Your purchase helps support NPR programming. We've been talking to robots for a while now. In the decade or so since Siri and her compatriots first appeared, we've all gotten pretty used to having conversations with computers in various forms. While your Alexa doesn't look much like a Cylon (the scary metal kind or hotty flesh kind) now, it seems like it's just a matter of time of time before we'll be talking with all kinds of robots -- including those that look just like us. Time, robots and conversations are at the heart of David Ewing Duncan's new book Talking to Robots: Tales from Our Human-Robot Futures.

The lunar space station, Gateway, will orbit the moon in an ellipse -- with a path that will resemble a halo -- when it is assembled in the next decade, NASA and the European Space Agency have announced. The station will act as a half-way house between the Earth and the Moon, acting as a place of shelter, making trips to the moon more efficient and providing a launch pad for missions heading further out into the solar system. Much like the International Space Station, the Gateway will be a permanent base on which astronauts will live for extended periods, conducting research on-board and making regular excursions down to the moon's surface. The halo-like orbit of the lunar gateway will see it trace a halo-like path around the moon (pictured). A stepping stone to allow astronauts to more easily travel to the Moon as well as a forward outpost for crewed excursions further into the solar system, the Lunar Orbital Platform is due for construction within the next decade.

LAUNCESTON, Australia (Reuters) - One of humankind's most enduring weaknesses is to assume that the way things are presently will somehow persist into the future, and that current trends are inexorable. This thinking is behind the often repeated view that renewable energy sources such as wind and solar cannot replace thermal electricity generation such as coal and natural gas. Presently, it is correct that the most significant weakness of these renewables is that they are intermittent, meaning they don't generate close to their installed capacity and cause instability in electricity grids. While storage through batteries or pumped hydro is often touted as a solution to the drawbacks of wind and solar, there are other emerging technologies that may well make renewables more effective. One of those is harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the efficiency of wind and solar by using machine learning programmes to enhance predictability of generation and grid stability.

Revenue from AI software soared more than 63 per cent to $846m (£664m) last year amid a surge in firms investing in the new technology. Robotic process automation (RPA), which provides AI tools for businesses, is now the fastest-growing segment of the enterprise software market, with revenue set to reach $1.3bn in 2019, according to research firm Gartner. "The RPA market has grown since our last forecast, driven by digital business demands as organisations look for'straight-through' processing," said Fabrizio Biscotti, research vice president at Gartner. "Competition is intense, with nine of the top 10 vendors changing market share position in 2018." The top five RPA vendors controlled 47 per cent of the market in 2018, though the vendors ranked sixth and seventh posted trip-digit revenue growth in a sign of heightening competition.

We are excited to announce a third series of GeoAI workshops at SIGSPATIAL 2019, in Chicago, IL. GeoAI2019 aims to continue bringing together geoscientists, computer scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and decision makers from academia, industry, and government to discuss the latest trends, successes, challenges, and opportunities in the field of deep learning for geographical data mining, to provide actionable intelligence and power new geographic scientific discoveries. Through the workshop, attendees will be able to exchange the latest information on techniques and workflows used in artificial intelligence for spatial research. With a combination of geo-computational methods and geographic research, we invite you to join us at GeoAI2019. The workshop will be interactive to engage in discussions, shape the research directions, and disseminate state-of-the-art solutions.

Petuum, an artificial intelligence platform company, announced Petuum Neurobots, a series of intelligent process automation (IPA) tools that provide cutting-edge AI capabilities to robotic process automation (RPA). This enables enterprise customers to quickly and cost-effectively deploy powerful RPA bots with the most advanced AI and machine learning (ML) technology. "We believe AI technology must be accessible to all companies of all sizes across different industries to achieve better business results. Neurobots are a critical part of Petuum's larger strategy to provide state-of-the-art AI that will transform RPA bots into intelligent agents that are cognitive, able to learn, think, and collaborate (with human and other bots), and therefore realize fully-operationalized business automation," said Dr. Eric Xing, founder and CEO of Petuum. The first Neurobots introduced include Kaibot for interactive conversational applications such as chatbots, Chimebot for automatic speech recognition, Chicbot for fashion applications and Pixbot for image understanding and enhancements.

Travel & tourism is on its rise nowadays. This may be explained by the fact that it has become more affordable to a broader audience. But, in today's fast-paced world, finding time to travel to a ticket office and get your tickets is a luxury few can afford. Like any other industry, machine learning, AI and big data analytics have changed the travel & hospitality industry as well. In this post, we will discuss the major applications and future scopes of machine learning, AI & big data analytics in the travel & hospitality industry – across the globe and India. Additionally, we will also have a look at how machine learning, AI and big data analytics are reshaping the hospitality job market. Due to rapid digital transformation, over 500 billion dollars ($564.87 billion) was made in the travel & hospitality sector in the year 2016 alone. The number is expected to reach $817.54 billion by 2020.

Often the best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in an environment where people speak it. The constant exposure, along with the pressure to communicate, helps you swiftly pick up and practice new vocabulary. But not everyone gets the opportunity to live or study abroad. In a new collaboration with IBM Research, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), a university based in Troy, New York, now offers its students studying Chinese another option: a 360-degree virtual environment that teleports them to the busy streets of Beijing or a crowded Chinese restaurant. Students get to haggle with street vendors or order food, and the environment is equipped with different AI capabilities to respond to them in real time.

AI can also unlock new insights from the massive amounts of complex climate simulations generated by the field of climate modeling, which has come a long way since the first system was created at Princeton in the 1960s. Of the dozens of models that have since come into existence, all look at data regarding atmosphere, oceans, land, cryosphere, or ice. But, even with agreement on basic scientific assumptions, Claire Monteleoni, a computer science professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder and a co-founder of climate informatics, points out that while the models generally agree in the short term, differences emerge when it comes to long-term forecasts.

From improving customer service to automating work processes and providing predictive analysis, artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the way organisations operate. AI is also bringing significant advantage to cybersecurity in uncovering vulnerabilities and responding to threats. Security correspondent Daniel Bardsley speaks to Paul O'Brien, Director of AI, Service, Security and Operations Lab Applied Research, BT Technology and Professor Nader Azarmi, Emirates ICT Innovation Centre (EBTIC) director and head of BT Global Research Centres to discuss how advancements in AI spells the future of security in the Middle East. There is no shortage of money being invested in cybersecurity research as the threats from attackers appear to grow. Microsoft, for example, spends more than $1 billion annually in cybersecurity research and development, with the firm having said that the amount is increasing as activity migrates to the cloud.