Unless you're new to the planet, you know that soon you'll be chatting away with artificially intelligent bots. But the bot revolution will also usher in something strange: It will give us a bot to talk for us, as us. I call it a "me bot." A developer named Irene Chang (a.k.a. Irene Lion) created a "me bot" at the recent TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon in New York.

US-based conglomerate GE has signed an agreement with the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT Madras), to set up an Industrial Internet Centre of Excellence. The Centre is being designed to develop applications that will help companies save costs. The first of these will be the Digital Twin of an aluminium smelter. According to senior company officials, GE would invest around Rs 3 crore in the first six months and could commit around Rs 30 crore over five years depending upon the outcome. Aluminium smelters are refineries for extracting the metal from aluminium oxide, separating it from oxygen through a chemical reaction.

A group of former employees from Google, Apple and Tesla has formed a start-up aimed at turning commercial lorries into self-drive vehicles. Rather than building vehicles from scratch, Otto will make kits to retro-fit existing lorries. The start-up, which will be self-funded, is betting on autonomous lorries becoming a reality before cars. Drivers will still be required to take the wheel on non-motorway roads. Implementing self-driving technology on US motorways is seen as being easier than on other roads or city streets.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers recently developed a tiny robot that can unfold itself from a biodegradable capsule once ingested, and then crawl across the stomach to remove swallowed items like battery buttons. The days of waiting for a swallowed item to pass through the body may soon be gone, thanks to a tiny pill-size origami robot. Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers recently developed a tiny robot that can unfold itself from a biodegradable capsule once ingested, and then crawl across the stomach to remove swallowed items like button batteries. Each year 3,500 button cell batteries are swallowed, according to the National Capital Poison Center. While they typically pass through the body without incident, if they come into prolonged contact with the stomach or esophagus they can cause internal burning, according to an MIT statement.

Yes, that movie based on the classic puzzle game Tetris is really happening. A live-action science fiction movie based on the block-stacking puzzler will be co-produced by Threshold Entertainment Group and China's Seven Star Works, the companies revealed in a joint statement Tuesday. The project, carrying a budget of 80 million, starts shooting in China in 2017. The Tetris film is the first movie in a joint venture between the two companies to produce and finance film under Threshold Global Studios. Threshold Entertainment Group is run by veteran film producer Larry Kasanoff, who worked on another series of notable video game adaptations based on Mortal Kombat.

IBM's technology has won Jeopardy, managed companies and is now practicing law. ROSS, 'the world's first artificially intelligent attorney' powered by Watson, recently landed a position at New York law firm Baker & Hostetler handling the firm's bankruptcy practice. The machine is designed to understand language, provide answers to questions, formulate hypotheses and monitor developments in the legal system. IBM's technology has won Jeopardy, managed companies and is now practicing law. ROSS, 'the world's first artificially intelligent attorney' powered by Watson, has just landed a position at New York law firm Baker & Hostetler handling the firm's bankruptcy practice Lawyers ask ROSS research questions in natural language, just like they were talking to a colleague, and the AI'reads' through the law, gathers evidence, draws inferences and returns with a'highly relevant', evidence-based answer.

It is one of the trickiest inflight manoeuvres performed by military fighter pilots, but now drones have shown they too can refuel in mid-air. Engineers in China have developed a way for drones to be able to carry out autonomous aerial refuelling (AAR). It could enable unmanned aircraft to carry out longer missions over greater distances without having to return to base for refueling. Engineers have developed drones that can refuel in midair. The tanker (right) uses cameras and markers to establish the position of the receiver (left).

Before the invention of the computer, most experimental psychologists thought the brain was an unknowable black box. You could analyze a subject's behavior--ring bell, dog salivates--but thoughts, memories, emotions? That stuff was obscure and inscrutable, beyond the reach of science. So these behaviorists, as they called themselves, confined their work to the study of stimulus and response, feedback and reinforcement, bells and saliva. They gave up trying to understand the inner workings of the mind. They ruled their field for four decades. Then, in the mid-1950s, a group of rebellious psychologists, linguists, information theorists, and early artificial-intelligence researchers came up with a different conception of the mind.

Peering through wire-rim glasses, he places the black stone on the board, in a mostly empty zone, just below and to the left of a single white stone. In Go parlance it is a "shoulder hit," in from the side, far away from most of the game's other action. Across the table, Lee Sedol, the best Go player of the past decade, freezes. He looks at the 37 stones fanned out across the board, then stands up and leaves. In the commentary room, about 50 feet away, Michael Redmond is watching the game via closed-circuit.

Following its attempts to digest romance novels, one of Google's artificial intelligence projects is now accidentally writing poetry, some of which would make the fictional Vogons proud. Google is working with Stanford University and University of Massachusetts in the US to enhance the natural language skills of an AI technique called recurrent neural network language model (RNNLM), which is used within machine translation and image captioning among other tasks. It essentially builds sentences a single word at a time by analysing the previous words in that sentence. Related: Poetry expresses what it is to be human – it's therapy for the soul Adam O'Riordan Currently, RNNLM is not capable of implementing global themes or features, such as a set topic, within its sentence generation. Each sentence produced by the algorithms doesn't necessarily flow smoothly into the next.