Looking after helpless babies may have been the key in humans developing bigger brains and ultimately helped us become smarter. A new study suggests the demands of intensive child-rearing set in motion a runaway feedback loop, acting as a driver for human intelligence. Researchers claim that intelligent parents give rise to larger brained babies, which need to be born earlier in order to pass safely through the birth canal and survive. Researchers suggest the demands of intensive child-rearing set in motion a runaway feedback loop, acting as a driver for human intelligence. Premature babies are more dependent at birth, so need more intelligent parents to take care of them and so on, all of which has led to human level intelligence.

We're excited for tomorrow's online discussion about automatic text summarization! During the event, Mohamed AlTantawy, CTO of Agolo, will explain the tech behind their summarization tool. In this blog post, he describes how his team evaluates the quality of summaries produced by their system. Join us tomorrow to learn more and ask questions about the approach! Evaluating the quality of algorithmically created summaries is a very hard task.

Google has been working on this self-driving car project since 2005; but even then the idea of self-driving car was not new. The idea already existed as far back as the nineteen-fifties but wasn't possible (picture 1[1]). But serious efforts at developing a driverless car had to wait until 2005, when computer and sensor technology became advanced enough to make the dream possible. Thus in 2005 for the second edition of the DARPA Grand Challenge consisting in an autonomous vehicle race in Mojaves desert, many universities and robotics labs participated to this challenge to test their capability to design such vehicles. If in 2004 for the first edition, no team succeeded in finishing the race, for the second edition, the Stanford university team managed to complete the race (picture 2[2]).

When the artificial intelligence program AlphaGo defeated champion Go player Lee Sedol earlier this year, everyone praised its advanced software brain. But the program, developed by Google's DeepMind research team, also had some serious hardware brawn standing behind it. The program was running on custom accelerators that Google's hardware engineers had spent years building in secret, the company said. With the new accelerators plugged into the AlphaGo servers, the program could recognize patterns in its vast library of game data faster than it could with standard processors. The increased speed helped AlphaGo make the kind of quick, intuitive judgments that define how humans approach the game.

Earlier this year, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering's (IEEE) published "AI's 10 to Watch" – a list of 10 people who are doing phenomenal work in the field of artificial intelligence. A Pakistani researcher Haris Aziz, who had graduated from LUMS, had his name published in this prestigious list for his work in the field related to computational social choice, an intersection between artificial intelligence and economics. Its seems that was just the beginning of the road for Haris Aziz, who is now back in the news for solving an'unsolvable' mathematical situation. Who will get the larger share of the profit from a business? Shall it be equally allocated or otherwise? Perhaps its your child's birthday and its time to cut and divide the cake in a way that none of the children gets sad by his/her share?

Sixty years ago this summer, four computer science professors established a summer project aimed at creating "artificial intelligence"--the first time this phrase was ever used. The hope was to figure out how to make machines use language and perform abstract thought. "We think that a significant advance can be made if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer," the now famous project proposal said. In retrospect that was almost hubristically optimistic. We still don't have software that can talk or write as we do, or perform abstract reasoning.

SAP rolled out a series of partnerships and advancements at its Sapphire Now event. Google unveiled a host of initiatives at Google I/0. HP Enterprise introduced an Internet of Things (IoT) platform. AtScale, a BI for Hadoop platform provider, raised a new round of funding. We've got it covered in our Big Data Roundup for the week ended May 22, 2016.

Overwatch sounds like a game I shouldn't want to play: a hero-focused team shooter that seems aimed at players given to godlike acts of ballistic skill. But I should know better. This is Blizzard we're talking about, after all, a studio that turned a generic fantasy-verse born from a niche real-time strategy game into a global online roleplaying sensation. After chatting with Overwatch co-director Jeffrey Kaplan, I'm almost convinced it's a game for me--the sort of lapsed, Quake-era clanner who has lost interest in competitive shooters. Here, by way of our lightly edited conversation, is a rundown of why.

Justin Gerrard speaks quickly, Brian Gerrard speaks slowly. If you met them separately, you would never guess they were brothers. But their oil-and-water partnership helped them create Bae, a dating app for black people. Bae works pretty much like Tinder, but tailor-made for black users. The Gerrards came up with the idea after they realized how difficult it is for black singles to find dates on existing platforms.

U.S. consumers still resist the notion of self-driving cars, according to a University of Michigan study released on Monday, the latest sign that investors and automakers may be rushing into a business where demand is limited at best. General Motors Co's recent acquisition of Silicon Valley startup Cruise Automation for a reported 1 billion has accelerated a stampede by other automakers, suppliers and venture capital firms looking to invest in or acquire new companies developing self-driving technology. Consumers, meanwhile, remain concerned about aspects of self-driving technology and "overwhelmingly" still want the ability to manually control a self-driving vehicle, the study said. "The most frequent preference for vehicle automation continues to be for no self-driving capability," said the study's authors, Brandon Schoettle and Michael Sivak. The survey results are consistent with those in a similar survey that the university conducted a year ago and generally mirror the findings in a study that the American Automobile Association released in March.