Life would be pretty dull without imagination. In fact, maybe the biggest problem for computers is that they don't have any. That's the belief motivating the founders of Vicarious, an enigmatic AI company backed by some of the most famous and successful names in Silicon Valley. Vicarious is developing a new way of processing data, inspired by the way information seems to flow through the brain. The company's leaders say this gives computers something akin to imagination, which they hope will help make the machines a lot smarter.

If a giant robotic arm swooped in to destroy your home, you would probably be pretty angry. So it is hardly surprising that an octopus living off the Canadian coast in the Pacific Ocean jumped to the defence of the coil of cable it had been living under when a robot came to take it away. A video captured while the underwater robot tried to carry out maintenance work, shows the cephalopod playing tug of war with the robotic arm. The dispute was filmed by Nautilus Live while engineers were using a submarine's robotic arm to repair a cable which was part of the Ocean Networks Canada underwater observatory. Sadly, the fight was only going to end one way, and despite the octopuses valiant efforts to protect its home by hanging onto cord holding the cable coil together, it ultimately lost.

In a previous post I advised data scientists in training to build stuff. This post gets more specific. Here's what I mean when I say I'm doing data science. The raw stuff of data science is a collection of numbers and names. Measurements, prices, dates, times, products, titles, actions--everything is fair game. You can use images, text, audio, video and other complex data too, as long as you have a way to reduce it to numbers and names.

Life would be pretty dull without imagination. In fact, maybe the biggest problem for computers is that they don't have any. That's the belief motivating the founders of Vicarious, an enigmatic AI company backed by some of the most famous and successful names in Silicon Valley. Vicarious is developing a new way of processing data, inspired by the way information seems to flow through the brain. The company's leaders say this gives computers something akin to imagination, which they hope will help make the machines a lot smarter.

Life would be pretty dull without imagination. In fact, maybe the biggest problem for computers is that they don't have any. That's the belief motivating the founders of Vicarious, an enigmatic AI company backed by some of the most famous and successful names in Silicon Valley. Vicarious is developing a new way of processing data, inspired by the way information seems to flow through the brain. The company's leaders say this gives computers something akin to imagination, which they hope will help make the machines a lot smarter.

In the latest attempt to fulfill sci-fi movie fantasies, tech firms have been lining up to provide you with a virtual assistant. From well-known voice-powered AIs such as Apple's Siri to upstarts like Viv, the goal is to quicken the actions you already take on your phone and other devices, growing ever-more efficient at the job by learning from your behavior. But like any hired help, each of these AI assistants has different skills, blind spots, and quirks. Bio: A voice-driven assistant that talks back to you--invoked by long-pressing the iPhone or iPad home button--and proactively recommends actions to take. Recently took up residence on Apple TV and Apple Watch.

At Retail Assist, we understand the importance of always having one eye on technology, in order to stay ahead of the curve. We've been researching the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to bring you our opinion on consumer adoption of AI. In the news recently, we've noticed that the makers of Apple's iconic digital assistant, Siri, Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, have released a new AI platform, Viv. The key difference between their "next generation" tool and other AI platforms is that it isn't constrained by service provider, i.e. Being cross channel, it can "speak" in a device agnostic manner to vendors and third party suppliers in order to provide the most relevant information based on the request, i.e. to purchase relevant goods at the cheapest price.

If you look at all the tech giants - Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon - there is one area all of them are keenly interested in. Personal assistants and bots which work on the basis of artificial intelligence (AI). Admittedly, Apple, Google and Microsoft have been in this space for a couple of years, but 2016 is the year when these technologies could start to have a telling impact on the way people use their gadgets and services. In fact, for many including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, "Bots will be the new apps." More than the biggies, start-ups are doing some unique and disruptive things. On Monday (May 9) night, at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Dag Kittlaus, co-founder and CEO of Viv, showed his new AI-based personal assistant which seemingly was a step above what Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Google's Search or even Amazon's Alexa are capable of doing.

Both theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk have warned that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to destroy humanity. Established geniuses as they are, their words don't seem to have resonated with Dag Kittlaus, the brains behind Siri, the beloved virtual assistant for iPhone. Ignoring words of caution pertaining to pending doom, the Norwegian, along with his team, have given birth to yet another AI, Viv. Dubbed "The Global Brain", this cloud-based virtual assistant is being called the next generation AI assistant. But the question is, is it?

A SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 2:51 p.m. EDT Wednesday, concluding a successful International Space Station resupply mission. MELBOURNE, Fla. -- A SpaceX Dragon capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean just before 3 p.m. ET Wednesday to wrap up a month-long visit to the International Space Station, returning to Earth with more than 3,700 pounds of equipment and science research. "The Dragon spacecraft has served us well," British astronaut Tim Peake radioed to mission controllers in Houston after the Dragon floated from the outpost in darkness at 9:19 a.m., released by its robotic arm. "It's good to see it departing full of science, and we wish it a safe recovery back to planet Earth." Among the 1,300 pounds of experiment on board were more than 1,000 tubes of blood, urine and saliva collected from former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly before his year-long ISS mission ended in March.