OSAKA – Omron Corp. has developed a new in-vehicle sensor for monitoring drivers from real-time video and pictures. The Osaka-based automated control equipment maker aims to put the sensor into use in 2019 or 2020. The sensor, which draws on artificial intelligence, uses a camera to monitor the driver's condition. In the event of a sudden change, the sensor will sound an alarm or stop the automobile safely. The new sensor will support autonomous driving technology by offering a new method for managing a vehicle when changing driving mode from autonomous to manual safely.

There was no single moment that everything changed for Steve Wozniak. Instead, it was years of creativity and work that led to his development of the Apple I and the Apple II computers. "I look back now and wonder how did I think of doing things that no one thought of back then?" Wozniak said, speaking at an Alltech conference. Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer Inc. and chief scientist at Primary Data, received the Alltech Humanitarian Award at a conference in Lexington, Ky. Watching Wozniak talk is like seeing a brilliant orator at work, as he talks about numerous subjects at a lightning fast speed and gives insightful commentary on each topic before the listener can sometimes even process what has been said on the previous subject. Despite his whirlwind mind, or perhaps because of it, Wozniak is a fascinating speaker and at the conference, he touched upon everything from AI to VR and many things in between.

By now, every business knows it has to be smart in its online strategy. Gone are the vanity metrics of yesteryear, with numbers of downloads, visitors, and the like. This startup based in Singapore and India is using AI to automate a lot of what goes into generating sales leads and acting on them fast. More and more sophisticated tools are coming into the market to help with tracking what's actionable that really matters to the business. Conversion rate optimization, funnel analysis, real time heat maps, abandoned cart recovery, sales lead generation – there are tech tools for all that and more.

I'm an Android girl who loves her iPad mini and her Amazon Echo. I also plan to be the first to bow before Skynet, once Judgment Day truly arrives. But I want to make sure I'm backing the right robot voice. I said "Hey Siri" and "Alexa" more than 300 times to determine which of these two virtual assistants, bordering on AI, truly represent Cyberdyne Systems in its infancy, or whether I should just wait for Google Home. Using an iPhone 6s with Hey Siri enabled and an Alexa-powered Amazon Echo, I asked questions to determine each assistant's intelligence, speed, versatility and personality while both were connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

Scientists at Microsoft Research and their colleagues are developing an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can tell stories based on photos. The aim is not just to explain what items are in the picture, but also what appears to be happening and how it might potentially make a person feel, US-based website livescience.com For example, if a person is shown a picture of a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a long, white dress, instead of saying, "This is a bride and groom," he or she might say, "My friends got married. They look really happy; it was a beautiful wedding." "The goal is to help give AIs more human-like intelligence, to help it understand things on a more abstract level and what it means to be fun or creepy or weird or interesting," Margaret Mitchell, study senior author said.

Stuart Armstrong is a philosopher at the University of Oxford and one of the paper's authors. AI agents, as they're sometimes known, can already beat us at complex board games like Go and they're becoming more competent in a range of other areas. Now a London AI research lab owned by Google has carried out a study to make sure we can pull the plug on self-learning machines when we want to. DeepMind, acquired by Google for a reported 400 million in 2014, teamed up with scientists at the University of Oxford to find a way to make sure AI agents don't learn to prevent, or seek to prevent humans from taking control. The paper - titled "Safely Interruptible Agents [PDF]" and published on the website of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) - was written by Laurent Orseau, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, Stuart Armstrong at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, and several others.

The last known living search dog who helped recover victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks died in a Houston suburb at age 16. A statement from the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service says Bretagne (pronounced like Brittany), a Golden Retriever, was euthanized at a veterinary clinic in Cypress. The Houston Chronicle reported that around two dozen firefighters lined the sidewalk as Bretagne was brought into the veterinarian's office Monday. An American flag was draped over the dog's body as it was carried out. Bretagne was 2 years old when she and her handler, Denise Corliss, were part of the Texas Task Force 1 sent to the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan after two hijacked airlines brought down the Twin Towers.

Loyal readers will recall that last spring we conspired with artificial intelligence expert Randal Olsen to develop the ultimate U.S. road trip. The map Olson came up with -- he did all the work, really -- optimized the best way to drive by car to 50 major U.S. landmarks, using machine learning algorithms and Google Maps. We're happy to report that Olsen is back at it, just in time for summer road tripping. By leveraging the power of genetic algorithms and other artificial intelligence technology, Olsen's optimized loop route will get you across the country and back in a little over eight days -- starting in Concord, New Hampshire, and dropping you back in Boston, Mass. How did Olsen generate his road trip map?

PARIS – A chemical in green tea has been shown to improve cognitive ability in people with Down syndrome, scientists and doctors said Tuesday. In a year-long clinical trial, the treatment led to improved scores on memory and behavior tests, they reported in a study, published in the The Lancet Neurology. The positive impact remained six months after the trial ended. Brain scans revealed that the compound, called epigallocatechin gallate, altered the way neurons in the brain connect with one another. "This is the first time that a treatment has shown efficacy in the cognitive improvement of persons with this syndrome," said Mara Dierssen, senior author of the study and a researcher at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain.

A self-learning knowledge base is often found to be a key component of enterprise level self-service solutions. Leading knowledge base technologies use machine learning algorithms to automatically collect customer queries, learn from representatives' responses, and continuously expand the knowledge base over time. As its name might suggest, the self-learning knowledge base continues to improve in accuracy and performance as it receives additional information. Knowledge Base systems which are integrated with digital self-service solutions improve with each customer interaction that occurs through the self-service interface. The machine-learning algorithms which are found in more advanced knowledge base systems are usually designed to evaluate and process large amounts of data received through customer interactions.