Google is catching up to competitors Facebook, Apple and Amazon in messaging, video calling and home speaker-embedded digital assistants. But it's taking the lead in virtual reality and may have changed mobile phones forever with a new twist on mobile apps that allows them to play without being installed. That's the conclusion of Jan Dawson, an analyst with Jackdaw Research, who was at the Google I/O annual developers conference Wednesday in Mountain View, California. Dawson said Google's new Allo app focuses on the search giant's strengths in search and natural language recognition, but may have come too late behind bigger rivals to gain much use. In a research note he praised Google's new Daydream virtual reality platform, but noted it'll take time to become popular because the high bar for specifications means no devices can support it yet.

Neural machine translation is a recently proposed approach to machine translation. Unlike the traditional statistical machine translation, the neural machine translation aims at building a single neural network that can be jointly tuned to maximize the translation performance. The models proposed recently for neural machine translation often belong to a family of encoder-decoders and consists of an encoder that encodes a source sentence into a fixed-length vector from which a decoder generates a translation. In this paper, we conjecture that the use of a fixed-length vector is a bottleneck in improving the performance of this basic encoder-decoder architecture, and propose to extend this by allowing a model to automatically (soft-)search for parts of a source sentence that are relevant to predicting a target word, without having to form these parts as a hard segment explicitly. With this new approach, we achieve a translation performance comparable to the existing state-of-the-art phrase-based system on the task of English-to-French translation. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals that the (soft-)alignments found by the model agree well with our intuition.

The message from Google's developers' conference is clear: The company is prepared to take on competitors as well as regulators. CEO Sundar Pichai and his team were flexing. We can do chatbots better than Facebook. We can be smarter at home than Amazon Echo. Our personal assistant gets trained on Google search, which is more widely used than Microsoft's Bing.

It can be a pain to install phone apps you know you'll use just once or twice. The app runs on Google's servers instead of your phone. Only the parts you need get sent to your phone on an as-needed basis. If it works as Google envisions, without lags and other annoyances, users won't have to spend a few minutes downloading and installing that app and having it take up valuable space on the phone. The app maker needs to enable this feature, though.

Dealing with obstacles is an inevitable part of life, and it looks like robots may be surprisingly adept at applying creativity to the challenge. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University developed software that not only helped a robot deal efficiently with clutter but also revealed considerable creativity in solving problems. Their new study is due to be presented Thursday at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Sweden. A research team led by Siddhartha Srinivasa, CMU associate professor of robotics, challenged HERB -- his lab's two-armed mobile robot -- with a pile of clutter. What they saw from the robot surprised them.

They find that we split the task into a hierarchy of different jobs, with different elements apparently handled in different parts of the brain. Particular parts of the cortex, for example, show greater activity if extra line changes are required; other regions simply become more excited as the overall goal inches closer. It arises from a collaboration between Oxford University, University College London and Google's artificial intelligence firm DeepMind. AI researchers are keen to learn from the brain's ability to plan a complex task by grouping together various actions and outcomes. This type of strategy is much more efficient than rattling through all the possible ramifications of each individual step - such as a simple computer program might do.

Jeremy Corbyn has likened the government to "a driverless car heading in the wrong direction", in his response to the Queen's Speech. The Labour leader said the raft of new policies would not make society more equal or create opportunities for all. He said the government failed to realise "cuts have consequences" as he attacked austerity as a "political choice not an economic necessity". Prison reform was the centrepiece of the government's plans. The government has also said it will publish details of a British Bill of Rights to replace the Human Rights Act.

"Legislation to enable the future development of the UK's first commercial spaceports." The new law would form part of the Modern Transport Bill. The UK's desire to build a spaceport on British shores isn't new, however. In the summer of 2014, the government revealed eight locations that it was considering for the landmark project. Six of these were in Scotland, leaving Wales and England with one apiece.

Forget about superintelligent AIs being created by a company, university, or a rogue programmer with Einstein-like IQ. Hollywood and its AI-themed movies like Transcendence and Her have misled the public. The launch of the first truly autonomous, self-aware artificial intelligence--one that has the potential to become far smarter than human beings--is a matter of the highest national and global security. Its creation could change the landscape of international politics in a matter of weeks--maybe even days, depending on how fast the intelligence learns to upgrade itself, hack and rewrite the world's best codes, and utilize weaponry. In the last year, a chorus of leading technology exp erts, like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates, have chimed in on the dangers regarding the creation of AI.

Automation has been responsible for improvements in manufacturing productivity for decades. Advanced robotics will accelerate this trend. Machines, after all, can perform many manufacturing tasks more efficiently, effectively and consistently than humans, leading to increased output, better quality and less waste. And machines don't require health insurance, coffee breaks, maternity leave or sleep. The industrial world realizes this and robot sales have been surging, increasing 29 percent in 2014 alone, according to the International Federation of Robotics.