On Sunday, Mark Zuckerberg set his goal for 2016 via a Facebook post: build an artificial intelligence to run his home and assist his work, "like Jarvis in Iron Man." The lofty ambition fits a growing trend of "smart" home technology, which links smartphones, tablets, and other computers with household appliances and other home items. High-powered commercial drones, self-driving cars, and virtual reality dominated the presentations at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, with Microsoft announcing its intention to become the "ultimate platform for all intelligent cars" and Intel showing how its new drone can dodge falling trees. But Samsung aimed closer to home. During its CES press conference, the South Korean company focused on new its new "SmartThings" appliances, which range from televisions to washing machines.

Cars could soon feature the ultimate backseat driver, an artificial intelligence technology that aims to make roadways safer by telling you when your mind is wandering. In doing so, the Japanese manufacturer Mitsubishi is taking autonomous vehicles in an entirely new direction, one that aims to improve the driver, Business Wire reports. "Not only does this smart automation offer more safety and the possibility of an enhanced experience for the de-stressed driver, but it can also reduce road congestion and benefit the environment," Matthew Beecham, an analyst for the automotive research agency QUBE, said of car automation generally in a news release. Mitsubishi calls the technology "deep learning," and it monitors the driver's behavior over time. The technology watches for patterns of normal, alert driving by gathering real-time data about the driver's steering, facial position, and even heart rate.

Brandeis has a program in autonomous agents, focusing on multi--agent and multi--robot systems and machine learning, headed by Maja Mataric For details on research directions and a photo of the available robot herd see: http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/dept/faculty/mataric To get more information about the Volen Center for Complex Systems, about the Computer Science Department, and about other faculty, see: http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/dept. For more information about the cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience programs at Brandeis see: http://fechner.ccs.brandeis.edu/cogsci.html The Robotics Institute also offers a Robotics PhD and students from other programs (e.g. Research includes many aspects of mobile robots, computer integrated manufacturing, rapid prototyping, sensors, vision, navigation, learning and architectures.

Cars that can talk to each other and almost drive themselves at freeway speeds are just two years away from the showroom, according to General Motors executives. The company announced Sunday that the semi-autonomous system for freeways will be an option on an unidentified new 2017 Cadillac model that goes on sale in the summer of 2016. In addition, the 2017 Cadillac CTS will be equipped with radio transmitters and receivers that will let it communicate with other cars, sharing data such as location, speed and whether the driver is applying the brakes. The announcements were made Sunday at the opening of the Intelligent Transportation Society World Congress being held in Detroit this week. They are part of a barrage of similar declarations that are expected from other companies throughout the week as the industry shows off progress toward self-driving and safer cars.

BERKELEY – When scale model helicopters pass through a makeshift "urban canyon" in a test field, or engage in a game of aerial "chicken", the drills may look like a robotic stunt show to outside eyes. Members of the university's Berkeley Aerial Robot (BEAR) program have successfully conducted a series of field tests with 130-pound helicopters that not only fly autonomously -- without human control -- but that also react to avoid obstacles in their flight path. "Our BEAR group is the first to successfully develop a system where autonomous helicopters can detect obstacles, stationary or moving, and recompute their course in real-time to reach the original target destination," said David Hyunchul Shim, a research engineer on the project who first began this work as a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering. With these achievements, the researchers are inching towards a future of robo-copters that could maneuver through city streets or forested landscapes. The development of reliable systems that can handle obstacle-avoidance tasks is still several years away, researchers said, but the computational foundations for such unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been laid.

Twenty patients with an aggressive form of brain cancer will have a new doctor on their medical team: the learned geneticist known as IBM Watson. In a collaboration announced today between IBM and the New York Genome Center, IBM's Jeopardy-beating AI will analyze the genomes of those 20 patients in hopes of providing insights for their oncologists. IBM has been promoting its AI as a killer app for health care, thanks to Watson's natural language processing skills and machine learning abilities. Over the past two years Watson has been engaged in a separate project at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in which doctors are training the AI to understand the language of medicine. In that project, Watson is being taught to read patients' records and search the medical literature for relevant suggestions on treatment.

NASA announced today that MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is one of two university research groups nationwide that will receive a 6-foot, 290-pound humanoid robot to test and develop for future space missions to Mars and beyond. A group led by CSAIL principal investigator Russ Tedrake will develop algorithms for the robot, known as "Valkyrie" or "R5," as part of NASA's upcoming Space Robotics Challenge, which aims to create more dexterous autonomous robots that can help or even take the place of humans "extreme space" missions. Tedrake's team, which was selected from groups that were entered in this year's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Robotics Challenge, will receive as much as $250,000 a year for two years from NASA's Space Technology Mission Directive. NASA says it is interested in humanoid robots because they can help or even replace astronauts working in extreme space environments. Robots like R5 could be used in future missions either as precursor robots performing mission tasks before humans arrive or as human-assistive robots collaborating with the human crew.

You don't have a big Hollywood marketing budget. How do you market your film? "Flatland was a different kind of film; strange, intellectual, bizarre," said Ladd Ehlinger Jr., director of the animated feature. "So I wanted something different to promote it." Chat room regulars may be familiar with the concept of a "chatbot."

Increasing globalization is driving a burgeoning demand on the language services market, which, according to statistics, is expected to reach $31.4 billion this year alone and is growing by a rapid rate of 7.4 percent annually. In response to this ever-growing need for language service providers and users of translation services to operate more efficiently, Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC (News - Alert)) has unveiled the industry's first-ever machine chat translation solution. Designed to enable tailored and adaptive contextual translation, this new integrated offering is meant for anyone that has to interact with another individual who speaks the same language or a different language, SAIC shared with TMC at the recent SpeechTEK (News - Alert) 2011 in New York City, where SAIC debuted the solution. "We've brought a single platform that does both text and speech and combined it with hybrid machine translation," Hassan Sawaf, chief scientist for SAIC, told TMC (News - Alert) during an interview at SpeechTEK. "It's highly customizable, tailorable and secure since it can reside on servers within a firewall." According to a press release, organizations using the machine translation technology will decrease the need for costly human translation, thus resulting in lower costs for businesses and boosted productivity for translation providers.

Find out how AI, Machine Learning and Sentiment Analysis are being applied to Finance in a new conference organized by UNICOM Seminars Ltd in Hong Kong on 14-15 March 2017. Technology innovations meet greatest success in business when these are entirely'client focussed'. Developments in the retail sector, which is consumer-led, are addressing client demand for more personalised, faster and competitive services. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Sentiment Analysis are changing the way in which these services are offered. In particular, Financial Organisations are creating and leveraging such innovation in the domain of wealth management.