People have a weird obsession with games likes Chess and Go. Achievement in them has long been seen as a marker of human intellect, and yet they're among the least human test you could devise; putting players in simplified situations where everything is known, every possible course of action is laid out for them, and the test is one of concentration and logic. We pass far greater tests daily, when we recognise a face in a crowd, when we dynamically balance in motion, when we predict the response our words and expressions will have on another sentient being, or when we do all of the above, effortlessly, at the same time. We don't think of these as challenging because they're so innately human, while playing Chess or Go seems far more impressive precisely because they're more rigid and computational in nature. There's an irony in making a board game one of the'grand challenges' of AI, and it surprises me that more people don't see it.

Coming off its first quarterly revenue decline in 13 years, Apple Inc. kicks off its annual developers' conference Monday in San Francisco facing questions about whether the company's best days are behind it. The focus of the weeklong Worldwide Developers Conference is expected to be on Siri, Apple's digital assistant. When Apple introduced Siri as an iPhone feature in 2011, it heralded a future of people finding information or completing tasks on their devices by speaking rather than typing or tapping. That vision of Siri hasn't fully materialized, leaving the door open for other technology companies to push into Apple's turf. Google parent Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have all introduced voice-activated digital assistants that rely on artificial intelligence -- technology that allows computers to understand inferences and context so they can make decisions like a human brain instead of following programmed instructions.

"Well, I have to go to the skull," is a line that can only find place in a movie that does not make any sense. In the nine minute movie "Sunspring," however, it is far from the most nonsensical piece of dialogue. The credit (or the blame) for the creation of the disjointed script of the movie goes to Benjamin -- a neural network created by filmmaker Oscar Sharp and Ross Goodwin, who is an artificial intelligence researcher at New York University. Sharp and Goodwin fed the AI, which is a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurring neural network, a raft of sci-fi scripts written for movies like Aliens, Watchmen, Star Trek and the X-Files. Initially, Benjamin kept "spitting out conversations between Mulder and Scully [the X-Files protagonists], and you'd notice that Scully spends more time asking what's going on and Mulder spends more time explaining," Sharp told Ars Technica.

EHang 184, the world's first passenger drone, capable of autonomously carrying a person in the air for 23 minutes, has been cleared for testing. The approval was given out by the Nevada governor's office to develop and test the vehicle at the state's Federal Aviation Administration-approved drone test site. The electric EHang 184 passenger drone by Chinese firm EHang was unveiled at CES in Las Vegas in January. The Chinese company said that the EHang 184 Autonomous Aerial Vehicle (AAV) is a 142-horsepower "personal flying vehicle" that can transport a single person at an altitude of more than 11,000 feet, China's People's Daily Online reported. According to BBC, Macquarie consultancy senior analyst Douglas McNeill gave his opinion of the flying drone concept.

The security threat landscape continues to evolve not just in scale, but, more importantly, in sophistication. Despite a range of advancements in the industry to safeguard against increasingly bold and intricate threats, organizations have struggled to keep pace with the technologies and techniques employed by those responsible for such attacks. As companies continue to increase their digital footprints, "identify and diagnose" capabilities are not enough to remediate against a growing fundamental business challenge for organizations of all shapes and sizes. We spoke with Avivah Litan, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, about the development of advanced security analytics and important considerations for organizations looking to implement machine learning to defend against an array of internal and external security threats. Q: How are analytics and machine learning changing the current security landscape?

As 2015 draws to a close, all eyes are on the year's accomplishments, as well as forecasting technology trends of 2016 and beyond. One particular field that has frequently been in the spotlight during the last year is deep learning, an increasingly popular branch of machine learning, which looks to continue to advance further and infiltrate into an increasing number of industries and sectors. Over the last year we've had the privilege of hearing from many of the great minds working in artificial intelligence and computer science, at RE•WORK events, and we look forward to meeting and learning from many more in 2016! As part of our ongoing speaker Q&A series, we asked some of the top names in deep learning for their predictions for the field over the next 5 years. What developments can we expect to see in deep learning in the next 5 years?

An autonomous robot developed by researchers in Singapore scans for missing or misplaced library books. You know you've done it. You grab a library book off the shelf, flip through the pages, then go to put it back and realize you forgot where it came from. So you just glance over your shoulder and take a wild guess. Misplaced library books frustrate patrons and give librarians migraines.

Artificial intelligence is becoming one of the most exciting technology trends in the market. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon are actively leveraging AI as part of their technology stacks. However, in order to dominate the market, these vendors will need to monetize AI at a large scale. UK director, Qualtrics Ian McVey is UK director at Qualtrics, an employee engagement firm. In this article, he explores the state of artificial intelligence.

Behavioral psychologists have long used mazes to study memory and learning; their subjects, mostly rats and mice. Now researchers are beginning to use the same approach to test an entirely new kind of subject--the latest breed of artificial intelligence machine. They have started by putting these machines through their paces in mazes created in the online world of Minecraft. Mazes have a long history in behavioral psychology. At the beginning of the 20th century, scientists became interested in the ability of rats and mice to learn and remember.

Though Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema's '"The Conjuring 2" ghosted all of its competition at the weekend box office, all eyes are on the performance of Universal Pictures and Legendary Pictures' "Warcraft." Though the video game adaptation grossed only a modest sum in the U.S and Canada, given its hefty production budget, the picture's international numbers wildly make up for it. "Warcraft" grossed an estimated 24.4 million in ticket sales in the U.S., coming in just shy of analyst projections of 25 million and taking the second place spot. The film has a 160 million price tag attached to it, proving that film adaptations of massively popular video games (the multiplayer strategy game "World of Warcraft" is produced by Irvine-headquartered publisher Blizzard Entertainment) are still a tough sell in the U.S. Reviews have been decidedly negative for the picture. As of Sunday, only 27% of Rotten Tomatoes critics favored it, though up from the paltry 16% positive rating the film had just days before its release.