The Planetary Society's LightSail, funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, will aim to demonstrate that controlled solar sailing is possible. The Planetary Society's LightSail, funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, will aim to demonstrate that controlled solar sailing is possible. The Planetary Society's LightSail, funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, will aim to demonstrate that controlled solar sailing is possible. When it comes to incredible science, 2015 will be hard to top. Among a number of notable events, we got our first, thrilling look at Pluto, found evidence that liquid water still flows on Mars and began facing the reality that human gene editing is closer than ever thanks to the CRISPR system.

Guam - While preparing for the first Saturday of college football for the 2011 season, I took a dinner break from studying charts, rosters, matchups and the pre-season Top 25 polls to watch one of my favorite shows, Modern Marvels on History Channel. It just so happened that the episode I caught profiled the technology used to manage crops. And remarkably, in a vignette about how grapes are picked en masse, the producers strongly emphasized a major advantage used in such work to achieve optimal systemic results: the harmonious synergy of man and machine. About 20 minutes hence, the episode having concluded and a delicious berry salad already beginning to digest in my belly, my thoughts returned to all things pigskin, wondering if the Bowl Championship Series, which utilizes the average of two human polls and a computer poll, might actually generate more reliable, reproducible results if it were run exclusively on machine learning. Let me break it down for you.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has claimed that computers with human like intelligence were not so far as everyone thought they were. Speaking during a business meet in Australia, Wozniak predicted that in his lifetime he would see computers with artificial intelligence. He said to a bewildered crowd that humans had set to create machines that make their jobs easier adding that mankind strives to come up with technology does a particular job instead of them doing it. "Every time we create new technology we're creating stuff to do the work we used to do and we're making ourselves less meaningful, less relevant," Wozniak said. "Why are we going to need ourselves so much in the future? We're just going to have the easy life," he added.

After spending decades in the shadows as a specialty discipline, machine learning is suddenly front and center as a business tool. The hard part, though, is making it useful, especially to the developers and budding data scientists who are being tasked with the job. To that end, we rounded up some of the most common and useful open source machine learning tools we've spotted in the wild. For Python: Data scientists have jumped on Python as a more open-ended alternative to analytical languages like R, and many employers looking to add big-data expertise to their rosters are listing Python as a desired skill. As a result, plenty of machine learning libraries have shown up in Python's ever-expanding software roster.

Turing proposed his test in a spirit of down-to-earth pragmatism. He saw that, when faced with the question, "Is it possible to build a machine that can think?", Turing hoped that his test would cut through a lot of fruitless semantic debate. It was an engineer's solution, rather than a philosopher's. Perhaps inevitably, Turing's proposal merely redirected the philosophical debate. Instead of quarrelling about the meaning of the verb "to think", philosophers argued about the meaning of the Turing test instead.

This article is by Sean Varah, founder and chief executive of MotionDSP, a company that makes advanced image processing and video analytics software. Last month the Federal Aviation Administration made a decision that marks a significant step for the commercial drone industry, permitting six movie and television production companies the right to use drones. This is the first time the FAA has allowed this type of industry exemption from the rules that prohibit drones from flying in U.S. airspace. Despite Congress' request that it develop standards in support of safe drone use by September 2015, and despite corporate America's campaigning for drone operations, the FAA has been dragging its feet. Thanks to Hollywood and the broader entertainment industry, a door has been opened for commercial drones.

Some of the first pieces of common sense a computer ever learned, like the fact that helicopters are found on airfields and babies have eyes, are now available for the public to see online. Nobody had to tell the Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) these everyday facts - the computer program figured them out for itself by analysing millions of images from the web all day every day for the last four months. NEIL uses recent advances in computer vision that allows programs to identify and label objects within images and then recognise elements of them - like colours, lighting and materials - all with the minimum of human supervision. But the project takes things a bit further by trying to make associations between the pictures it sees to come up with everyday rules, such as that cars are often found on roads or that ducks (sort of) look like geese. Abhinav Gupta, lead investigator and assistant research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, where NEIL spends its time, said that images were the best way to learn visual properties.

Above, Jean Luc Picard has been assimilated and given a new identity as a Borg. Are humans doomed to a machine-like future of radically-enhanced lifespan and intelligence, but without the intangibles that have made our 200,000 year-old species so unique? Using technology to stave off Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or other neurological maladies is easy to justify. But is it inevitable that humans and machines will meld into a Borg-like future? That is, something akin to the "Trekian" villains who appear to have all the personality of a side-by-side refrigerator.

If you want a notion of how easy it would be for terrorists to slip a dirty nuke, a canister of nerve gas or a bundt cake of C4 through a container port, consider this statistic from the Brookings Institution in Washington: If the newly renamed U.S. Customs & Border Protection agency were to inspect all incoming containers, it would need to spend $50 billion a year. The Customs inspection budget is $2.3 billion. Currently, American authorities physically search only 2% of them. There's no reason to think things are too different elsewhere. "You ought to be damn afraid," says Thomas Sheets, chairman of the National Cargo Security Council trade group in the U.S. and director of corporate security services at Palo Alto, California-based CNF, a logistics company.

Dr Milne, who has already climbed Carstensz Pyramid (Oceania) Vinson Massif (Antarctica), Elbrus (Europe), Kilimanjaro (Africa), Denali (North America) and Aconcagua (South America), will be the first mountaineer to use the IM-PACs (intelligent messaging, planning and collaboration) system. The technology, developed at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute in the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, has been designed to provide computer support to people and teams performing a range of tasks - not just expedition teams operating in extreme conditions, but also key personnel involved in planning and rescue services responding rapidly to emergencies. IM-PACs' foundations in artificial intelligence planning technologies supply a framework that encourages a methodological approach to any task and allows users to transmit and respond to information in ways that can adapt to the circumstances the expedition team finds itself in. During his ascent, Dr. Milne will be in regular contact with colleagues in base camp who will monitor his progress against his ascent plan. A laptop computer and satellite phone will allow details of his current status and progress to be sent over the internet to a support team in Edinburgh.