These artificial intelligence-powered digital assistants that can check the weather, read the latest headlines, do your banking, and help you shop for clothes are proliferating on Facebook Messenger. In fact, an estimated 10,000 chatbots are now available via Messenger. But the rapid spread of chatbots is raising fresh privacy concerns, too. Due to the personal nature of the bots – encouraging users to reveal intimate details about their habits and personal lives – some experts worry that consumers aren't aware of how just much insight these bots have into their lives, and who is actually using the information. "Chatbots may be able to get us to say more about ourselves than an ordinary website," says Ryan Calo, codirector of the Tech Policy Lab at the University of Washington.

Machine intelligence continues to advance; in the span of a few years we've seen a robot write a book (with human assistance) and become our personal drivers. As this technology continues to advance, many wonder how long it will take for artificial intelligence to outgrow us. As you might expect, pinning down a time frame is difficult. Not too long ago, a journalist asked a group of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence, "When will the machines take over?" the room become split. "Among the top people assembled in one place the answers were anything from 20 years in the future to 1,000 years in the future--with some AI experts saying never. Some people put it at 2029," he said.

Can you imagine robots making babies? Scientists at Amsterdam made it happen! Robots can choose their mate, have sex and create their own "robot baby." A team of scientists from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam has proven this in its Robot Baby Project. They were able to successfully have the world's first baby "born" to robot parents. The robots didn't actually meet, date, have sex and give birth like humans or animals.

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

The Financial Times is reporting that Adidas is going to bring back production to its native Germany for the first time in 30 years. It's spent the last six months testing a robotic factory with automated production lines creating soles and uppers separately before stitching them together. Spurred on by the results, the company is working on a large facility near Ansbach which will begin making sneakers for sale at some point next year. Another facility will be built in the US, although both are expected to produce just a tiny fraction of the 301 million pairs the firm made last year. The paper explains that a robot production line takes about five hours to create each pair of sneakers from scratch. By comparison, it apparently takes "several weeks" to do the same job in an Asian factory with human workers.

But experts believe they could become our friends and even provide enjoyable company. Mr Kaname Hayashi, the'father' of Pepper, is developing a new machine, inspired by R2-D2, the friendly and resourceful droid featured in the Star Wars films. He believes it could provide company isolated people, such as the elderly. Mr Kaname Hayashi, the'father' of Pepper, is developing a new machine, inspired by R2-D2, the friendly and resourceful droid featured in the Star Wars films. For a long time, Japanese scientists have been trying to create eerily human-like machines with a'presence'.

At the upscale Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California, people are taking selfies with a roving robot that looks like a cross between Wall-E's girlfriend and R2D2. It's actually a K5 robot security guard--a 300-pound, sensor-filled droid made by a startup called Knightscope that patrols the area and detects suspicious behavior. K5 is part of a small but growing number of human-scale mobile robots that are finding employment outside the confines of industrial settings like factories. They're invading consumer spaces including retail stores, hotels, and sidewalks in a quest to deliver services alongside human staff members for a fraction of the price of employing people to do a variety of typically unexciting tasks. The machines come with navigation capabilities and safety features to allow them to perform simple jobs autonomously without putting people at risk.

This blog is about building a classifier on the Azure Machine Learning platform for qualitative activity recognition of weight lifting exercises. This classifier predicts if an exercise has been done correctly (class A). We will use data from accelerometers on the belt, forearm, arm, and dumbell of 6 participants. The goal of this experiment is to predict the manner in which people did the exercise. This is the "classe" variable in the data set.

My colleague Harold Cohen, who has died aged 87, was a computer art pioneer and developer of the popular Aaron program. He was born in London, the son of Victor and Leah Cohen, who ran a general store and expected Harold to enter the family business. His passion, however, saw him enrol at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he obtained a diploma in 1951. He then spent a year on a fellowship in Rome and came back to Britain to teach at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London and at the University of Nottingham. Harold became well known in London as an abstract painter, representing the UK at the Venice Biennale, Documenta – the German modern art show – and other international exhibitions in the 1960s.

A lot can change in the space of six years. At the 2010 World Cup in Germany, match results were predicted by an octopus named "Paul." As Euro 2016 prepares to kick off Friday in France, scientists are using advanced neural networks to try to figure out which team will win this summer's tournament. As fans from across the continent begin their journeys toward France this week, predictions among them will be based on passion, patriotism and hope rather than algorithms, artificial intelligence or machine learning. However, that's not stopping companies like Microsoft, Yahoo and Blue Yonder from trying to leverage their technology to predict who will win the tournament.