A woman in California who previously served prison time for identity theft was busted at a high-end hotel after investigators said she used even more stolen cash to live a life of luxury, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Dept. Maria Christina Johnson was accused of stealing the identities of a slew of people she met through online dating and home rental websites. Investigators said she would "capitalize on her physical attraction" to get into victims' homes and obtain their personal information, ultimately using it to open new lines of credit. Courts in several states convicted Johnson on fraud and similar charges as early as 1997. She served at least 2 years in prison, the Los Angeles Times reported.

For Dag Kittlaus, creating Siri was just the beginning. The technology entrepreneur who developed the famous voice assistant before selling it to Apple in 2010 showcased his new intelligent assistant, called Viv, at TechCrunch Disrupt on Monday. Based on Kittlaus' demo, Viv is capable of answering complex questions, an area where some virtual assistants have struggled thus far. The idea behind Viv is to make it as simple as possible to accomplish tasks through speech. Rather than just fetching recent weather forecasts, for example, Viv is said to serve up data pertaining to specific times and conditions.

Six years ago, I drove from my crummy little apartment in the part of Berkeley that's too close to Oakland to somewhere in the south bay that I don't really remember to pick up, in person, what I'm pretty sure was a development prototype of the Neato XV-11 robotic vacuum. I was instructed to return it in 24 hours, or they'd send a robotic hit squad after me. I wrote a blazing fast review of the XV-11, taped a butter knife to it and let it duel my iRobot Roomba 560, and then brought it back to Neato, having inflicted a bare minimum of physical (and emotional) scarring. Since then, Neato Robotics has established itself as a solid and capable competitor to iRobot's Roombas in the autonomous vacuum space. The XV-11 series has been incrementally upgraded, with a much more significant redesign in 2014 in the form of the BotVac series. Late last year, Neato announced the BotVac Connected, which adds WiFi connectivity and an app that lets you control your robot from anywhere in the world. This is Neato's top of the line model and currently sells for US 700. We took a look at it at CES, and then Neato promised to send us one to check out at home. Neato's robots, starting with the XV-11 and continuing with the BotVac Connected, are notable because of their ability to rapidly generate accurate maps of the spaces that they're in, and then localize and navigate to efficiently clean those spaces in nice straight lines.

From Siri creator Dag Kittlaus comes Viv, a product that aims to be the next generation personal assistant. Kittlaus sat down with USA TODAY's Ed Baig to talk about Viv and where he thinks its headed. BROOKLYN, NEW YORK-- Siri's cofounder gave the public its first look at Viv, his artificial intelligence-powered digital assistant that aims to lap rivals with its understanding of human conversation. Dag Kittlaus took the stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference here to demonstrate his latest baby in public for the first time. Viv aims to go beyond -- and take on -- Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana and the voice inside Google. Kittlaus is CEO of Viv Labs and if he can pull off its bold vision, Viv (pronounced Viv as in Vivian) will be a personalized assistant that will be available to you on any device and powered by every service.

"We're going to use this technology to breathe life into the inanimate objects and devices of our life through conversation," said Siri co-founder and CEO Dag Kittlaus. Viv (which means life in Latin) offers an experience akin to the AI in the film Her. When Kittlaus asked, "Will it be warmer than 70 degrees near the Golden Gate Bridge, after 5pm, the day after tomorrow?" Viv quickly retrieved the correct hourly forecast from the Weather Underground app. When I asked the same question to Siri on my iPhone 6S, it pulled up the daily forecast from San Francisco for the next week, but it's unclear if it actually gave me predicted temperatures after 6pm.

If you're too busy, lazy or antisocial to keep up with all the conversations happening in your Facebook Messenger inbox, then an American developer has just created the perfect program for you. During the recent TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon in New York, Irene Chang made the The Chat Bot Club - a program that essentially creates a robotic version of yourself, which can post messages in conversations and trick your friends into thinking that you're actually there. Using the Cisco Spark messaging app as her platform, Chang used IBM's Watson chatbot software to build the program, TechCrunch reports. The Chat Bot Club monitors your messages and gradually learns your messaging'style', building up a database of your typical reponses, favourite phrases, and most-used emojis. The bot can then send messages to your group chats, making it seem like you're paying attention while you focus on more important things.

As technology continues to permeate society more and more, companies are exploring how advancements in tech can improve the legal profession. Many of these institutions are researching ways to make the legal system more efficient for all stakeholders through information technology. Where can lawyers who are interested in this growth industry learn about the progress being made from thought leaders in the field? In this episode of Law Technology Now, host Monica Bay speaks with Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology Executive Director Roland Vogl about the upcoming 2016 CodeX FutureLaw Conference. Roland reflects on his time as a student in The Stanford Program in International Legal Studies (SPILS) and how that path led him to work as an intellectual property lawyer and ultimately a Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School.

Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer created the artificial intelligence behind Siri, Apple's iconic digital assistant, and one of the first modern apps to capably handle natural language queries on a smartphone. Today the pair showed off their newest creation, Viv, a next generation AI assistant that they have been developing in stealth mode for the last four years. The goal was to create a better version of Siri, one that connected to a multitude of services, instead of routinely shuffling queries off to a basic web search. During a 20-minute demo onstage at Disrupt NYC, Viv flawlessly handled a dozen complex requests, not just in terms of comprehension, but by connecting with third-party merchants to purchase goods and book reservations. The major difference between Siri and Viv is that the latter is a far more open platform.

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Researchers recently demonstrated how an informatics-based adaptive design strategy, tightly coupled to experiments, can accelerate the discovery of new materials with targeted properties, according to a recent paper published in Nature Communications. "What we've done is show that, starting with a relatively small data set of well-controlled experiments, it is possible to iteratively guide subsequent experiments toward finding the material with the desired target," said Turab Lookman, a physicist and materials scientist in the Physics of Condensed Matter and Complex Systems group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Lookman is the principal investigator of the research project. "Finding new materials has traditionally been guided by intuition and trial and error," said Lookman."But with increasing chemical complexity, the combination possibilities become too large for trial-and-error approaches to be practical." To address this, Lookman, along with his colleagues at Los Alamos and the State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials in China, employed machine learning to speed up the process.