If there was any doubt that artificial intelligence is the future of technology, look no further than Google. The company announced the new AI research push on Thursday in a blog post. Opening as part of Google's existing Google Research center in Europe, the Machine Learning Research Group will focus on, naturally, Machine Learning, in which computers use vast amounts of data to teach themselves and build rules about the data; Natural Language Processing for speech-systems and conversational queries; and Machine Perception, which is used to understand the contents of images, sounds, music and video. This announcement comes four years after the company began aggressively pursuing machine learning technologies, three months after Google's AI beat one of the world's best Go players and just weeks after Google codified its approach to AI during its annual Google I/O developers conference. During I/O, Google unveiled Google Assistant, a voice-based digital assistant designed the take on Microsoft's Cortana, Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa.

The world of autonomous vehicles just got a more luxurious, after Rolls-Royce unveiled a driverless super car of the future. It has dubbed its futuristic car, which looks like it could have come straight out of Batman's cave, the Rolls-Royce 103EX. The vehicle will be six metres long, with a canopy roof, covered wheels and a curved body. The six metre-long vehicle, dubbed the Rolls-Royce 103EX, has a canopy roof, covered wheels and a curved body. The front seat is replaced with a sofa-style body.

Thousands of ancient treasures that have been unearthed by climate change could soon be lost to humankind forever, as they are eroded by weathering and eaten by pests. The crisis is so extreme that some archaeologists are urging colleagues to abandon their current field sites and focus instead on these newly exposed relics before they vanish. Rising seas, raging storms, melting ice and forest fires are revealing artefacts that have much to tell us about our history on Earth – from sunken shipwrecks in Svalbard to the ancient waste dumps filled with bones, shoes and carvings emerging all over the Arctic and further south, including in Scotland. "This material is like the library of Alexandria. It is incredibly valuable and it's on fire now," George Hambrecht, an anthropologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, told New Scientist at the Anthropology, Weather and Climate Change conference held in London last month.

Google announced today that it is expanding its largest non-U.S. The new Machine Learning Research Group will be based in Zurich, Switzerland, which is already Google's largest research center outside the U.S. The company did not say specifically how many positions will be added. But in a blog post, Google executives said machine learning has become critical to the company's development efforts across a wide range of services. "Google's ongoing research in Machine Intelligence is what powers many of the products being used by hundreds of millions of people a day -- from Translate to Photo Search to SmartReply for Inbox," wrote Emmanuel Mogenet, head of Google Research in Europe. Indeed, the Zurich research center has already had a sizable impact on Google.

"The robot was learning automatic movement algorithms on the testing ground, these functions will feature in the latest version of the Promobot." The co-founder of the robot's maker, Oleg Kivokurtsev, told ura.ru news agency. "Our engineer drove onto the testing ground and forgot to close the gates. So the robot escaped and went on his little adventure." The team only noticed their brainchild was missing 45 minutes into the robot's travel stint and by the time they located it, there was already a crowd of puzzled citizens and the police had arrived.

Have you ever used a voice-activated service such as Apple's Siri only to find it completely missed what you were saying? Or played a game against a computer and felt it didn't even put up a fight? That's about to change with advances in deep learning, which improves computers' ability to process information and make decisions--like people do, and oftentimes even better. Deep-learning techniques allow a computer system to connect the dots from many different areas of knowledge, similar to how the human brain works, to make the best decision possible. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other tech companies are in a race to apply deep learning to make machines intelligent without much help from the programmers.

The UK has a wealth of capability in AI techniques and their application, but a future with AI raises many questions. In this 90 minute debate our panel of thought leaders chaired by Will Hutton, author of'How Good We Can Be', will address your questions. They will discuss the safeguards that might be needed to ensure a responsible and ethical approach towards the applications of AI technologies. The debate will be followed by refreshments and networking. This debate launches The Future with AI -- a one year programme jointly run by BIG INNOVATION CENTRE, HACKMASTERS and KTN.

Appealing to your manager's human nature to get a day off work could get a whole lot more difficult in the future - because they may not be human at all. A robot office manager, named Betty, is being tested by a business in Milton Keynes for two months to help patrol the corridors and monitor its staff. The robot, developed by engineers at the University of Birmingham, uses artificial intelligence to help it keep track of where people are in the office, who is at their desk and keep tabs on clutter. Betty the robot (pictured), developed by researchers at the University of Birmingham, is working as an office manager at the Transport Systems Catapult in Milton Keynes. While there are many who fear robots are on the verge of stealing our jobs, it seems they have a weak spot - flat packed furniture.

Hollywood studios have struggled to contend with the increasingly fleeting attention spans of online consumers. But now Sony Pictures Entertainment thinks it may have found a way to better hold people's interest with online video – by letting them affect the outcome. Sony Pictures Entertainment is making a multimillion-dollar strategic investment in New York-based Interlude, a digital firm that helps production companies and advertisers make interactive videos to better target online audiences. As in video games, Interlude's videos allow viewers to control aspects of what they see on screen with the click of a button, bringing the choose-your-own adventure concept to traditional entertainment. In a promotional video for MTV's "Scream" series, for example, viewers choose what to do in a short home-invasion thriller by clicking on icons that appear in the corner of the screen.

While it already feels that AlphaGo is ancient history in the fast moving AI world, I think it makes a powerful case for how human-machine collaboration could help us improve our own mastery of complex tasks. Google DeepMind also made the headlines for the data sharing agreement they signed with three hospitals that are part of UK's National Health Service. The data on 1.6 million patients includes live and historical medical records stretching back 5 years. Its stated use is for "real time clinical analytics, detection, diagnosis and decision support", with an initial focus on the Company's Streams app for measuring the risk of acute kidney injury. While many engaged in heated debate over data privacy (see this headline, courtesy of The Daily Mail), my view is that medicine should be moving towards real-time monitoring of health and prediction of future conditions.