Who here remembers taking computer programming in school? Whether you learned programming by punching holes in a never ending series of cards, or by writing simple DOS or other computer language commands, the fact remained that computers needed an incredibly precise set of instructions to accomplish a task. The more complicated the task, the more complicated your instructions had to be. Machine learning is inherently different. Rather than telling a computer exactly how to solve a problem, the programmer instead tells it how to go about learning to solve the problem for itself.

Jurgi Camblong plans to work with "liquid biopsies" making the process less invasive and faster This article was first published in the June 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. Jurgi Camblong is diagnosing cancer using thousands of people's DNA. The 38-year-old Sophia Genetics co-founder detects cancer in the lungs, skin, ovaries and breast, as well as congenital diseases, by sequencing the genomes of patient's tissue samples – then uses machine learning to compare the results and suggest the most effective treatments. "The problem is not producing the content or the data but really analysing to find the important information so you can act on a disease," says Camblong.

French officials have unveiled a humanoid diving robot that they hope will give a big artificial hand to the practice of underwater archaeology. Ocean One, which looks like something out of a scuba-diving sequel to "Transformers," is the work of a team of roboticists, including Oussama Khatib of Stanford University. It is intended to help researchers explore underwater archaeological sites that are too deep to be explored by human divers. It was unveiled by culture officials on Thursday in the French city of Marseille following a trial sifting through the wreckage of "The Moon," a 17th century warship, where it had managed to collect a delicate ceramic pot and bring it back to the surface.

NEW ORLEANS--The problem with robots on the battlefield today, according to Marine Corps Colonel Jim "Jinx" Jenkins, is that they still have to be driven by humans. That's why the Marine Corps and the Department of Defense are researching ways for robots to act more like teammates on the battlefield than just another piece of hardware. Jenkins, who serves as director of science and technology at the Marine Corps' Warfighting Lab at Quantico, Virginia, said in a presentation at the Association for Unmanned Systems International's XPONENTIAL conference that while robots such as those used for explosive ordnance disposal and other roles on the battlefield take soldiers and Marines out of some dangerous situations, they take their operators out of the fight. "A marine is driving, so we haven't improved our manpower situation, and sometimes it costs more manpower," he noted, since operators have to pay such close attention to what they're doing with the robot that they need someone watching their back. "We need to move toward autonomy" for robots and other uncrewed systems, he said.

Watch our founder and CEO, Parsa Ghaffari (@parsaghaffari) and Kevin Koidl (@koidl), a Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin's Department of Computer Science and the ADAPT research centre, talk Computer intelligence at a recent talk they gave at Science Gallery, Dublin. This interactive discussion, takes you from general AI, right through to the modern day applications of narrow AI paying, particular attention to a real life example, the Bigfoot App, which was created as part of the Lifelogging exhibition, currently running at Science Gallery, Dublin.

For all of Amazon's grand plans regarding delivery drones, it still needs to figure out concepts we take for granted with traditional courier methods. Namely, figuring out how to drop off your latest order without destroying anything (including the UAV itself) during transit and landing. That's where advanced computer vision comes in from Jeff Bezos' new team of Austria-based engineers, according to The Verge. The group invented methods for reconstructing geometry from images and contextually recognizing environmental objects, giving the drones the ability to differentiate between, say, a swimming pool and your back patio. Both are flat surfaces, but one won't leave your PlayStation VR headset waterlogged after drop-off.

An alternate version private photo application is now available for users in Europe and Canada, leaving out features that violate privacy laws in those locales. Most notably, the facial-recognition tool isn't included in the software, which means users will have to do a bit more work to tag and identify who's in their snapshots. Facebook says that while it left the facial recognition out, the app will group photos that "appear to include the same face." Sounds kind of like facial recognition, right? Facebook says the app now functions more like object recognition, observing things like the distance between someone's eyes and ears rather than their unique facial features.

If you're also single and looking for love, then Maple Match – a new matchmaking website that promises to "Make dating great again" – may be the catch-all solution you've been waiting for. According to its website, Maple Match aims to make it "easy for Americans to find the ideal Canadian partner to save them from the unfathomable horror of a Trump presidency." "After more than 35,000 hits and more than 4,500 signups in just four days, we are confident that Maple Match will fulfill a clear need in the dating space," site founder and CEO Joe Goldman told Tech Times. He added that the site aims to be operational "as soon as possible." Even Canadians – who are known for being unflinchingly polite – have been vocal about their dislike for Donald Trump, though perhaps that dislike is more out of concern than anything else.

Even though the weak learners were human, the algorithm that aggregates them qualifies as machine learning.

The promise of virtual reality is that it can transport you to places you'd prefer not to go: the tops of the highest mountains, for instance, or the mosh pit of Norwegian party metal concert. Then there are the impossible places, like the roiling vents at the bottom of the deepest oceans, where crushing pressures and searing heat make an environment fit only for robots. In March, one of those robots, the straightforwardly-named Remotely Operated Vehicle for Ocean Sciences, spent a staggering 150 hours exploring an undersea volcano near Samoa. Not only were researchers from the Schmidt Ocean Institute able to capture VR video and upload it to YouTube so regular folk can explore the action themselves (check it out below), but they 3-D mapped a so-called black smoker vent so scientists around the world can study the phenomenon independently. But this wasn't all an exercise in delayed gratification.