In an effort to make its apps more conversational, Google fed its AI engine a whopping 2,865 romance novels so it can improve its understanding of language. The idea is to improve the way Google products respond to users. Software engineer Andrew Dai, who led the project, told BuzzFeed News that this sort of work could help make the responses from the company's search app, as well as the'Smart Reply' feature in Inbox, more natural and varied. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching! Dai added that romance novels are great for training AI because they mostly follow the same plot – allowing the AI to focus on picking up nuances of language.

Facebook outlines its photo-tagging process in its terms of service and users can opt out of it. The lawsuit will decide whether this measure qualifies as explicit consent under the privacy act. "The Court accepts as true plaintiffs' allegations that Facebook's face recognition technology involves a scan of face geometry that was done without plaintiffs' consent," U.S. District Judge James Donato wrote in his ruling. Facebook faced similar privacy concerns in Europe and Canada, and it stopped using the facial-recognition tech in those regions.

Very interesting data compiled and analyzed by O'Reilly, using statistical models such as Lasso regression to predict salary based on different factors. It reminds me our own analysis based on simulated (but realistic) data, to assess whether having Python or R (or both) commands a bigger salary, and what is the extra boost provided by these skills, individually. The statistical model used was Jackknife regression, and it was designed for tutorial purposes. The O'Reilly survey is much bigger, based on real data, and it includes many factors, as well as factor selection. It uses standard statistical techniques which might be less robust than Jackknife regression.

SpaceX has successfully landed a rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean, for the second month in a row, following a Japanese satellite mission. The unmanned SpaceX rocket blasted off from Florida early this morning to put the communications satellite into orbit, with the launch vehicle's main-stage booster completing a quick return landing on the floating platform. Due to the high altitude of the mission, SpaceX did not expect a successful landing, but the Falcon 9 rocket touched down on the drone platform - nicknamed Of Course I Still Love You - just over eight minutes after launching. SpaceX has successfully landed a rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean after a delivering a Japanese satellite into orbit early this morning, and is the second rocket to successfully land in the space of a month. A company webcast showed the 23-story-tall rocketsoaring off a seaside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air ForceStation at 1:21 am EDT (06:21 BST).

The organizational theorist Geoffrey Moore as soon as argued that "with out large information, you're blind and deaf and in the midst of a freeway." However with out human intelligence, all the info and machine studying on the planet gained't set you free. Moore's freeway analogy is in reality extra apt than he knew. In 2011, John Gass, a Massachusetts resident with a stellar driving file, acquired an automatic discover informing him that his license had been revoked, efficient instantly. It turned out that the commonwealth's motorized vehicle company used a facial-recognition program to scan its database in the hunt for "fraudulent" licenses.

If the BA incident had involved a drone, I might have had mixed feelings. Last summer, I was testing a drone. To evaluate the device and its camera, I wanted to find a safe, yet picturesque place to fly. I chose a quiet stretch of beach, a short bus ride south of where I live in Spain. I say quiet: That was until two police officers rolled over the sand dunes on quad bikes and told me to stop.

Google's DeepMind has hit back at criticism of its partnership with London's Royal Free hospital to develop an app that helps doctors and nurses rapidly identify and treat acute kidney injuries. DeepMind's co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, said the company was better placed than any other to handle sensitive medical data, given its long history of securing highly personal information from other fields. He said: "As Googlers, we have the very best privacy and secure infrastructure for managing the most sensitive data in the world. That's something we're able to draw upon as we're such a core part of Google." He added: "When we developed our information governance toolkit and we submitted that for assessment to the health and social care information centre (HSCIC), which approves these data-sharing agreements, we got 100% for our toolkit. There's pretty much nobody else who's been able to get a score as high as that."

When you're dealing with software such as Google Search or virtual assistants like Apple's Siri, there's not an awful lot of friendliness or emotion in the exchange – and any warmth you can find has probably been deliberately programmed in by human software engineers (like Siri's famous easter eggs). But now Google is working on a solution, and it's looking for love in perhaps the most obvious of places: romance novels. The company is feeding romance novels – thousands of them – to one of its artificial intelligence (AI) engines, in a bid to enhance the software's personality and people skills. "In the Google app, the responses are very factual," Google software engineer Andrew Dai told Alex Kantrowitz at BuzzFeed News. "Hopefully with this work, and future work, it can be more conversational, or can have a more varied tone, or style, or register."

The fear of robots and artificial intelligence is widespread. If it's not popular culture creating images of psychotic or scheming machines think Ultron in The Avengers or Ava in Ex Machina it's the actual news. According to a steady stream of reports, humans will lose jobs to machines on a vast scale. The latest, coming from the White House in February, said up to 80 per cent of people who are currently making 20 (U.S.) or less an hour are likely to be replaced by robots and AI over the next few decades. Those making over 40 are a little safer, but close to a third will still be made redundant.

Robot Wars will soon back on TV in the UK, and a very similar battle is heading for the country's seas. The British Royal Navy will be holding a demonstration of unmanned technology off the coast of Scotland this autumn. And during the event, one company will be trialling the world's first unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capable of landing autonomously on a moving ship. The British Royal Navy will be holding a demonstration of unmanned technology off the coast of Scotland this autumn. One company, Roke, will be trialling the world's first unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capable of landing autonomously on a moving ship (test phases pictured) The machines will compete in their very own version of'robot wars' to demonstrate they could be part of the Navy's future.