It was a simple enough question, at least in this part of the world. "How can we mosey on down to the rodeo?" my friend Ben Crook drawled, sat in a rocking chair on his front porch, a can of Lone Star beer in his left hand on a humid night in Houston. Only one thing jarred with this otherwise stereotypical Texas scene: Crook was asking Siri, the voice-activated digital personal assistant on his iPhone, rather than, say, a passing sheriff on horseback with a cowboy hat wider than the Buffalo Bayou. Siri understood the individual words but didn't know how to respond. But Crook had other questions. He was hungry; heck, so hungry he coulda eaten the north end of a southbound billy goat.

The world's largest artificial intelligence body, the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI), has appointed UCC's Prof Barry O'Sullivan as its deputy president. Professor O'Sullivan is director for the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, and UCC's chair of Constraint Programming. He leads Insight's research group on optimisation and decision analytics, and is responsible for Insight's strategic engagement in European initiatives, such as Horizon 2020. Professor O'Sullivan has been involved in winning over 140 million in research funding, of which approximately 25 million has directly supported his research activities at UCC. EurAI has more than 4,500 members across more than 30 countries, making it the largest AI organisation in the world. The primary objective of the association is to promote research in, and study of, artificial intelligence, as well as representing the AI community externally.

The system is called Recognition and will be running for three months in London up to 27 November 2016. A nice touch is that it will also take in feedback from matching selections made by viewers themselves at the art museum on Millbank. Created by Fabrica, it's the winner of the IK Prize 2016 for digital innovation, awarded by Tate Britain, in partnership with Microsoft. A display at Tate Britain accompanies the online project offering visitors to the gallery the chance to compare the machine's matches with their own and invites them to help retrain the algorithm. The experiment will explore whether an artificial intelligence programme can learn from the many personal responses humans have when looking at images.

Beauty pageants have always been political. After all, what speaks more strongly to how we see each other than which physical traits we reward as beautiful, and which we code as ugly? It wasn't until 1983 that the Miss America competition crowned a black woman as the most beautiful woman in the country. So what if we replaced human judges with machines? As shallow as the whole thing is, would a computer at least be able to see past skin colour and look at, potentially, more universal markers of attractiveness?

The world's first public, self-driving taxi pilot program is now underway in Singapore, according to recent reports -- with nuTonomy's ride-hailing app now being functional for those looking to travel within Singapore's one-north business district. This is the same district that the firm has been doing testing in since April. The pilot will reportedly be continuing indefinitely, rather than for a set period. The plan is apparently to use the data gathered during the pilot -- on software system performance, vehicle routing efficiency, the ride-booking process, etc. -- to improve the firm's software in anticipation of the launch of a full-scale commercial autonomous taxi service in 2018 in Singapore. The launch of the new pilot follows the selection of nuTonomy as a research and development partner by the Singapore Land Transport Authority (LTA), which occurred just in August.

A few years ago, a young man named Kyle Behm took a leave from his studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He was suffering from bipolar disorder and needed time to get treatment. A year and a half later, Kyle was healthy enough to return to his studies at a different university. Around that time, he learned from a friend about a part-time job. It was just a minimum-wage job at a Kroger supermarket, but it seemed like a sure thing. His friend, who was leaving the job, could vouch for him. For a high-achieving student like Kyle, the application looked like a formality. But Kyle didn't get called in for an interview. When he inquired, his friend explained to him that he had been "red-lighted" by the personality test he'd taken when he applied for the job. The test was part of an employee selection program developed by Kronos, a workforce management company based outside Boston.

A grainy video uploaded to YouTube appears to show a small object flying over the SpaceX rocket moments before it exploded. SpaceX said an'anomaly' had occurred while the rocket was being loaded with fuel. No was injured in the blast. The rocket's payload, an Israeli-built communications satellite for Facebook due to launch on Saturday, was also destroyed. A video of the blast, posted to the site by Steve Svensson, appears to show a silver spherical object flying close to rocket when the blast happened.

Stare across the gallery of the Tate Britain at a Turner and you bring with you a quiet murmur of experiences – a family holiday, an orgasm, that morning's news. What you see works in co-ordination with echoes. But what does a computer see? What does it think when it looks at a Turner? Recognition, the winner of the Tate's IK Prize 2016 for digital innovation, asks – and answers – some of these questions. Made up of multiple artificial-intelligence technologies, Recognition makes use of object recognition, facial recognition and composition analysis to pull up-to-the-minute photojournalism from Reuters, then trawls through Tate Britain's vast collection to plonk a comparable picture beside it.

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

Artificial intelligence could improve the interpretation of lung function tests for the diagnosis of long-term lung diseases, according to the findings of a new study. The results, presented today (04 September, 2016) at the European Respiratory Society's International Congress, are the first to explore the potential use of artificial intelligence for improving the accuracy of the diagnosis of lung diseases. Current testing requires a series of methods including a spirometry test, which measures the amount (volume) and the speed (flow) of air during breathing, followed by a body plethysmography test measuring static lung volumes and airways resistance and finally a diffusion test, which measures the amount of oxygen and other gases that cross the lungs' air sacs. Analysis of the results of these tests is largely based on expert opinion and international guidelines, attempting to detect a pattern in the findings. In this new study, researchers included data from 968 people who were undergoing complete lung function testing for the first time.