Our machines are getting smarter at a mind-bending pace. Tech writer Kevin Kelly, founder and former executive editor at Wired Magazine (his job title now is Senior Maverick), attempts to chart the future in his new book "The Inevitable: Understanding The 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future." In this interview with Ross Reynolds, Kelly explores two of those forces: virtual reality, which he says is creating the next evolution of the internet, and artificial intelligence, of which he writes "it's hard to imagine anything that'changes everything' as much as cheap, powerful, ubiquitous, artificial intelligence." He confronts the questions of whether virtual reality is too real for most users, whether the big companies that make artificial intelligence (Google and Amazon) will take advantage of their power, and now that we're dependent on these devices, what happens when the power goes out. Kelly has been on the forefront of technology journalism for 35 years.

The first artificial intelligence algorithm to pass the "Turing Test for sound" has been created, capable of producing sounds that fool humans into thinking they are real. Researchers from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) demonstrated an algorithm that was able to view silent video clips and accurately predict realistic sounds that might appear. In order to train the algorithm, the researchers fed it with around 1,000 videos containing an estimated 46,000 sounds produced using a drumstick. "To then predict the sound of a new video, the algorithm looks at the sound properties of each frame of that video, and matches them to the most similar sounds in the database," said Andrew Owens, a CSAIL PhD student who was the lead author on an upcoming study detailing the work. "Once the system has those bits of audio, it stitches them together to create one coherent sound."

Getting anywhere in a city like Beijing means slogging through colossal traffic jams and chaotic, bewildering intersections. Crashes kill 500 people daily, and everyone views the rules of the road as advisory at best. "Many drivers and pedestrians think that traffic signals are just for reference," says Jing Wang. But Wang is entirely serious when he says Beijing and Shanghai are a perfect laboratory for self-driving cars. He leads the autonomous vehicles program at Baidu (China's version of Google), and he's confident China will be the first country to embrace autonomy.

Artificial intelligence can now cook you a meal, chat to you on your phone, and beat you in a game of rock, paper, scissors. But Andy Rubin, who co-founded Android, believes that AI in the future will go one step further - being so powerful that it underpins every connected device. Mr Rubin said a combination of quantum computing and AI advancements could yield a conscious intelligence that would control every internet-enabled gadget. According to recent studies, certain jobs are already at risk of being replaced by automated workers. Accountants are 99 per cent likely to lose their jobs to machines.

Data Science Central, LLC, creates the first research lab entirely focused on modern data science, big data and business analytics. Issaquah, Washington (PRWEB) June 13, 2014 - Data Science Central has created the first research lab focused entirely on modern data science, big data and business analytics. The research is developed by co-founder Dr. Vincent Granville, a former post-graduate from Cambridge University with more than 20 years of cross-industry experience in large and small companies including eBay, Wells Fargo, Visa, and Microsoft, and a long list of publications and start-ups. The research center, also called data science research lab and abbreviated as DSRC produces intellectual property (open patents that anyone can use), designs API's, machine learning algorithms prototyped on real data, and publishes articles related to Map-Reduce, robust scoring techniques for big data, clustering and creation of large taxonomies with natural language processing, detection of spurious correlations, new types of noise-resistant regression, new synthetic metrics to re-define correlations, variance and other statistical indicators in a way that is more robust, especially in the context of big data. The DSRC's mission is also to automate data science and statistical analyses, by producing efficient, scalable techniques that can be used as black boxes, in batch mode, by non-experts, or integrated to existing platforms.

Although prosthetics have been used for centuries, current options remain uncomfortable and have limited and unreliable functionality. In fact, some patients prefer not to use them at all. But a team of scientists in Gothenburg have been working on a cutting-edge bionic limb that could transform the field of prosthetics. Lead professor, Dr Rickard Branemark, and team leader Max Ortiz Catalan, have developed a new way to attach prosthetics. The new technology involves a titanium implant being surgically inserted into the bone in a process known as osseointegration.

Ask five people who follow the video games industry what to expect from an E3 press conference and they'll all paint you a similar picture. Bright lights on a big stage, lengthy cinematic trailers for shooters starring gravelly-voiced stubble-faced white men, interspersed with awkward patter from white men in suits (or, depending on the publisher, suit jackets and T-shirts and trainers), cheered and whooped at by a largely white male audience. This industry is often unwelcoming to women and underrepresented minorities, and these widely watched events do little to counter that. Of course, some conferences do better than others. This year, we've judged EA, Bethesda, Microsoft, Ubisoft, and Sony for the diversity of their speakers and of the games and characters on show.

Computers have been capable of taking hand-drawn sketches and turning them into photorealistic images for some time now, but the color photographs that result haven't always been accurate. Obviously it's even more of a frustrating exercise for humans to tackle, let alone take even a cursory stab at. That's where a neural network educated by Yagmur Gucluturk, Umut Guclu and others at Radboud University in Denmark comes in. The process began with 200,000 images of faces pulled from the internet and converted them into drawings, grayscale and color sketches to teach a neural network with 11-layers to turn a sketch into a photograph of a face that could rival one actually taken by a camera. This went so far as to train the neural network, and then the team gave it one more go using a completely different set of data.

It has housed soldiers, scientists, and even ravers, but Fort Alexander near St Petersburg now lies abandoned. Magnificent drone footage shows the fortress, named after a Russian Emperor, in its current forsaken state. The structure was built between 1838 and 1845 on an artificial island in the Gulf of Finland. Dramatic drone footage shows the derelict Russian'Plague Fort' near St Petersburg in the Gulf of Finland During the Crimean war the fort guarded the Imperial Russian Navy base in Kronstadt against British and French fleets. But it was never involved in hostilities and lost its military value soon after construction.

IBM'S ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) will be mixed with Cisco's data analytics to help make sense of the data hoovered up by the Internet of Things (IoT). The partnership will use the IBM Watson AI with Cisco's ability to carry out data analysis on at the edge of IoT networks rather than waiting for all that information to be pushed back to a central point. The companies explained that this will make data analysis in the IoT faster and allow customers to act on the information as soon as possible. Organisations are trying to make better use of data as devices become more intelligent and connected to corporate networks, and one of the problems is the process of actually gathering the data, according to IBM. "Today, in a typical industrial deployment, only one per cent of IoT data is actually analysed. Legacy processes and drawbacks in current IoT platforms make it too expensive and slow to analyse the other 99 per cent," said Chris O'Connor, general manager for IoT at IBM, on the firm's blog.