When I was about 6, my mind did something wondrous, although it felt perfectly natural at the time. When I encountered the name of any day of the week, I automatically associated it with a color or a pattern, always the same one, as if the word embodied the shade. Sunday was dark maroon, Wednesday a sunshiny golden yellow, and Friday a deep green. Without knowing it, I was living the unusual mental state called synesthesia, aptly described by psychology professor Emma Geller as a "condition in which ordinary activities trigger extraordinary experiences." More exactly, it is a neurological event where excitation of one of the five senses arouses a simultaneous reaction in another sense or senses (the Greek roots for "synesthesia," also spelled "synaesthesia," translate as "joined perception").

A robot dog from Boston Dynamics is now officially available to purchase. Spot, as the machine has been dubbed, will cost $74,500 (approximately £60,000). The canine droid is only available to customers in the United States at the moment, after they make a $1,000 deposit. It is capable of climbing stairs and crossing rough terrain, with the company sending the mechanical pooch into dangerous environments to carry payloads from place to place or collect data from the site. Users can control spot through its controller, which "easy access" to the robot's body posing, walking gaits, obstacle avoidance, and local navigation. Spot can also be set to follow predefined routes.

As protests continue both in the United States and the United Kingdom over police brutality and the death of George Floyd, an iPhone shortcut that allows users to quickly record interactions with law enforcement is becoming more popular. The tool, which was created in 2018, uses Apple's Shortcuts app. This allows users to trigger a series of actions based on a single word, similar to Routines with Amazon's Alexa voice assistant. Saying "Hey Siri, I'm getting pulled over" will automatically activate the program, which pauses any music that could be playing, turns down the brightness on the phone screen, and puts the device on Do Not Disturb. It can also send a contact a text message, letting them know that you have been pulled over by the police as well as sending your exact location.

Amazon has released its first Echo device for use outside of the house, allowing users to take Alexa in their car. The company revealed the device in 2018 but it has finally come to customers in the UK and Ireland. Echo Auto plugs into a car's 12V power outlet or built-in USB port and connects to the in-car stereo via either audio jack cable or Bluetooth to enable the use of voice assistant Alexa inside the vehicle. Users are then able to use Alexa voice commands to control music, check the news, make phone calls or check their schedule without taking hands off the wheel or eyes off the road. The device gets internet connectivity by connecting to a user's smartphone and the Alexa app and using its existing data plan.

Brands, development companies, agencies, and startups rapidly followed, taking advantage of their potential. ARKit 2 landed at WWDC 18, with Apple introducing the USDZ format that makes adding models, data and animations to AR landscapes simple.

Over a few years, applications of the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have seen astounding growth. The technique has been successfully used for high-fidelity natural image synthesis, data augmentation tasks, improving image compressions, and more. From emoting super-realistic expressions to exploring deep space, and from bridging the human-machine empathetic disconnect to introducing new art forms, GANs have it all covered. Here, we list down a few impressive real-world applications of GANs. Who imagined that one day we will be able to see the expressions of the Italian noblewoman Lisa Gherardini from the famous portrait of Mona Lisa painted by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci.

With its White Paper on Artificial Intelligence (AI), the European Commission embraces the potential of AI in the European economy and labour market. They have the potential to serve applicants, clients and society by enabling better matches and a faster, more efficient process. These improvements will prove essential for the recovery of the European labour markets following the drastic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Still, the human touch will remain crucial in the recruitment industry. Leveraging technology in a smart way allows us to free-up time to focus more on those elements of our work that require human creativity and emotion – traits that technology cannot emulate. The future will be one combining smart tech and human touch.

A new Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithm, developed by scientists at the University of Hong Kong, can only create enormously realistic photos from sketch drawings. Researchers say the new algorithm can be used to identify suspects in police investigations. Despite the concerns of names like Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies continue to penetrate every aspect of our lives. AI, which has a place in many sectors including security, health, military, automotive and transportation, is becoming more and more powerful. According to the information reported by the website of New Scientist, Hongbo Fu and colleagues from the University of Hong Kong developed an algorithm that can instantly convert a very simple sketch drawing representing the face of a person into portrait photography.

The U.S. has started to catch up to China on the adoption of Artificial Intelligence technology, says AI expert Kai-Fu Lee. When Lee--the chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures--wrote his book AI Superpowers in 2018, he argued that China was faster in implementing and monetizing AI technology. But the U.S. has started to close the gap on adopting and using AI day-to-day Lee said at Wednesday's TIME100 Talks event. "China was way ahead in things like mobile payments, food delivery, robotics for delivery, things like that, but we also saw recently, in the U.S., very quickly peoples' habits were forming about ordering food from home, about use of robotics in various places, in using more mobile technologies, mobile payments," said Lee, who has been at the forefront of AI innovation for over three decades at Apple, Microsoft, Google and today as an investor in Chinese tech startups. The Chinese Communist Party has placed a huge focus in recent years on technological advancement to drive its economic growth.

Self-supervised goal proposal and reaching is a key component for exploration and efficient policy learning algorithms. Such a self-supervised approach without access to any oracle goal sampling distribution requires deep exploration and commitment so that long horizon plans can be efficiently discovered. In this paper, we propose an exploration framework, which learns a dynamics-aware manifold of reachable states. For a goal, our proposed method deterministically visits a state at the current frontier of reachable states (commitment/reaching) and then stochastically explores to reach the goal (exploration). This allocates exploration budget near the frontier of the reachable region instead of its interior. We target the challenging problem of policy learning from initial and goal states specified as images, and do not assume any access to the underlying ground-truth states of the robot and the environment. To keep track of reachable latent states, we propose a distance-conditioned reachability network that is trained to infer whether one state is reachable from another within the specified latent space distance. Given an initial state, we obtain a frontier of reachable states from that state. By incorporating a curriculum for sampling easier goals (closer to the start state) before more difficult goals, we demonstrate that the proposed self-supervised exploration algorithm, can achieve $20\%$ superior performance on average compared to existing baselines on a set of challenging robotic environments, including on a real robot manipulation task.