History shows us that any newly evolving entity can cause great changes for life on Earth, and it may be time to start thinking of our technology as such an organism. Indeed, that is precisely the point made by Michael Gillings, Darrell Kemp, and Martin Hilbert from the University of California, Davis. A basic human characteristic is to accumulate and reproduce information, something that has been improved through the years with humans creating, using, and being almost dependent on the internet for the accumulation and sharing of digital information. To date, digital information can copy itself perfectly, multiply with each download or view; it can be modified or merged to create new information packets; it can also be applied through artificial intelligence systems. Notably, there are also additional factors that make digital information even more advanced--it can replicate with almost no energy cost, and has quicker generation times.

What if computers could take the words we type on the internet and convert them into a language that describes what they actually mean? Analyzing data pulled from social media would reveal insights into the deeper questions about our real motives and feelings, instead of mere statistics. Pierre Lévy, a French philosopher who's been writing about cyberspace since the 1990s and who is the Canada research chair in collective intelligence at the University of Ottawa, is working on software that can do just this. He's done the math and annotated the entire French dictionary with a language--or, as he calls it, a hyper-language, since it describes words that already form a language of their own--that he calls IEML, or the Information Economy MetaLanguage. All that's left is to do the actual coding to turn it into an automatic system.

The artificial intelligence (AI) system is "based on deep learning, a machine-learning algorithm used for a range of applications including speech recognition and image recognition," explains Andrew Beck, an associate professor in pathology at Harvard Medical School, who heads the team developing the new system at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), in Boston, MA. Prof. Beck and colleagues demonstrated the new AI system in a competition held at the annual meeting of the International Symposium of Biomedical Imaging (ISBI 2016) in Prague in April. He and his colleagues are developing AI methods that train computers to interpret pathology images to improve the accuracy of diagnoses. The approach they are using teaches computers to interpret the complex patterns seen in such images by "building multi-layer artificial neural networks," says Prof. Beck. The process is thought to be similar to the way learning takes place in the layers of neurons in the neocortex of the brain, the region where thinking occurs.

A car accident is one of the most frightening experiences a driver can have. But, how would you feel about an artificial intelligence (AI) system taking over to keep you safe? That's just what Japanese automaker Toyota is planning. Gill Pratt, CEO of the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), said that the manufacturer is working on driver assistance systems with built-in AI to improve safety, as originally reported by Reuters. Pratt said that the new system will "improve car safety by enabling vehicles to anticipate and avoid potential accident situations."

When introducing its monster 72-core Xeon Phi chip, Intel couldn't help but take a swipe at graphics processors for being sluggish for some tasks. Ironically, Xeon Phi is a byproduct of Larrabee, which was supposed to be Intel's first major GPU but was abandoned in 2009 after multiple delays. The swipe was a shot at Nvidia, whose GPUs are flourishing in the gaming and machine learning areas. But Nvidia's success has also raised questions about whether Intel should've been patient and pursued Larrabee. Nevertheless, Xeon Phi has been successfully used in supercomputing, and now Intel wants to challenge Nvidia's GPU by bringing the chip to machine learning.

Trendytoutdoor pizza ovens have been labelled an environmental menace by scientists. The wood burning stoves used to cook pizzas churn out dangerous emissions which may be polluting some built up urban areas where the crusty favourites are particularly popular. It is not just pizzas that could be taking a bite out of attempts to clean up the environment, the study says. Similar wood burners are also used by many steakhouse restaurants too. The wood burning stoves used to cook pizzas churn out dangerous emissions which may be polluting some built up urban areas where the crusty favourites are particularly popular.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

With every passing day, it feels like the robot uprising is getting a little closer. Robots are being beaten down by their human overlords, even as we teach them to get stronger. Now, they're starting to break free. A robot in Russia escaped from a research lab in the town of Perm yesterday, June 15, reports the BBC. An engineer at robotics company Promobot had forgotten to close a gate, and the runaway bot caused a traffic jam as it bolted out into the world.

A research team from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) 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, MD, PhD, Director of Bioinformatics at the Cancer Research Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. "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." The Beck lab's approach was recently put to the test in a competition held at the annual meeting of the International Symposium of Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), which involved examining images of lymph nodes to decide whether or not they contained breast cancer. The research team of Beck and his lab's post-doctoral fellows Dayong Wang, PhD and Humayun Irshad, PhD, and student Rishab Gargya, together with Aditya Khosla of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, placed first in two separate categories, competing against private companies and academic research institutions from around the world. The research team today posted a technical report describing their approach to the arXiv.org

Twitter has bought London-based AI startup Magic Pony Technology for a reported 150m ( 102m) as the company moves to strengthen its position in image-sharing, video and live video. Founded in 2014, Magic Pony uses machine learning to build improved systems for visual processing. The company said it was excited to be joining forces with Twitter "to improve the visual experiences that are delivered across their apps". Twitter's chief executive, Jack Dorsey, said Magic Pony's technology would be used to enhance live and video offerings and "opens up a whole lot of exciting creative possibilities for Twitter". Dorsey said the team included "11 PhDs with expertise across computer vision, machine learning, high-performance computing and computational neuroscience".