And now, the technology is being harnessed to streamline the United States Air Force acquisitions process -- an effort that will be undertaken by a small Lawrence business. Lawrence-based KalScott Engineering Inc. announced Wednesday it was selected to finish building artificial intelligence, called SOPHIA, for the Air Force. KalScott, owned by two Kansas University graduates, was chosen last summer to do some preliminary work training a supercomputer -- or "cognitive thinking machine" -- that could understand Defense Department contracting rules and answer questions about them audibly. Suman Saripalli, a co-owner of KalScott, said Wednesday the firm received the final go-ahead to complete the work. The announcement came with 750,000 more in funding. The finished product -- which will act as a "very intelligent assistant," Saripalli said -- is intended to help businesses and government employees navigate the Air Force's complex procurement process, which has been found to discourage small and innovative businesses from partnering with the federal government.

Well that must have been weird: A marine robot scouring Loch Ness in Scotland detected something at the bottom of the lake, something that looked exactly the Loch Ness Monster. And it was indeed Nessie. Except, as Reuters reports, it was a long-lost 30-foot replica built for a 1970 Sherlock Holmes movie that sank during filming. "We have found a monster, but not the one many people might have expected," Nessie expert Adrian Shine tells the BBC. There's still hope for believers, though: The underwater robot from Norwegian company Kongsberg Maritime isn't finished mapping the lake, a project called Operation Groundtruth that will result in the first high-resolution survey of the body of water, reports Discovery. It should wrap up next week.

Japan's Sharp will launch in May a smartphone that's built into a humanoid robot. Or is it a humanoid robot with a built-in smartphone? The Robohon is said to be the world's first mobile robotic phone--and judging from the price and slightly unwieldy form factor could also be the last. It's 19.5 centimeters (7.7 inches) tall and weighs 390 grams (13.8 ounces), making it several times the size and weight of a conventional smartphone, and it will cost 198,000 yen, which is just over 1,800 and more than double the price of a high-end iPhone. But those shortcomings are more than made up in cuteness.

But while we've been traditionally involved in providing you with the data that you need, we are now taking it a step further by helping you analyze it as well. To this end, we'd like to officially announce the MonkeyLearn integration for Scrapy Cloud. This feature will bring machine learning technology to the data that you extract through Scrapy and Portia. MonkeyLearn is a classifier service that lets you analyze text. It provides machine learning capabilities like categorizing products or sentiment analysis to figure out if a customer review is positive or negative.

This blog post is authored by T. J. Hazen, Principal Data Scientist at Microsoft, and Patrick Buehler, Senior Data Scientist at Microsoft. The Masai giraffe is facing a troubling future. Because of habitat loss, illegal hunting and disease, the population of wild giraffes in Africa has declined to only 80,000. Scientists from the Wild Nature Institute are studying where the giraffe population is doing well and where they are faring poorly. By studying and understanding the natural and human-caused factors that affect giraffe survival, reproduction and movements, scientists can determine which conservation actions best protect giraffe populations.

Let's say you're scrolling through your favorite social media app and you come across a series of pictures of a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a long white dress. An automated image captioning system might describe that scene as "a picture of a man and a woman," or maybe even "a bride and a groom." But a person might look at the pictures and think, "Wow, my friends got married! As image captioning tools get increasingly good at correctly recognizing the objects in an image, a group of researchers is taking the technology one step further. They are working on a system that can automatically describe a series of images in the same kind of way that a human would, by focusing not just on the items in the picture but also what's happening and how it might make a person feel. "Captioning is about taking concrete objects and putting them together in a literal description," said Margaret Mitchell, a Microsoft researcher who is leading the research project. "What I've been calling visual ...

The Berggruen Philosophy and Culture Center recently brought a diverse group of neuroscientists and philosophers together with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and programmers to answer a question posed by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio: As developments in artificial intelligence extend or surpass human intelligence, do they challenge the traditional definition of what it means to be human?

Millions of people in the last year or so have bought microphones so that Amazon.com AMZN 1.42 % could listen in on them at home. And I just got more, built into new speakers called the Tap and the Echo Dot. Some day, Amazon could be embedded in appliances, listening all over your house. Why would you want that?

A United Nations meeting this week in Geneva is debating the future of autonomous weapons--the controversial weapons systems capable of selecting and engaging targets without human intervention. Delegates from about 90 countries are discussing the far-reaching technical, legal, and ethical questions that these robotic weapons raise, and at the end of the week-long meeting they hope to agree on what to do next. For a group of arms control activists that has long been concerned about autonomous weapons, the next step countries should take is clear: they should ban these weapons. That's the goal of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of non-governmental organizations that was formed in late 2012 and whose steering committee includes groups like Human Rights Watch and the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. On Monday Human Rights Watch released a memorandum to the delegates in Geneva calling for countries to "adopt an international, legally binding instrument that prohibits the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons."

Microsoft wants to join the rest of the software giants in the AI game, but it just keeps striking out. Weeks ago the firm's lovable teen chatbot turned into a Hitler supporting racists and this week its CaptionBot isn't living up to its potential. CaptionBot, which analyzes pictures in order to formulate captions, has been spot on with some results, but horridly wrong for others – it thought the First Lady Michelle Obama was a cell phone. Weeks ago the firm's lovable teen chatbot turned into a Hitler supporting racists and this week its CaptionBot isn't living up to its name. This technology combines three different services to process images and write descriptive captions – and sometimes includes an appropriate emoji.