University of North Carolina detail how they were able to reverse engineer machine learning-trained AIs based only on sending them queries and analyzing the responses.

During my commute the other day, I ended up on a dark subway car. The train still had power--the air conditioning was on, the announcements were coming through--but all the lights were dead. I live near an above-ground stop, so at first there was morning sunshine coming in through the windows. But when the train went underground, we were plunged into complete darkness. I found myself suddenly in a sea of floating, ghostly faces, illuminated by the glow of smartphones.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Deep learning efforts today are run on standard computer hardware using convolutional neural networks. Indeed the approach has proven powerful by pioneers such as Google and Microsoft. In contrast neuromorphic computing, whose spiking neuron architecture more closely mimics human brain function, has generated less enthusiasm in the deep learning community. Now, work by IBM using its TrueNorth chip as a test case may bring deep learning to neuromorphic architectures. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) in August (Convolutional networks for fast, energy-efficient neuromorphic computing), researchers from IBM Research report, "[We] demonstrate that neuromorphic computing, despite its novel architectural primitives, can implement deep convolution networks that approach state-of-the-art classification accuracy across eight standard datasets encompassing vision and speech, perform inference while preserving the hardware's underlying energy-efficiency and high throughput."

Salesforce.com Inc. CRM -0.38 % 's annual Dreamforce customer conference, set to blanket downtown San Francisco next week, will be an unusual blend of business, technology, entertainment, philanthropy and personal empowerment. The conference, which is the world's largest tech get-together sponsored by a single company, will be an expression of the business-software provider's socially conscious corporate culture and the idiosyncratic character of its Chief Executive Marc Benioff. The event, which is expected to draw 170,000 attendees--17% more than last year--comes as Salesforce, whose public profile to date has been confined largely to salespeople and marketers, is stepping onto a larger stage. The company on Thursday vowed to block Microsoft Corp. MSFT -0.75 % 's 26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn Corp. LNKD 0.22 %, after failing in its own effort to buy the online network of 450 million mostly professional members. Meanwhile, Salesforce is considering a bid for the consumer-focused messaging service Twitter.