Artificial intelligence may one day embrace the meaning of the expression "A picture is worth a thousand words," as scientists are now teaching programs to describe images as humans would. Someday, computers may even be able to explain what is happening in videos just as people can, the researchers said in a new study. Computers have grown increasingly better at recognizing faces and other items within images. Recently, these advances have led to image captioning tools that generate literal descriptions of images. Now, scientists at Microsoft Research and their colleagues are developing a system that can automatically describe a series of images in much the same way a person would by telling a story.

Robots play football in a demonstration of artificial intelligence at the stand of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH) at the CeBIT Technology Fair on March 2, 2010 in Hannover, Germany. China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has announced a three-year guidance program in which the country plans to increase the advancement of the nation's artificial intelligence (AI) sector. According to the NDRC, the plan - which was devised together with China's Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Cyberspace Administration of China - is expected to create new AI industries and economic growth which will result in a market value of over 15.26 million (100 billion Yuan) in the next three years. The three-year program for "Internet Plus" AI indicated that the move will eventually see China developing "platforms for fundamental AI resources and innovation" by the year 2018. In the same year the country is expected to be at about the same level of the world's AI industry and technology, according to the NDRC website.

Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) playbook, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) is developing drones for their supply chain management. The company's VP of Emerging Sciences, Shekar Natarajan, showed off the big box retailer's new distribution center tech in Bentonville, Arkansas on Thursday. The main reasons to implement drones in distribution centers is to replace inventory quality assurance employees, while also cutting inventory checks from a month to one day. Also, with the use of drone technology, Wal-Mart can improve the safety of all of the U.S. distribution centers. As for how it works, the drones would be able to take 30 images per second from a mounted camera that is linked to a command center.

Tribune Publishing Co. said late Thursday it will change its name to Tronc (which the company spells with lowercase T) and focus on turning itself into a "content curation and monetization" company that creates and distributes "premium" content. "Our transformation strategy ... is focused on leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the user experience and better monetize our world-class content," Chairman Michael Ferro said in a statement. "Our rebranding to tronc represents the manner in which we will pool our technology and content resources to execute on our strategy." The new company will transfer its stock-exchange listing to Nasdaq from the New York Stock Exchange. Shares of the newly renamed Tronc were flat in late trading after ending the regular trading session down 1.8%.

The fact that most insects (except for the really freaky ones) are very small doesn't stop them from getting everywhere they want to, especially all of those places that you try to keep them out of. Roboticists have been experimenting with bug-sized robots, but they're still pretty large, about the size of giant beetles or moths. Most insects are far smaller than that, which means that they experience the world much differently, and that can be a hard thing to study effectively. At ICRA last month, Ryan St. Pierre and Professor Sarah Bergbreiter from the University of Maryland presented a paper on the gait characteristics of magnetically actuated legged robots weighing less than 2 grams, which was very cool to see. It's only the beginning, though: robots like these are about to get way, way smaller.

Social media and interplanetary mission -- what do they have in common? Well, they have in common the Mars Orbiter Mission, also known as'Mangalyaan'. It was launched on 5th November by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). It generated a lot of interest across the globe among millions of people on Social Media networks. In this blog, we analyze how Twitterati reacted to this news. Asia was by far the most interested in the subject, covering 74% of all the tweets on'Mangalyaan'.

Determining whether a lead is interested in becoming a customer is a delicate game of answering the right questions, responding with timely emails and providing pertinent information. But these tasks add cumbersome work for sales personnel -- and even if done correctly, they can lead to no sale. Companies like Conversica Inc. are starting to develop AI software to help automate the sales task. Despite the time and effort needed to nurture leads into customers, salespeople have been hesitant to allow third-party software to interact with leads. As time becomes more valuable, however, more industry verticals are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) software.

Parent robots can send their genomes through the Wi-Fi network to mate Eventually, they say, robots will'develop their bodies through evolution' What if robots could evolve? It's the question asked by a group of scientists in Amsterdam, whose radical new project aims to create smarter, more advanced robots through a process similar to sexual reproduction.

When Eric Schmidt took the stage today in New York City, he spent less time talking about business at Google (where he was previously CEO and now serves as executive chairman of parent company Alphabet), and more time focused on new technologies and the bigger picture. Schmidt was interviewed by Charlie Rose at The Economic Club of New York, where seemed most excited about the possibilities of advances in biology and medicine, as well as artificial intelligence. He also made a general call to tackle important problems with science and technology. The key, he said, is finding consensus. "The country is full of smart people, right?" "The American model got us through the last 30 years. Compared to other models, I'll take ours. But we need to focus on it. We need to agree, roughly, on what these projects are."

You would be amazed about how many requests are made for a banner on a website. All kinds of tracking services are called along with the actual banner content. Now another request will increase load time. The Weather Company, an IBM Business is announcing Watson Ads, an industry-first capability in which consumers will be able to interact with IBM Watson through advertising, by being able to ask questions via voice or text and receive relevant information about the product or offering. Marketers have long sought an advertising solution that can create a one-to-one connection with the consumer, that can be personal, relevant and valuable; and can scale across millions of interactions and touchpoints. Watson Ads will help marketers achieve those goals, and can also help them uncover consumer and product insights faster than ever before, revealing connections previously invisible to human data scientists.