He is one of the greatest artists of all time, famed for his detailed portraits that helped cement his reputation as one of the Dutch Old Masters. But when it came to his self portraits, Rembrandt van Rijn appears to have needed a bit of technological help getting his depictions just right. The 17th century artist might have used a combination of mirrors and lenses to project his faceonto a surface, allowing him to trace the outline, according to new research. Rembrandt's self portraits are well-known for being highly detailed, and the Dutch painter often favoured himself as his subject (self portrait pictured). Known for his self-portraits and biblical scenes, his early work was small but rich in detail; religious and allegorical themes were prominent.

Space telescopes like Hubble has given astronomers a unique glimpse at the universe unhindered by the thick atmosphere of our planet that can blur our view. But hauling a huge telescope into space can be difficult, which makes it hard to build the bigger space telescopes needed to peer into the furthest reaches of space. This problem could be solved by a new telescope-constructing robot capable of assembling a space telescope while orbiting around Earth. Each folded'mode' would be stored in a cargo unit until it was ready to be attached to the central'hub' by the robot Researchers at the California Institute of Technology and Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) came up with the new concept, which uses a modular structure so each part of the telescope could be carried separately. When the Hubble Space Telescope first went into space in 1990, it promised to provide spectacular views and an unprecedented insight into the cosmos.

A UK start-up developing artificial intelligence and machine learning for fully autonomous vehicles has received 2.7m in equity funding. The funding, led by Amadeus Capital Partners with Spring Partners and Notion Capital, will enable Bristol-based FiveAI to grow its team, step-up its development and begin simulator and road testing of its software. According to FiveAI, early approaches to autonomous vehicles have required accurate, 3D maps built using point cloud technology. In use, each vehicle then correlates against that map to work out where it is and establish a track to follow. The company is now planning a system using much stronger AI and ML to ensure that autonomous vehicles can safely and accurately navigate all environments, including complex urban ones, with simpler maps.

In one month from now, the second edition of the Data Science Game, an international competition of data science for students, will start (more info here). Students in last year of Masters or PhDs from all around the world will be challenged through an online competion (June 17 to July 10) and a final hackathon (september 10-11). The first 20 teams of the online phase will come to Paris to demonstrate their skills and abilities to solve a data science challenge and meet professional data scientists coming from leading companies in Data Science (Microsoft, CapGemini, Axa Data Innovation Lab, etc.). We think our participants would love to learn from your data challenge experience since you were the former top ranked kaggler. But first of all, can you quickly introduce yourself?

The Turing test, the quintessential evaluation designed to determine if something is a computer or a human, may have a fatal flaw, new research suggests. The test currently can't determine if a person is talking to another human being or a robot if the person being interrogated simply chooses to stay silent, new research shows. While it's not news that the Turing test has flaws, the new study highlights just how limited the test is for answering deeper questions about artificial intelligence, said study co-author Kevin Warwick, a computer scientist at Coventry University in England. "As machines are getting more and more intelligent, whether they're actually thinking and whether we need to give them responsibilities are starting to become very serious questions," Warwick told Live Science. "Obviously, the Turing test is not the one which can tease them out." The now-famous Turing test was first described by British computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950 to address questions of when and how to determine if machines are sentient.

A parametrically designed, intelligent light canopy placed in the atrium of the Philips Lighting Headquarters in The Netherlands helps people get in the mood for work, relaxation and interaction. Architecture firm LAVA collaborated with INBO and JHK to adapt the existing 1950s building Eindhoven for the new headquarters to design an installation that showcases the impact of lighting on how people use office buildings. The large light sculpture comprises 1,500 pyramid-shaped panels suspended from the ceiling to filter golden light like tree leaves. It covers the entire atrium space, which once functioned as the central courtyard of the mid 20th century building. The panels were programmed using low-level artificial intelligence to create daily light scenarios that give people a sense of time and showcase the company's innovative, people-centric lighting technology. The panel surface reflects natural light coming into the interior through side windows and skylights and creates different light scenarios through the day and calendar year.

Artificial Intelligence Used to Predict Onset of Alzheimer's

First was the Monte Carlo tree search, an algorithm that rather than attempting to examine all possible future moves instead tests a sparse selection of them, combining their value in a sophisticated way to get a better estimate of a move's quality. The second was the (re)discovery of deep networks, a contemporary incarnation of neural networks that had been experimented with since the 1960s, but which was now cheaper, more powerful, and equipped with huge amounts of data with which to train the learning algorithms. The combination of these techniques saw a drastic improvement in Go-playing programs, and ultimately Google DeepMind's AlphaGo program beat Go world champion Lee Sedol in March 2016. Now that Go has fallen, where do we go from here? Following Kasparov's defeat in 1997, scientists considered that the challenge for AI was not to conquer some cerebral game.

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

Everyone has heard of Kaggle, but have you heard of London-based Google DeepMind? Their researchers build deep learning algorithms to conquer everything from Pong and the ancient game of go to blindness caused by diabetic retinopathy. If the latter sounds particularly familiar, you may be recalling the Diabetic Retinopathy Detection competition which ran on Kaggle from February 2015 to July 2015. In this blog post, I interview Jeffrey De Fauw who came in 5th place in this competition using convolutional neural networks and is first author of Google DeepMind's study spearheading efforts to automate analysis of ophthalmic images using machine learning in order to help clinicians diagnose sight-threatening diseases. He explains how he got started on Kaggle, how it led him to his current role at DeepMind, and what he's learned along the way.