If the founders of a new face recognition app get their way, anonymity in public could soon be a thing of the past. FindFace, launched two months ago and currently taking Russia by storm, allows users to photograph people in a crowd and work out their identities, with 70% reliability. It works by comparing photographs to profile pictures on Vkontakte, a social network popular in Russia and the former Soviet Union, with more than 200 million accounts. In future, the designers imagine a world where people walking past you on the street could find your social network profile by sneaking a photograph of you, and shops, advertisers and the police could pick your face out of crowds and track you down via social networks. In the short time since the launch, Findface has amassed 500,000 users and processed nearly 3m searches, according to its founders, 26-year-old Artem Kukharenko, and 29-year-old Alexander Kabakov.

Industrial revolutions are momentous events. By most reckonings, there have been only three. The first was triggered in the 1700s by the commercial steam engine and the mechanical loom. The harnessing of electricity and mass production sparked the second, around the start of the 20th century. The computer set the third in motion after World War II (see "The Man Who Made the Computer Age Possible," by Jeffrey E. Garten). It might seem too soon to proclaim that the fourth industrial revolution, spurred by interconnected digital technology, has begun. But Henning Kagermann, the head of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering (Acatech), did exactly that in 2011, when he used the term Industrie 4.0 to describe a proposed government-sponsored industrial initiative. When you look closely at the rapid pace of digitization in industry today, the name doesn't seem hyperbolic at all. It is a signal of sweeping change that is rapidly transforming many companies and may catch others by surprise.

For 30 years the games industry worked in a certain way. People rented offices and set up studios to create games; they employed staff to work in-house, then got those projects funded and distributed by publishers. If you wanted to opt out of that setup, you worked alone, or in a small team, as an indie developer – you operated in a totally separate stratosphere; the system neatly self-segregated. Meanwhile, in the background, the business worked to the seven-year cycles dictated by the lifespan of the major consoles. It was a machine of discreet components. But that machine is rusting and falling apart.

HANNOVER, GERMANY - MARCH 02: Robots play football in a demonstration of artificial intelligence at the stand of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH) at the CeBIT Technology Fair on March 2, 2010 in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT will be open to the public from March 2 through March 6. (Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images) Artificial intelligence or AI is among the most favorite subjects today. With AI's versatility and flexibility, you can find them anywhere. There are already companies run by AI and factories with robots operating the machines. But did you know that AI robots also suffer stereotypical sexism in the workplace?

The trucking industry is ready for revolution. Autonomous trucks aren't as sexy as driverless cars, but they could have a bigger impact on our lives. Within years, they could make the roads safer, the air cleaner, and deliveries cheaper. All of this is closer than you think. Last year, Daimler unveiled the world's first autonomous semi.

Ever since IBM's Deep Blue defeated then world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game contest in May 1997, humanity has been looking over its shoulder as computers have been running up the inside rail. What task that we thought was our exclusive preserve will they conquer next? What jobs will they take? And what jobs will be left for humans when they do? The pessimistic case was partly set out in the Channel 4 series Humans, about a near-future world where intelligent, human-like robots would do routine work, or stand on streets handing out flyers, while some people worked (law and policing seemed to get a pass, mostly) but others were displaced – and angry.

A team of Australian physicists has employed a new research assistant in the form of an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to help set up experiments in quantum mechanics. For its first task, the algorithm took control of a delicate experiment to create a Bose-Einstein condensate – a weird state of matter that can form in certain atoms at ultracold temperatures. The algorithm didn't need specific training and was able to learn on the job. It developed its own model of the process and tweaking the parameters to get them just right. "I didn't expect the machine could learn to do the experiment itself, from scratch, in under an hour," said co-lead researcher Paul Wigley from the Australian National University in Canberra.

We review the task of Sentence Pair Scoring, popular in the literature in various forms - viewed as Answer Sentence Selection, Semantic Text Scoring, Next Utterance Ranking, Recognizing Textual Entailment, Paraphrasing or e.g. a component of Memory Networks. We argue that all such tasks are similar from the model perspective and propose new baselines by comparing the performance of common IR metrics and popular convolutional, recurrent and attention-based neural models across many Sentence Pair Scoring tasks and datasets. We discuss the problem of evaluating randomized models, propose a statistically grounded methodology, and attempt to improve comparisons by releasing new datasets that are much harder than some of the currently used well explored benchmarks. We introduce a unified open source software framework with easily pluggable models and tasks, which enables us to experiment with multi-task reusability of trained sentence model. We set a new state-of-art in performance on the Ubuntu Dialogue dataset.

Eric, one of the world's first robots, made his public debut in 1928. Before there was Star Wars' C-3PO and the robot who famously warned of "Danger, Will Robinson!" on TV's Lost in Space, there was Eric -- one of the world's first real robots. He was built in 1928, less than a decade after the word "robot" was first used. He wowed audiences in Britain, where he was created, and elsewhere in Europe and the United States. Now, a team from the Science Museum of London is planning to rebuild him, using original archival materials.

Tomorrow, the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) opens in Stockholm, Sweden. Over the next three days, more than 1,200 robotics research papers will be presented through a bunch of concurrent interactive conference sessions, and we'll be running around doing our best to check out every single one of them. To give you a sense of the kind of thing that we're expecting to see, here are a quartet of highlights videos that ICRA put together from this year's paper submissions, featuring the yellow ducky mascot: See something you'd like details on? Let us know, and we'll find out more starting tomorrow. And check back the rest of the week (and probably on into next few weeks) for an in-depth look at the most interesting robotics research that we can find.