Apple is introducing more artificial intelligence to the iPhone and iPad, with devices now able to understand conversations and recognise faces in photos. The technology giant's virtual assistant Siri has been given a major update that now means it can use machine learning to predict words you plan to use in text conversations as well as find faces in your photo albums. Apple chief executive Tim Cook opened the keynote at the WWDC conference in San Francisco by paying tribute to the victims of the Orlando shootings, saying Apple offered its "deepest sympathies to everyone whose lives were touched by the violence". He then led a moment's silence before the event began. As part of the iOS 10 update revealed at the event, it was also announced that Apple Music, the firm's streaming service, will be getting a complete re-design.

Apple is introducing more artificial intelligence to the iPhone and iPad, with devices now able to understand conversations and recognise faces in photos. The technology giant's virtual assistant Siri has been given a major update that now means it can use machine learning to predict words you plan to use in text conversations as well as find faces in your photo albums. Apple chief executive Tim Cook opened the keynote at the WWDC conference in San Francisco by paying tribute to the victims of the Orlando shootings, saying Apple offered its "deepest sympathies to everyone whose lives were touched by the violence". He then led a moment's silence before the event began. As part of the iOS 10 update revealed at the event, it was also announced that Apple Music, the firm's streaming service, will be getting a complete re-design.

Apple Inc. said it will let Siri connect with other apps and work on its Mac computers, moves to make the voice-activated digital assistant more useful and keep pace with rivals deploying so-called artificial-intelligence technology. Apple made the announcement at its annual developers' conference in San Francisco. Usually a showcase for Apple's software updates, the conference is being closely watched after the company reported its...

In a world where any self-respecting malware author makes sure that his creations bypass antivirus detection before releasing them, enterprise security teams are forced to focus on improving their response times to infections rather than trying to prevent them all, which is likely to be a losing game. Exabeam, a provider of user and entity behavior analytics, believes that machine-learning algorithms can significantly improve ransomware detection and reaction time, preventing such programs from spreading inside the network and affecting a larger number of systems. Because the decryption price asked by ransomware authors is calculated per system, isolating affected computers as soon as possible is critical. Only last week the University of Calgary announced that it paid 20,000 Canadian dollars (around US 15,600) to ransomware authors to get the decryption keys for multiple systems. Exabeam's Analytics for Ransomware, a new product that was announced today, uses the company's existing behavior analytics technology to detect ransomware infections shortly after they occur.

You'll find the Future of Humanity Institute down a medieval backstreet in the centre of Oxford. It is beside St Ebbe's church, which has stood on this site since 1005, and above a Pure Gym, which opened in April. The institute, a research faculty of Oxford University, was established a decade ago to ask the very biggest questions on our behalf. Notably: what exactly are the "existential risks" that threaten the future of our species; how do we measure them; and what can we do to prevent them? Or to put it another way: in a world of multiple fears, what precisely should we be most terrified of? When I arrive to meet the director of the institute, Professor Nick Bostrom, a bed is being delivered to the second-floor office. Existential risk is a round-the-clock kind of operation; it sleeps fitfully, if at all. Bostrom, a 43-year-old Swedish-born philosopher, has lately acquired something of the status of prophet of doom among those currently doing most to shape our civilisation: the tech billionaires of Silicon Valley.

Elon Musk says the microchip implant is the human race's best chance against emerging artificial intelligence. The SpaceX CEO foresees a future when AI becomes so advanced it will start to treat humans as house cats. Musk muses on the fear that has been bugging humans, ever since AI was created. Can robots take over the world? Also, how can humans prevent real-word scenarios similar to "Terminator" and "I, Robot"?

Technically, the E3 kicks off Tuesday, June 14, but we all know that much of the show's biggest news out will be announced before the show floor opens, at the parade of publisher "keynote" press conferences in the days prior to the show. With more and more publishers broadcasting live-streams, there will be more live content coming out of this year's show than ever before. We've rounded up some of the biggest broadcasts, including all of the press conferences, so you can follow along the news as it happens, hassle-free. As you may or may not have heard, EA backed out of E3 this year. Instead, it hosted its own fan event, EA Play, adjacent to the show.

While many companies are racing to perfect autonomous driving technologies, no one really meddles in the "flying drone taxi" category. But now, that may change. The world's first passenger drone capable of autonomously carrying a person in the air has been given clearance for testing in Nevada. A Chinese company called EHang, the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems (NIAS), and the Governor's Office of Economic Development have all partnered to put EHang's drone through testing and regulatory approval. The drone--the electric Ehang 184 passenger drone--premiered in the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this January.

For robots to navigate the world, they need to be able to make reasonable assumptions about their surroundings and what might happen during a sequence of events. One way that humans come to learn these things is through sound. For infants, poking and prodding objects is not just fun; some studies suggest that it's actually how they develop an intuitive theory of physics. Could it be that we can get machines to learn the same way? Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have demonstrated an algorithm that has effectively learned how to predict sound: When shown a silent video clip of an object being hit, the algorithm can produce a sound for the hit that is realistic enough to fool human viewers.

Thousands of openings in artificial intelligence and machine learning posted on job boards are going unfilled. In fact, though AI is one of the fastest-growing areas for high-tech professionals, according to a recent Kiplinger report, there are too few qualified engineers. "Supply is far lower than demand," says Boris Babenko, a machine vision engineer at Orbital Insight, a company in Palo Alto, Calif., that uses AI to make sense of data gathered from satellite images. "That's true of all software engineering, but AI is a niche on top of that." The need for AI specialists exists in just about every field as companies seek to give computers the ability to think, learn, and adapt.