Dealing with obstacles is an inevitable part of life, and it looks like robots may be surprisingly adept at applying creativity to the challenge. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University developed software that not only helped a robot deal efficiently with clutter but also revealed considerable creativity in solving problems. Their new study is due to be presented Thursday at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Sweden. A research team led by Siddhartha Srinivasa, CMU associate professor of robotics, challenged HERB -- his lab's two-armed mobile robot -- with a pile of clutter. What they saw from the robot surprised them.

Let me be almost recklessly honest: I allow my Android phone to distract me while driving. Sure, I stick to the Google Maps interface when I'm navigating somewhere, and try to avoid skipping through songs as I'm streaming music. But even with this level of quasi-carefulness, I could benefit from Google's plan to put Android Auto directly on smartphone screens, a new feature that I tested in my own car at Google HQ on Tuesday. Android Auto, first announced in 2014, was designed to keep Android users like me from fiddling around with our devices when we should really be paying attention to the road. The headline features include hands-free voice control for playing music, texting, making phone calls, and navigating via Google Maps.

Those two words are recognized worldwide as a way for any internet user to find an answer to nearly any question. But until now, it's mostly been about typing into a search bar. Now, Google wants you to speak up and chat with your mobile phone and other devices within your home, all powered by its own technology. The Mountain View, California, company revealed two projects, Google Assistant and Google Home, at its annual developer conference, Google I/O, in San Francisco Wednesday. Google Assistant is the company's effort to make search more personalized and efficient for users through machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Google on Wednesday became the latest major technology company to join a standoff with the FBI over encryption. At its developer conference, the company announced that its new messaging app, Allo, would feature an "incognito mode" that offered end-to-end encryption. Such technology can make it difficult for law enforcement to recover messages during investigations even if they have a warrant. In Washington DC, the FBI director, James Comey, has lobbied the administration to put restrictions on such technology. Google isn't the first Silicon Valley giant to offer a messaging app with strong encryption. Apple's iMessage system uses it by default, and Facebook's WhatsApp turned end-to-end encryption on by default this spring.

SAN FRANCISCO – Google is expected to dive deeper into virtual reality and artificial intelligence Wednesday during an annual conference that serves as a launching pad for its latest products and innovations. Although Google keeps its plans under wraps until the big event, the conference agenda makes it clear that virtual reality and artificial intelligence, or "machine learning," will be among the focal points. That has spurred speculation that Google is getting ready to release a virtual-reality device to compete with Facebook's new Oculus Rift headset, as well as the Samsung's Gear VR and the Vive from HTC and Valve. Reporters and bloggers from around the world will attend, ensuring that whatever the company unveils will also be featured in stories, pictures and video delivered to a vast audience of consumers. The three-day showcase also attracts thousands of computer programmers, giving Google an opportunity to convince them why they should design applications and other services that work with its gadgets and an array of software that includes the Chrome Web browser and Android operating system for mobile devices.

Google has announced a conversation-based tool to control smartphones, smartwatches and other devices. Google Assistant can be used to find information, play media and carry out tasks - such as booking cinema tickets - via a back-and-forth chat between the user and the software. The firm also announced a voice-activated device with a built-in speaker called Google Home to provide the tech in living rooms. Amazon launched its own dialogue-based smart home device in 2014, and has since included the Alexa voice assistant that powers it in some of its other products. Google's chief executive Sundar Pichai credited Amazon with having pioneered the idea.

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from the upcoming report Data Science for Modern Manufacturing: Global Trends: Big Data Analytics for the Industrial Internet of Things, by Li Ping Chu. Sign up to be notified when the report becomes available. The field of artificial intelligence has been around for decades, and the world has seen massive advances in what is considered deep learning (e.g. IBM's Deep Blue and Google's AlphaGo), but it's only within the past decade that we've seen practical applications of machine learning in an enterprise setting. In the past few years, there has been an explosion in the number of products available that integrate machine learning within a business intelligence platform.

They find that we split the task into a hierarchy of different jobs, with different elements apparently handled in different parts of the brain. Particular parts of the cortex, for example, show greater activity if extra line changes are required; other regions simply become more excited as the overall goal inches closer. It arises from a collaboration between Oxford University, University College London and Google's artificial intelligence firm DeepMind. AI researchers are keen to learn from the brain's ability to plan a complex task by grouping together various actions and outcomes. This type of strategy is much more efficient than rattling through all the possible ramifications of each individual step - such as a simple computer program might do.

Google is turning to artificial intelligence to make sure people keep using its search engine, even if they're not spending as much time on the Web and personal computers. The Alphabet Inc. division unveiled a new mobile messaging application Wednesday called Allo containing a digital personal assistant, based on AI technology that powers other Google services like Inbox. At its I/O developer conference near its Silicon Valley headquarters, the company also showed off a voice-based search device called Google Home that uses the same assistant technology to answer questions when people are in their houses, a potentially potent rival to Amazon.com Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said the goal is to develop an "on-going two-way dialog with Google" and build billions of people their own "individual Google." The CEO sees the Google digital assistant as an "ambient experience that extends across devices."

The consumer electronics company has invested in AI startup Cogitai to build intelligent systems that will learn from their own experiences in the world. "We have a shared vision for where AI needs to go," Dr. Satinder Singh, co-founder of Cogitai, told Engadget. "The next wave will be'continual learning.' It's the idea that machine intelligence will continually grow as it interacts with the world." Continual learning isn't just about creating smart devices that sense your presence, or virtual assistants that understand you better.