By: HQAnon / (AnonHQ) The evolution of humanoid robots is well into the concerning stage at this point. DARPA's latest incarnation of its Atlas robot is seen in the following video beginning to walk at a pace with a sense of balance equal to most humans. Strangely, toward the end of the video, it is being "abused" by its human handler, which begs the question if a true artificial intelligence is permitted to flourish in this robot, if it might strike back at some point. At the very least, this robot's demonstration of dexterity in the warehouse is likely to threaten humans economically as humans continue to be outsourced to machine labor at record levels. But it's the latest humanoid robot from Hanson Robotics that might further heighten the level of concern.

By Riki Ozawa / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff WriterAutomated cars are classified into four levels based on how much the driver is involved in the operation of the accelerator, brakes and steering. The ranks range from Level 1 -- in which one of the operations is automated -- to Level 4 -- in which a car is fully autonomous and can operate without a human driver. Most domestic and overseas car manufacturers are at Level 2, with Tesla Motors Inc.'s Model S also in this category. Toyota Motor Corp., Nissan Motor Co., Honda Motor Co. and other major domestic carmakers have been putting work into the research and development process, aiming to market automated cars that can run on expressways by around 2020. The manufacturers are aiming to reach Level 3, in which a self-driving system mainly operates the car and the driver takes the necessary actions only in case of emergency, such as when the system malfunctions.

When computers speak, how human should they sound? This was a question that a team of six IBM linguists, engineers and marketers faced in 2009, when they began designing a function that turned text into speech for Watson, the company's "Jeopardy!"-playing Eighteen months later, a carefully crafted voice -- sounding not quite human but also not quite like HAL 9000 from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- expressed Watson's synthetic character in a highly publicized match in which the program defeated two of the best human "Jeopardy!" The challenge of creating a computer "personality" is now one that a growing number of software designers are grappling with as computers become portable and users with busy hands and eyes increasingly use voice interaction. Machines are listening, understanding and speaking, and not just computers and smartphones.

Amid the protests against police brutality spreading across the country, Dallas is still haunted by the death of five officers at the hands of a lone gunman. However, some were concerned by the manner in which the police ended a standoff with 25-year-old Micah X Johnson, the suspect behind the shooting. The standoff ended early Friday morning when the police detonated a bomb robot, killing the suspect. The Dallas Police Department defended its action saying that the bomb was "a last resort." In a statement published Saturday, the Dallas Police Department said, "When all attempts to negotiate with the suspect, Micah Johnson, failed under the exchange of gunfire, the Department utilized the mechanical tactical robot, as a last resort, to deliver an explosion device to save the lives of officers and citizens." Police used the Remotec, Model F-5 with claw and arm extension and an explosive device of C4 with a "Det" cord.

Episode Summary: If you're in the San Francisco Bay area, it's not all that novel to be trained in or working on some form of AI; however, to be doing so in the 1980s and 1990s was a more rare occurrence. Dr. Lorien Pratt has been working with neural nets and AI applications for many decades, and she does lots of consulting work in implementing these technologies with companies in the Bay area. In this episode, Lorien provides her unique perspective on decades of development and adoption in AI as we ask, where is the traction today in places where it wasn't 5 or 10 years ago? We also discuss where Lorien thinks machine learning applications in business and government seem to be headed in the near term. Recognition in Brief: Lorien Pratt, PhD, is co-founder and chief scientist at Quantellia, a consultant firm for machine learning applications in business and industry.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are biologically-inspired variants of MLPs. From Hubel and Wiesel's early work on the cat's visual cortex [Hubel68], we know the visual cortex contains a complex arrangement of cells. These cells are sensitive to small sub-regions of the visual field, called a receptive field. The sub-regions are tiled to cover the entire visual field. These cells act as local filters over the input space and are well-suited to exploit the strong spatially local correlation present in natural images.

DeepMind is an artificial intelligence lab in London that creates what are known as general purpose self-learning algorithms. The company, acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported 400 million, is best-known for creating software „agents" that have mastered games like…

Minecraft has gained a tool that lets artificial intelligence experiments be carried out in its virtual worlds. The Malmo platform will be offered free of charge to research institutions as well as the general public.

An artificial intelligence lawyer chatbot has successfully contested 160,000 parking tickets across London and New York for free, showing that chatbots can actually be useful. Dubbed as "the world's first robot lawyer", a title which actually belongs to an AI called "Ross", by its 19 year old creator, London born second year Stanford University student Joshua Browder, DoNotPay helps users contest parking tickets in an easy to use chat like interface. The program first works out whether an appeal is possible through a series of simple questions, such as were there clearly visible parking signs, and then guides users through the appeals process. The results speak for themselves. In the 21 months since the free service was launched in London and now New York, Browder says DoNotPay has taken on 250,000 cases and won 160,000, giving it a success rate of 64% appealing over 4m of parking tickets.

NEW YORK--When Dallas police detonated a "bomb robot" Thursday night to take down a sniper suspect, it was believed to be the first time a robot was used by law enforcement to kill a human being in the U.S. Dallas police chief David Brown explained in a press conference that "other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger." The action raises ethical questions about the role of robots in warfare, or in this case, police work, especially given continuing breakthroughs in machine learning and artificial intelligence. "I think for all of us, the first issue that comes to mind is some degree of relief," says Michael Kalichman, director of the Center for Ethics in Science and Technology. "While it's premature to judge exactly what happened, it certainly seems likely that this ended a tragedy that could have been far worse. However, we also can't help but think about where this will go next."