In Einstein's general theory of relativity, there's no conceptual distinction between the past and the future, let alone an objective line of "now." There's also no sense in which time "flows"; instead, all of space and time is just there in some four-dimensional structure. None of these facts are easy to accept, because they're in direct conflict with our subjective experience of time. But don't feel too bad: They're hard even for physicists to accept, an ongoing tension that places physics in conflict not just with common sense but also with itself. As much as physicists talk about time symmetry, they do not allow themselves to invoke the future, only the past, when seeking to explain occurrences in the world.

On a very warm afternoon in April, the image of a bald young white man's head floated on a gray screen at the Kitchen, in Chelsea. The man spoke in a tone that shifted worryingly between aggressive and confessional, punctuating his lines with two disembodied hands. "And I could have been your haruspex, sexy," he said at one point, snarling. "I could have read omens in your extricated liver." There were pale red marks beneath his eyes, a five-o'clock shadow on his jaw.

An internet pioneer who first taught the world how to find friendship, love, and sex online a quarter century ago is trying to determine at what point artificial intelligence develops emotional intelligence, and he thinks he can do it with an art contest. About 31 different robots competed for 100,000 in prizes at the first annual International Robot Art Competition. The vote was based on 2,200 votes cast on Facebook as well as judgment from six art critics who have experience working with technology. The fan and judge favorite was TAIDA from the National Taiwan University. TAIDA won first place and 30,000 for several Pointillism-style works, including a still life of fruit, landscape of the Taiwan coast, and a portrait of Albert Einstein.

The artificial intelligence revolution is clearly happening. A.I. will transform medicine, give us all super-smart virtual assistants, fight crime and a thousand things more. In order for A.I. to work its miracles, it's going to need data. And I'm predicting that we'll willingly give that data. Do you use Siri, Google Now, Cortana or Alexa?

Spring may finally have arrived for artificial intelligence, Google executives said Friday. Speaking at the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, executives said that artificial intelligence and machine learning have advanced to the point where they are proving genuinely useful, through such technologies as speech recognition and language translation. But there remains great room for improvement. "We've seen extraordinary results in fields that hadn't really moved the needle for many years," said John Giannandrea, vice president of engineering for Google. "I think we're in an AI spring right now."

With the enormous growth of data size n and model complexity, asynchronous parallel algorithms [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] have become an important tool and received significant successes for solving large scale machine learning problems in the form of (1). Asynchronous parallel algorithms distribute computation on multicore systems (shared memory architecture) or multi-machine system (parameter server architecture), whose computation power generally scales up with the increasing number of cores or machines. As a consequence, effective design and implementation of asynchronous parallel algorithms is critical for large scale machine learning. Numerous efforts have been devoted to this topic. Among them, asynchronous stochastic gradient descent is proposed in [1, 2], and its performance is guaranteed by theoretical convergence analyses. An asynchronous proximal gradient descent algorithm is designed on the parameter server architecture in [3] with a distributed optimization software provided. Convergence rate of asynchronous stochastic gradient descent with a nonconvex objective is analyzed in [4].

ICRA is almost over, and we hope you've been enjoying our coverage, which so far has featured robot moths, zipper actuators, machine learning, and duckies. We'll have lots more from the converence over the next few weeks, but for you impatient types, we're cramming Video Friday this week with a painstakingly curated selection of ICRA videos--emphasis on pain: there were nearly 500 videos! We tried to include videos from many different areas of robotics: control, sensing, humanoids, actuators, exoskeletons, manipulators, prosthetics, aerial vehicles, grasping, AI, VR, haptics, vision, and microrobots. We're posting the abstracts along with the videos, but if you have any questions about these projects, let us know and we'll get more details from the authors. Have a great weekend everyone! We present an adaptive filter model of cerebellar function applied to the calibration of a tactile sensory map to improve the accuracy of directed movements of a robotic manipulator.

Google's gumdrop-shaped autonomous car looks like something you'd see in a Pixar movie, a cute and cuddly machine that makes the future look fun--until it ambushes you in a crosswalk, traps you like a fly in a web, and whisks you away. That horrific scenario comes to mind reading Google's recently approved patent for what amounts to slathering its cars in glue. To be fair, this has less to do with collecting humans than protecting them. Autonomous vehicles absolutely will reduce collisions and fatalities, but even the most ardent advocates concede one of them eventually will hit a pedestrian. Google engineers believe coating the front of a car with adhesive could prevent someone from bouncing onto the windshield, sliding under the wheels, or flying into the air and landing in the road.

Spring may finally have arrived for artificial intelligence, Google executives said Friday. Speaking at the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, executives said that artificial intelligence and machine learning have advanced to the point where they are proving genuinely useful, through such technologies as speech recognition and language translation. But there remains great room for improvement. "We've seen extraordinary results in fields that hadn't really moved the needle for many years," said John Giannandrea, vice president of engineering for Google. "I think we're in an AI spring right now."

Lawyers, doctors and accountants may be redundant in 20 years after scientists have claimed their jobs will be taken over by robots . A study into the future of human employment has predicted a surge in machine-led work such as robotic counsellors, body part makers and virtual lawyers. This is bad news for those in the profession, who could see themselves out of a job due to highly-skilled artificial intelligence. The worrying research suggests that humans will be replaced because robots are able to produce better results. A report compiled by professor of management practice at London Business School, Lynda Gratton, and futurologist David A. Smith, looked at different sector jobs.