When we think about big data, we usually think about the web: the billions of users of social media, the sensors on millions of mobile phones, the thousands of contributions to Wikipedia, and so forth. Due to recent innovations, web-scale data can now also come from a camera pointed at a small, but extremely complex object: the brain. New progress in distributed computing is changing how neuroscientists work with the resulting data -- and may, in the process, change how we think about computation. The brain consists of many neurons -- a hundred thousand in a fly or larval zebrafish, millions in a mouse, billions in a human. Its function depends on the neurons' activity, and how they communicate with one another.

You might do a double take when you see this particular robot - and if you did you would not be alone. Visitors to a recent exhibition in China were greeted by Jia Jia, a humanoid robot who is not only scarily lifelike, but intelligent and quick-witted too. The female robot has been called a'robot goddess' by her hoards of online fans, and some who met her at a recent exhibition were taken aback by her lifelike appearance. You might do a double take when you see this new interactive robot, and visitors to a recent exhibition in China did the same. It took the team three years to complete the robot, which can speak, show micro-expressions, move its lips and body, yet seems to hold its head in a submissive manner.

Technology allowing a pre-programmed robot to shoot to kill, or a tank to fire at a target with no human involvement, might only be years away. And a new report from the UN warns of the dangers if terrorists got their hands on these kind of'killer robots'. The report, which was a result of a week-long meeting on such weapons, held in Geneva earlier this year, said swarms of autonomous weapons would be capable of carrying out attacks. As artificial intelligence advances, the possibility that machines could independently select and fire on targets is fast approaching. Fully autonomous weapons, also known as'killer robots,' are quickly moving from the realm of science fiction (like the plot of Terminator, pictured) toward reality Experts from dozens of countries gathered in Geneva earlier this year to consider the implications of'Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems' (LAWS).

Infor, a leading provider of business applications, has announced the acquisition of Predictix, a provider of machine-learning solutions for retailers. Predictix will become part of Infor CloudSuite Retail, a new suite of enterprise applications delivered in the cloud and designed for today's retailing landscape. The acquisition comes six months after Infor announced an investment in Predictix. "The synergies between Infor and Predictix were greater than we could have hoped, and we've come to appreciate a great cultural alignment where both teams have passionate people who work hard and want to make a difference in retail and beyond," said Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor. "Buying out the other Predictix investors makes sense to bring the teams together and provide the scale and resources needed to accelerate the retail revolution."

A new class of smart machines is emerging that can help you automate your business and make life easier for professionals by eliminating many of the routine, manual aspects of their jobs, freeing them to work on more innovative and strategic areas. Products and technologies such as intelligent agents/digital assistants, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) systems, intelligent software agents, expert systems and robotic office devices are likely to become more common in work environments in the years to come. A report released in February 2016 by industry research firm Research and Markets, "Artificial Intelligence Market: Global Forecast to 2020," forecasts that the AI market will grow from 419.7 million in 2014 to 5.05 billion by 2020, at a compound annual growth rate of 54 percent from 2015 to 2020. The key factors driving this growth include diversified application areas of AI, improved productivity, and increased levels of customer satisfaction, the report says. The rising demand for intelligent systems is expected to propel the growth of the market in the next five years.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is concerned about the power artificial intelligence will wield over our lives. In a post on Slate yesterday he advised the computing industry to start thinking now about how to design intelligent software to respect our humanity. "The tech industry should not dictate the values and virtues of this future," he wrote. Nadella called for "algorithmic accountability so that humans can undo unintended harm." He said that smart software must be designed in ways that let us inspect its workings and prevent it from discriminating against certain people or using private data in unsavory ways.

Natural Language Processing seems to have become somewhat of a commodity in recent years. More than a few companies have sprung up that offer basic NLP capabilities through a cloud API. If you'd like to know whether a text carries a positive or negative message, or what people or companies it mentions, you can just send it to one of these black boxes, and receive the answer in less than a second. Superficially, all these NLP APIs look more or less the same. Textrazor, AlchemyAPI, Aylien, MeaningCloud and Lexalytics all offer similar services (named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, topic identification, etc.), and do so through similar interfaces.

In a TEDx talk entitled "How Computers are Learning to Be Creative", Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Google principal scientist, demonstrated how neural networks recognizing images can run them in reverse-- thus generating them. Of this, he noted that perception and creativity are highly linked together. With Google's neural network models, machine perception and machine creativity are no longer that far-fetched. Arcas identified perception as the process by which simple objects are transformed by the mind into overwhelmingly different concepts. With today's technology, even computers are capable of perception. Creativity, on the other hand, is actually-- as far as Arcas is concerned in his speech-- the "flip side" of the former.

Americans overwhelmingly want to buy and ride in self-driving cars, but they do not want the "brains" of those vehicles to come from automakers, a new survey has found. Automotive consulting firm AlixPartners surveyed more than 1,500 people between the ages of 18 and 65 and found that 73 percent would like a vehicle to do all of the driving. Yet when asked who they would trust more to program the car's software, 41 percent chose the experts in Silicon Valley. That compares with 26 percent who selected Japanese automakers, and 17 percent who opted for Detroit's Big Three. When it comes to building these vehicles, however, respondents said they have the most trust in the three major U.S. automakers -- Ford, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler.

Pathologists have been largely diagnosing disease the same way for the past 100 years, by manually reviewing images under a microscope. But new work suggests that computers can help doctors improve accuracy and significantly change the way cancer and other diseases are diagnosed. A research team from Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and recently developed artificial intelligence (AI) methods aimed at training computers to interpret pathology images, with the long-term goal of building AI-powered systems to make pathologic diagnoses more accurate. "Our AI method is based on deep learning, a machine-learning algorithm used for a range of applications including speech recognition and image recognition," explained pathologist Andrew Beck, HMS associate professor of pathology and director of bioinformatics at the Cancer Research Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess. "This approach teaches machines to interpret the complex patterns and structure observed in real-life data by building multi-layer artificial neural networks, in a process which is thought to show similarities with the learning process that occurs in layers of neurons in the brain's neocortex, the region where thinking occurs."