Based in Google Research offices in Zurich, Switzerland, the new group will focus on three key areas of artificial intelligence: machine intelligence, machine perception, and natural language processing and understanding, according to a blog post by Emmanuel Mogenet, head of Google Research for Europe. It will research ways to improve machine-learning infrastructure and enable the technology for practical use, for instance. Researchers will also work closely with linguists to advance natural language understanding, Mogenet said. Zurich, meanwhile, is home to Google's largest engineering office outside the U.S. Researchers there developed the engine that powers Knowledge Graph as well as the conversation engine that powers the Google Assistant in its Allo messaging app. Katherine Noyes has been an ardent geek ever since she first conquered Pyramid of Doom on an ... Full investment news article is here.

Computer systems could also be smarter than people at some issues, however are they clever? The ultimate in our Computing turns 60 collection, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the primary pc in an Australian college, seems at how clever the expertise has turn into. The time period "synthetic intelligence" (AI) was first used again in 1956 to explain the title of a workshop of scientists at Dartmouth, an Ivy League school in the US. At that pioneering workshop, attendees mentioned how computer systems would quickly carry out all human actions requiring intelligence, together with taking part in chess and different video games, composing nice music and translating textual content from one language to a different language. These pioneers had been wildly optimistic, although their aspirations had been unsurprising.

The defining advance of the next decade, if you listen to the prophets of Silicon Valley, will be the seismic and unavoidable ascent of artificial intelligence. It might be hard to take the thought seriously when a satnav sends you down a dead-end country road, or your phone's autocorrect feature turns a carefully-constructed text message to gibberish, but the milestones reached in the last year alone have been exceptional. DeepMind, the British AI company owned by Google, has defeated the world champion at Go, the ancient game that requires a finely-tuned sense of intuition to master. Driverless cars now seem like an inevitability rather than a curiosity. Error rates on image recognition technology have dropped from 25pc in 2011 to less than 4pc.

The future of luxury cars will be entirely personalized, fully autonomous and exceedingly comfortable -- at least if Rolls Royce has anything to do with it. On Thursday, the venerable British automaker, which is now owned by BMW Group BMW, 0.53%, unveiled its first self-driving car, the Vision Next 100 concept car, a spectacularly ornate, futuristic land yacht that wouldn't look out of place in the sci-fi classic "Tron." At nearly 20 feet long and 5 feet tall, the car features a zero-emissions powertrain, glass canopy roof and virtually invisible wheels, which are tucked inside the sleek chassis (Got a flat? The robot will fix it). But it's inside where the Vision Next 100 really shines, sporting a silk sofa -- or as Rolls puts it, "a beautifully textured, ivory-coloured luxurious throne upon which our passengers are conveyed" -- deep wool carpet, hand-crafted Madagascar wood paneling and a big-screen TV.

Elon Musk has released video footage of SpaceX's latest landing attempt, in which the aerospace firm lost a Falcon 9 rocket. The Falcon 9 took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Wednesday, carrying two communications satellites into orbit. Looks like early liquid oxygen depletion caused engine shutdown just above the deck pic.twitter.com/Sa6uCkpknY Head of SpaceX, Elon Musk, has released video footage showing just how close the first stage of this week's rocket launch came to successfully landing on the floating barge. The Falcon 9 appeared to be on course for an upright landing before it was lost in clouds of smoke.

This year's E3 may be over, but we'll feel the ripples for months. Here's a rundown of some of the heavily scrutinized industry trade show's biggest events and takeaways. It'll need more in the years to come, but for E3 2016 at least, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild seems like the knockout punch so many have been hoping for. The action-adventure game, which stars longtime series hero Link, transpires for the first time in an open world festooned with objectives, unique biomes and completely new-to-the-series activities. You can cook, (manually) jump, climb nearly anything and go anywhere you like in a painterly multifaceted playground as vast as any yet seen. It's a full rethink of the Zelda formula, reformulated from the footings up, and crafted so that players of the Wii U version won't feel left behind by the "NX" version when the game ships for both Wii U and Nintendo's forthcoming platform reboot next March.

Even the smartest of intruders would struggle to slip past this security guard. Armed with lasers and infrared cameras, a new security robot is promising to take over the tedious task of patrolling buildings. RAMSEE can provide round-the-clock monitoring of an area by scanning its environment as it trundles through rooms, looking for motion, along with signs of fire, smoke and gas leaks. Lidar is a remote sensing technology that measures distance by shooting a laser at a target and analysing the light that is reflected back. The technology was developed in the early 1960s and uses laser imaging with radar technology that can calculate distances. It was first used in meteorology to measure clouds by the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Machine Learning is one of the most exciting fields in the world. Every week we discover something new, something amazing, something revolutionary. It's incredible, but it can also be overwhelming. That's why we created This Week in Machine Learning! Each week we publish a curated list of Machine Learning stories as a resource to help you keep pace with all these exciting developments.

The first time I used Waze was a revelation. This was not because of the network effects it generates, but more importantly, because of how transparently the application's user interface (UI) exposes them. This means every time I open the Waze app, I'm implicitly participating in the system. In doing so, I help improve every other user's driving experience, and as an added bonus, all the other Waze users participating around me improves mine, too. This example shows that when you're an active participant in the learning loop, everyone benefits – in this case, because everyone reaches their destination faster than we could by ourselves.

There are additional obstacles to finding programmers and manufacturers of fully autonomous weapons liable under civil law, in which a victim files a lawsuit against an alleged wrongdoer. The United States, for example, establishes immunity for most weapons manufacturers. It also has high standards for proving a product was defective in a way that would make a manufacturer legally responsible. In any case, victims from other countries would likely lack the access and money to sue a foreign entity. The gap in accountability would weaken deterrence of unlawful acts and leave victims unsatisfied that someone was punished for their suffering.