Photoshop is to use artificial intelligence to help users identify typefaces they have seen elsewhere. Developer Adobe describes its DeepFont feature as "Shazam for fonts" - a reference to the song-recognising app. It will work on both the mobile and desktop versions of the image-editing software, but users will need a Creative Cloud subscription. One expert said the tool would probably be popular with professionals, who often struggle to identify a design. Other font-matching online services already exist, but Adobe suggested the machine learning technology behind its system gave it an edge.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory is kind of a misleading name. NASA's southern Californian center doesn't really make rockets or jets or anything propulsive these days. Nope, JPL builds robots that explore the solar system: Curiosity, Voyager, Galileo, GRACE. On July 1, the center's legacy becomes the responsibility of Michael Watkins. Watkins is a twenty-year NASA veteran who has been mixed up in nearly every important JPL project during that time.

A file photo dated 06 January 2004 shows Apple Computer's CEO Steve Jobs sitting in front of a project Apple Computer logo during his keynote speech at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, California, USA. Apple's (AAPL) epic fall on the markets took a symbolic turn Thursday after its market value again dropped below its top rival's. That makes it second fiddle behind Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) at 497.8 billion. Shares of Apple have been in freefall this year, dropping more than 14%, amid the company's disappointing first-quarter results. It's the second time this year that Alphabet's market value has surpassed Apple's.

Google is expected to hit the smart home market in a big way with a new device codenamed Chirp. According to a report from Recode, the tech titan is moving in on the turf carved out by Amazon's Echo with its own voice-activated assistant for the home. The device probably won't see the light of day until later this year, though we may see some hints of what's to come by reading between the lines at Google's developers conference in San Francisco next week. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Google has been focused on the smart home for years, and in 2014 forecast broader ambitions in the space by buying smart appliance maker Nest for 3.2 billion.

At 100million a pop, you might expect F-35 fighter jets to take-off at the first time of asking. But the life of a test pilot is not that simple, with dozens of computer systems to calibrate and reset before the Air Force's most sophisticated plane can even taxi to the runway. Defense News got a glimpse of how testing F-35s works during a visit to Edwards Air Force Base in southern California. Major Raven LeClair, of the 461st flight test squadron, begins his day at around 10am by checking the plane for any issues. It immediately became clear that the day's testing would not pass without a hitch, with an alarm sounding as soon as he got to the aircraft.

A Lincoln man says he's not dead, despite what the Social Security Administration has said. Chuck Zellers learned of his demise in March after his Social Security deposit was removed from his bank account while he and his wife, Alice, were in Arizona, he told the Lincoln Journal Star (http://bit.ly/1TcuM3V They talked to a woman at the Social Security office who checked her computer and told him, "'Oh, by golly, you are dead,'" Zellers said. "She told me it could be a funeral home declared you deceased; or that someone just put in a wrong keystroke or something like that," he said. But Zellers, 73, admitted he will probably never know how it happened.

While this sounds like the stuff of science fiction the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working to make this amazing project science fact. Known as Upward Falling Payloads (UFPs), the pods are made by DARPA, which aims to develop innovative technologies to keep the U.S. safe. Hidden throughout global seas, the giant pods would let the U.S. Navy launch surprise attacks anytime, anywhere. UFPs would let the Navy deploy Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, to provide surveillance and other key cutting-edge tech to support operations. UFPs resemble giant 15-foot high pods or capsules.

Vikash Kumar and University of Washington colleagues have developed a simulation model that allows robotic hands to learn from their own experiences, while performing dexterous manipulation. Human direction is not required. A recent study incorporated the model while a robotic hand attempted several tasks, including rotating an elongated object. With each try, the hand became better able to spin the tube. Machine learning algorithms helped it model the basic physics involved, and plan the actions it should take to best complete the task.

But such is not the case in the domain of cybersecurity. Although security solutions based on unsupervised machine learning do exist, relying entirely on artificial intelligence to spot cyberattacks isn't totally practical because such systems yield a large number of false positives. You eventually need the help of human experts to find evidence of security breaches and make critical decisions. This means cybersecurity professionals get to keep their jobs--at least for the time being. But that's not necessarily a good thing, especially since analyst-based security solutions are fraught with problems, too, and can't keep up with the huge volume of data that needs to be analyzed at every moment, eventually leading to high rates of undetected attacks and delayed responses.

Facebook says chatbots will change the way businesses communicate with their customers, but will businesses want to put their user communications in the hands of artificial intelligence? "They're a powerful tool but they're also a big risk," said Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner. "A.I. can be a very powerful technology. Businesses are going to have to understand how to harness that power. There are reasons to be worried about it. Because we're giving chatbots the power to act on our behalf, they're taking on greater importance."