Last week, deep in the heart of Mobile World Congress, in a remarkably refined, albeit temporary, meeting space, I couldn't help but reflect on how far Google's Android ecosystem had come. Five short years ago, Android's mission was focused on personalized privacy controls and smart home integration. Also: Best of MWC 2025: 10 most impressive products that you might've missed Now, amid towering Android statues, Gemini balloons, and miniature figures rappelling from bookshelves, the narrative had shifted decisively toward integrating AI-powered experiences into almost every aspect of the mobile experience. At the center of this evolution sits Sameer Samat, Google's Head of Android, who graciously carved out time during the conference chaos to discuss Gemini Live's new real-time video and screen-sharing capabilities -- features powered by DeepMind's Project Astra -- and what they reveal about Android's AI-driven future. Samat's enthusiasm for Gemini Live's new features was palpable from the moment we began discussing the updates, even if he first praised his team's measured marketing of Circle to Search last year.

It's an age-old adage of cyber defense that an attacker has to find just one weakness or exploit, but the defender has to defend against everything. The challenge of AI, when it comes to cybersecurity, is that it is an arms race in which weapons-grade AI capabilities are available to both attackers and defenders. Cisco is one of the world's largest networking companies. As such, it is on the front lines of defending against AI-powered cyberattacks. In this exclusive interview, ZDNET sits down with Cisco's AI products VP, Anand Raghavan, to discuss how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing cybersecurity and expanding organizations' attack surfaces.

In this interview series, we're meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. The Doctoral Consortium provides an opportunity for a group of PhD students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives in an interdisciplinary workshop together with a panel of established researchers. In the third of our interviews with the 2025 cohort, we heard from Tunazzina Islam who has recently completed her PhD in Computer Science at Purdue University, advised by Dr Dan Goldwasser. Her primary research interests lie in computational social science (CSS), natural language processing (NLP), and social media mining and analysis. We now live in a world where we can reach people directly through social media, without relying on traditional media such as television and radio.

A warrior is in a prison cell. His guard approaches and shows him the wooden sword that he will receive once he has earned his freedom. The warrior grabs it, uses his unlocked cell door to knock the guard down, and places the sword's tip on the guard's throat. He drives it in as one might hammer a post, a coarse and grisly death. Then, for some reason, swaying back and forth, the warrior yells down at the corpse, "Wood or steel, a point is still a point!"

Around 500 million years ago, the world exploded with complex life. Prior to what is known as the Cambrian era, the planet was populated primarily with simple, microscopic organisms. But during the Cambrian period, creatures with complex body structures emerged. Scientists who study such things call this the "Cambrian explosion" because it was a period of rapid evolution. Major animal groups emerged, competition and predation for food resources increased, and new ecosystems appeared.

The Association for Computing Machinery, has named Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton as the recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award. The pair have received the honour for "developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning". In a series of papers beginning in the 1980s, Barto and Sutton introduced the main ideas, constructed the mathematical foundations, and developed important algorithms for reinforcement learning. The Turing Award comes with a 1 million prize, to be split between the recipients. Since its inception in 1966, the award has honoured computer scientists and engineers on a yearly basis.

Some of the flashiest achievements in artificial intelligence in the past decade have come from a technique by which the computer acts randomly from a set of choices and is rewarded or punished for each correct or wrong move. It's the technique most famously employed in AlphaZero, Google DeepMind's 2016 program that achieved mastery at the games of chess, shogi, and Go in 2018. The same approach helped the AlphaStar program achieve "grandmaster" play in the video game Starcraft II. On Wednesday, two AI scholars were rewarded for advancing so-called reinforcement learning, a very broad approach to how a computer proceeds in an unknown environment. Andrew G. Barto, professor emeritus in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Richard S. Sutton, professor of computer science at the University of Alberta, Canada, were jointly awarded the 2025 Turing Award by the Association for Computing Machinery.

Years before she became the peculiar central thread linking a double homicide in Pennsylvania, the fatal shooting of a federal agent in Vermont and the murder of an elderly landlord in California, a computer programmer bought a sailboat. The programmer was known to friends, foes and followers as Ziz. She had come to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2016 as part of an influx of young people arriving to study the dangers that artificial intelligence could pose to humanity. In one of the most expensive regions of the United States, however, it is difficult to save the world when you can't make rent. So she bought a boat for 600 and moored it next to a friend's vessel in a marina. For five years, she used it as an occasional, cramped bunk. In her waking hours, she worked on a blog of provocative and increasingly extreme ideas about confrontation and retaliation. At night, she fell asleep as the boat rocked back and forth, drifting with the flotsam of greater Silicon Valley. Then, on the night of 19 August 2022, her sister and a friend reported that they saw her fall overboard. The Coast Guard and local authorities scrambled boats and aircraft. After a nearly 30-hour search, neither Ziz nor her body could be found. A newspaper in Alaska, where she was born, published a short obituary referring to her by her birth name: "Jack Amadeus LaSota left our lives but not our hearts on Aug 19 after a boating accident. Loving adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals, you are missed." Ziz's ideas did not die in the waters of the California coast. She had faked her drowning and gone underground, before being arrested last month in western Maryland and charged with trespassing and illegal transportation of a firearm. The targets of Ziz's ire, who include some of Silicon Valley's most prominent intellectuals, have taken security precautions. "Ziz is not stupid," someone familiar with her, who asked to remain anonymous, told me. "This is a very smart person – both smart and crazy." Ziz's writing had polarized members of a niche but influential movement of AI theorists and tech bloggers who call themselves the "rationalists". The movement is less about specific ideas than it is about an ethos – applying rigorous, mathematically informed thinking to AI, philosophy, psychology and the big questions of our time. Rationalists are odd, though often charming, people. They tend to be fantasy and sci-fi geeks, use lots of jargon and think intensely about things other people barely think about at all.

Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton have won the 2024 Turing award, which is often called the Nobel prize of computing, for their fundamental work on ideas in machine learning that later proved crucial to the success of artificial intelligence models such as Google DeepMind's AlphaGo. Barto, who is now retired and lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, didn't even realise he was nominated for the award. "I joined a Zoom with some people and was told and I was…

In the 1980s, Andrew Barto and Rich Sutton were considered eccentric devotees to an elegant but ultimately doomed idea--having machines learn, as humans and animals do, from experience. Decades on, with the technique they pioneered now increasingly critical to modern artificial intelligence and programs like ChatGPT, Barto and Sutton have been awarded the Turing Award, the highest honor in the field of computer science. Barto, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Sutton, a professor at the University of Alberta, trailblazed a technique known as reinforcement learning, which involves coaxing a computer to perform tasks through experimentation combined with either positive or negative feedback. "When this work started for me, it was extremely unfashionable," Barto recalls with a smile, speaking over Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. "It's been remarkable that [it has] achieved some influence and some attention," Barto adds.