If you close your eyes and imagine a brick wall, you can probably come up with a pretty good mental image. After seeing many such walls, your brain knows what one should look like. A startup in the U.K. is using machine learning to enable computers and smartphones to model visual information in a similar way. A computer could use these visual models for various tasks, from improving video streaming to automatically generating elements of a realistic virtual world. Magic Pony Technology, created by graduates of Imperial College London with expertise in statistics, computer vision, and neuroscience, trains large neural networks to process visual information.

Secretive electric car company Faraday Future hopes to have its first vehicles rolling off the assembly line in 2018. The announcement was made as officials marked the start of construction on a planned 1 billion Las Vegas-area production plant, not far from rival Tesla's Gigafactory. While it's clear the company plans to create an electric car, a prototype has yet to be unveiled and there are no specifics yet on what kinds of cars it might manufacture. The company, backed by Chinese entrepreneur Jia Yueting, currently has about 700 employees in the U.S. It unveiled a concept car in January, but hasn't put a vehicle on the market. Faraday Future puts the size of the Apex Industrial Park facility at 3 million square feet, or nearly the size of the sprawling Las Vegas Convention Center close to the Las Vegas Strip.

It is the luxury speedboat that could leave you shaken, but not stirred. Luxury car maker Aston Martin, the supplier of James Bond's cars, has revealed the design for its first foray onto water. The firm hopes to produce a series of powerboats, which is boasts will be as luxurious and hi-tech as its cars. The AM37 yacht will enter production later this year, and will be launched in Monaco. There will be two captains chairs and a wrap-around bench set to accommodate 8 of your friends to take along for the journey.

There has been some grumbling amongst industry folk who traveled to CinemaCon this year that studios aren't really showing anything new. In an age where fans clamor for teasers and trailers to debut earlier and earlier online, Hollywood has started giving sneak peeks of their films many months -- and sometimes years -- in advance of a movie's release. That wasn't the case with Universal Pictures, whose chairman Donna Langley told the crowd of movie theater owners gathered here on Wednesday that all material the studio would be sharing was "created specifically for CinemaCon." A majority of that material involved the studio's animated slate -- more on that here. But Universal also gave conference-goers a first glimpse at some of its most anticipated live-action releases.

Pop quiz: is the following statement true or false? Canada is the birthplace of a transformative technology set to disrupt countless industries and potentially lead the next wave of global economic growth. Most Canadians aren't aware of it, but artificial intelligence (more specifically its subset, deep learning) -- the inspiration for scores of dystopian science-fiction movies -- is a made-in-Canada technology that will become profoundly important over the next few years. Deep learning was the name given to a group of complex mathematical models that came out of the University of Toronto in 2006. In a nutshell, the technology mimics the neural networks of a human brain, giving machines the capacity to learn on their own and discover previously undetectable patterns within massive data sets.

Well that must have been weird: A marine robot scouring Loch Ness in Scotland detected something at the bottom of the lake, something that looked exactly the Loch Ness Monster. And it was indeed Nessie. Except, as Reuters reports, it was a long-lost 30-foot replica built for a 1970 Sherlock Holmes movie that sank during filming. "We have found a monster, but not the one many people might have expected," Nessie expert Adrian Shine tells the BBC. There's still hope for believers, though: The underwater robot from Norwegian company Kongsberg Maritime isn't finished mapping the lake, a project called Operation Groundtruth that will result in the first high-resolution survey of the body of water, reports Discovery. It should wrap up next week.

Let's say you're scrolling through your favorite social media app and you come across a series of pictures of a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a long white dress. An automated image captioning system might describe that scene as "a picture of a man and a woman," or maybe even "a bride and a groom." But a person might look at the pictures and think, "Wow, my friends got married! As image captioning tools get increasingly good at correctly recognizing the objects in an image, a group of researchers is taking the technology one step further. They are working on a system that can automatically describe a series of images in the same kind of way that a human would, by focusing not just on the items in the picture but also what's happening and how it might make a person feel. "Captioning is about taking concrete objects and putting them together in a literal description," said Margaret Mitchell, a Microsoft researcher who is leading the research project. "What I've been calling visual ...

A United Nations meeting this week in Geneva is debating the future of autonomous weapons--the controversial weapons systems capable of selecting and engaging targets without human intervention. Delegates from about 90 countries are discussing the far-reaching technical, legal, and ethical questions that these robotic weapons raise, and at the end of the week-long meeting they hope to agree on what to do next. For a group of arms control activists that has long been concerned about autonomous weapons, the next step countries should take is clear: they should ban these weapons. That's the goal of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of non-governmental organizations that was formed in late 2012 and whose steering committee includes groups like Human Rights Watch and the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. On Monday Human Rights Watch released a memorandum to the delegates in Geneva calling for countries to "adopt an international, legally binding instrument that prohibits the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons."

Though foreign companies invested primarily in production/manufacturing operations in France, last year saw many groundbreaking transactions for U.S. businesses in the French tech sector. First, Facebook made the monumental decision to choose Paris as the location for its first artificial intelligence research center outside of the U.S. But that was, by far, not the only major U.S. investment in our country. Also choosing Paris, Alexion Pharmaceuticals will bring us its first research lab outside of the U.S., dubbing it the Alexion R&D Center, Paris. And Matter, an incubator for health and e-health startups, has partnered with Paris City Council's network of health-sector incubators in order to provide easier access to the European market for American health startups, to attract European companies to Matter's home city of Chicago, and to encourage even greater interaction and collaboration between health-sector startups from our two countries.

An underwater robot exploring Loch Ness has discovered a dark, monster-shaped mass in its depths. Disappointingly, tourism officials say the 30-foot (9-meter), object is not the fabled Loch Ness Monster, but a prop left over from a 1970 film. Billy Wilder's "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" puts the great detective on the trail of the monster -- which turns out to be a disguised submarine. A model of the submarine-monster sank during production to the bottom of the 750 foot (230 meter) -deep lake. Tourism body Visit Scotland is backing a survey of the Highlands lake by a marine robot to study its depths and see if there is any sign of the fabled monster, which helps attract hundreds of thousands of visitors a year to the region.