The first GTC took place in a set of hotel ballrooms a few blocks away. That's up from 4,000 last year, a growth rate that's tracked pretty steady since the start of the show. The stage is about five feet off the ground. And on the vast screen is an NVIDIA-green moving image that, as it scans looks like a multi-level rendering of the brain's neural network. With some electronics thrown in between. A great many of those here, though, are scientists and analysts of the computational sort -- those who rely on NVIDIA GPUs to help them crunch the rising sea of data that's engulfing us. A lot are associated with universities, close to 200 of them. Virtually every one of the top 100 university comp sci departments are here. There are also hundreds of companies represented--certainly the dozens of major web-services companies that use artificial intelligence. But also industrials, oil and gas, retail. Err, less so this time. But folks don't seem to mind.

A breakthrough year for artificial intelligence (AI) research has suddenly turned into a breakdown, as a new automated banking system that runs on AI has been caught embezzling money from customers. The surprising turn of events may set back by years efforts to incorporate AI into everyday technology. "This is the nightmare scenario," says Len Meha-Döhler, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who was not involved in the work. However, Rob Ott, a computer scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who did work on the system--Deep Learning Interface for Accounting (DELIA)--notes that it simply held all of the missing money, some 40,120.16, in a "rainy day" account. "I don't think you can attribute malice," he says.

If all humans have the same brain capacity--about 300 million pattern recognizers in our cortices--then what made Albert Einstein special? In his quest to replicate the human brain, renowned AI engineer Ray Kurzweil finds that a big part is: The courage to stick to your convictions. The average human is inherently conventional, reluctant to pursue ideas outside of the norm. "[Courage] is in the neocortex, and people who fill up too much of their neocortex with concern about the approval of their peers are probably not going be the next Einstein or Steve Jobs." – Ray Kurzweil told Wired. If your work elicits ridicule from the rest of the world, pushing past this skepticism could be a strong indication of brilliance. Anyone who has been dedicated to the field of AI for decades knows this feeling very well.

Amazon.com Inc. acquired artificial-intelligence startup Orbeus Inc., according to a person familiar with the matter, part of a broader push by the world's largest Internet retailer into smart software for its cloud-computing and connected-device businesses. The acquisition took place in the fall of 2015, said the person who asked not to be identified because Amazon hasn't announced the deal. An Amazon spokeswoman and representatives at Sunnyvale, California-based Orbeus, including Chief Executive Officer Yi Li, did not respond to requests for comment. An online search shows that the startup's domain name, Orbe.us, is owned by registrant Amazon Hostmaster, part of an Amazon subsidiary called Amazon Technologies Inc. Orbeus developed photo-recognition technology based on a powerful type of AI called neural networks and made this available as a consumer application, as well as a service for other companies and developers called ReKognition. It automatically categorized and identified the contents of photos. Orbeus's app, PhotoTime, came out before Google launched its successful AI-based Photos app.

A study conducted by researchers at Stanford University and published in Science Daily found that humans get physiologically aroused by touching a robot's intimate areas. The researchers used Aldebaran Robotics' NAO, a humanoid robot, for their study. The robot instructed participants in the study to either touch or point at 13 different parts of its body. They then monitored the participants' responses as they carried out each command. The study found that participants more hesitant to touch more intimate parts of the robot, such as its eyes and buttocks, and they were physiologically aroused when touching these areas.

Most of today's robots only function well in highly structured environments, like factory assembly lines. But thanks to some clever biomimicry, we might soon be seeing robots with a more flexible approach. To build their squishy aquatic robots, a team of researchers in Italy drew inspiration from the octopus. The animal's movements don't require a lot of brainpower. Rather than relying on top-down instructions from the central nervous system, many of an octopus's movements happen almost spontaneously–the result of the physical interplay between the animal's body and its surrounding environment.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

A smartphone-based system for diagnosing respiratory diseases achieved an accuracy of 89 percent in a recent clinical study of 524 pediatric patients conducted by the company at Joondalup Health Campus (JHC) and Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH) in Perth, Western Australia. Perth-based ResApp essentially uses the smartphone microphone as a stethoscope to listen to a patient's breathing. But instead of relying solely on a doctor's ears to form a diagnosis from those sounds, ResApp has been developing machine-learning algorithms that will automatically determine which respiratory condition a patient might have, including pneumonia, asthma, bronchiolitis and COPD. In the future, the company hopes to integrate those algorithms into telehealth offerings as well as making them available for clinical use. ResApp released data from this trial previously in November, but that data set included fewer patients.

"It shows that people respond to robots in a primitive, social way," researcher Jamy Li said in the release. "Social conventions regarding touching someone else's private parts apply to a robot's body parts as well. This research has implications for both robot design and theory of artificial systems." As shown in the video above, the robot in the experiment also provides an anatomical definition of each body part touched. There were four female volunteers and six male volunteers in the small study, according to The Guardian.

From self-driving cars, to data driven programmes that solve complex problems in the worlds of business, healthcare and leisure, intelligent automation is already beginning to dramatically alter the workplace. Robots are becoming more common across different sectors, and their use is expanding from factories to more human-driven industries such as services. Within the next few months, diners at a leading restaurant in Singapore will experience something novel in its service - dishes will no longer be delivered by human waiters, but instead be flown to their tables. This is more than a gimmick. Once in service, restaurant employees will no longer have to rush dishes between the kitchen and the dining area – a process that is expected to boost staff productivity by 25%.