Your smartphone is about to get even smarter. As artificial intelligence and machine learning become all the more influential across the tech industry, tech giant Google has just made moves to improve its own AI capabilities by purchasing Moodstocks, a French startup that is particularly adept at helping phones recognize objects. Soon, you may be able to simply point your mobile device at whatever strikes your fancy, and have your phone tell you what it is (and perhaps tell you a bit about it). In a blog post announcement on Wednesday morning, Vincent Simonet, the head of Google France's R&D Center noted that a number of Google services already employ machine learning "to make them simpler and more useful in everyday life," including Smart Reply Inbox and Google Translate. And while Google has already "made great strides in terms of visual recognition," Simonet writes, as you can currently search for a term in Google Images and be presented with pretty decent image results, Simonet notes "there is still much to do in this area."

IntelligentX Brewing Co. has introduced what it calls "the world's first beer brewed by artificial intelligence." The London-based microbrewery is putting a new twist on an old tradition, using machine learning and a Facebook Messenger bot to spot trends and improve its product. "We currently live in a world where companies are using our data to target more advertising at us. We believe we can do something more useful with data," IntelligentX co-founder Hew Leith said in a statement to PCMag. "We can use data to create better products that improve over time. "In this example we [are] combining customer feedback data and a machine-learning algorithm to determine what consumers like about our beers, then brew new versions which are more finely tuned to people's tastes," he continued. "This is the future of data.

Bain Capital Ventures announced today in a public filing that it has closed a 600 million investment fund. BCV, the venture arm for Boston-based firm Bain Capital, said it "also has money remaining in its [ 200 million] 2014 Coinvestment Fund for larger investments." The new fund, the firm said, will continue with previous BCV investing trends, pouring seed and growth capital into enterprise and infrastructure software startups, as well as in "industries transformed by data." BCV managing director Ajay Agarwal tells VentureBeat that specific areas of focus for the new fund include "SaaS, machine learning, financial and retail technology, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure and open source." "We will also continue to balance investments geographically, including California which now represents half of our senior investment team and half of our investment dollars," said Agarwal.

Some are little more than a mechanical arm mounted onto a vehicle and equipped with a video camera and two-way audio communications, according to William Flanagan, a retired deputy police chief from New York's Nassau County who now does law enforcement and technology consulting. The most versatile robots can climb stairs and navigate other tight spots, such as this one made by Icor Technology.

An Indiegogo campaign by a group of health, robotics, AI and software experts, is planned to start shipping Pillo Home Edition to its supporters by July 2017. At the time of writing, the campaign had raised over US 68,000, not far short of its 75,000 flexible goal. Pillo, which tech sites are calling the "future robot pharmacist" and the "pharmacist of the future," is described by the campaign as "an intelligent home robot dedicated entirely to the health and wellbeing of you and your loved ones". "Pillo empowers people of all ages to better manage their health," the campaign says. "He can answer your health and wellness questions, connect you directly with healthcare professionals, and securely manage your vitamins and medication; storing, dispensing, and even ordering refills when you need them.

The three cutting-edge frameworks showcased in these talks from MesosCon North America demonstrate the amazing power and flexibility of Apache Mesos for solving large-scale problems. Perhaps you have noticed, in our Apache Mesos series, the importance of frameworks. Mesos frameworks are the essential glue that make everything work in a Mesos cluster, the layer between Mesos and your applications. They perform a multitude of tasks, including launching and scaling applications, monitoring and health checks, configuration management, and scheduling. In these talks, you'll learn how: Netflix uses Mesos to power their recommendation engines.

Scientists are closer to creating a computer with emotions. Researchers in Russia are expected to reveal an emotional computer within a year and a half, which will be able to think like a person and build up trust, its creators say. The system, called'Virtual Actor', is being created by the National Research Nuclear University in Moscow. Computers are machines used for practical reasons, without any emotion involved. The AI, called'Virtual Actor', is expected to be online within the next year and a half.

Bringing bloody resolution to a standoff with the suspected shooter in Thursday's horrific sniper attack on police at a Black Lives Matter protest, Dallas Police cornered and killed the suspect in a parking garage with an explosive delivered by a bomb-disposal robot. The AP quotes robotics expert Peter W. Singer at the New America Foundation as saying that, to his knowledge, this is the first instance in the United States of police killing someone with a robot. In a statement given on Friday, Police Chief David Brown said that the robot was deployed after several hours of failed negotiations and an exchange of fire at the El Centro College parking structure where the suspect was found. "We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was," said Brown. "Other options would have exposed our officers to great danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb."

New research from Adobe and Goldsmiths University of London has looked at the future of customer experience, with some surprising findings on machine-learning, IoT, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR). 'The Future of Experience' report was published yesterday, with its findings revealed at Adobe's Cross-Channel Marketing Forum in London. IoB attended the event to learn more about the report. The report reveals new rules of engagement when it comes to brands creating great experiences using a range of emerging technologies, such as VR, AR, AI, wearables and the IoT. Goldsmiths University of London worked with Adobe on qualitative online research with over 2,000 adults in the UK, as well as workshops with technology experts, and the resulting report identifies five new dimensions for brands to think about when creating experiences for the future.

A high British entrepreneur thinks he is solved the issue of our over-stretched NHS – a private robotic physician you'll be able to entry with the press of a button. Babylon is being hailed because the world's first synthetic intelligence triage nurse and may be accessed on a smartphone at any time. On the app's launch in London yesterday, Ali stated his machine outperforms the well being service and is a "phenomenal step" in the way forward for each the NHS and world healthcare. "Within the final three weeks, 20,000 folks used our symptom checker and in the identical time interval 600,000 folks used the 111 helpline – that is three% of individuals already," he mentioned at Babylon's HQ in West London. In response to Babylon's calculations, in 102 medical eventualities the well being app outperforms medical doctors by 21.5% and nurses by 23.5%.