The word Artificial Intelligence is increasing. The latest example is Picturesqe, a tool for photographers that uses AI-powered automation to help pick out the best snaps and filter out the dross. Founders of Picturesqe, a machine-learning powered piece of software, are confident that it can select the good photos from your large stack. But unlike similar mobile Apps, Picturesqe is targeted specifically at professional photographers and semi-pros. Features of the application include smart grouping, which automatically groups similar photos based on visual content, intelligent zoom so that you can quickly compare the same spot on multiple shots, and aesthetic ranking.

SpotMini is a new smaller version of the Spot robot, weighing 55 lbs dripping wet (65 lbs if you include its arm.) SpotMini is all-electric (no hydraulics) and runs for about 90 minutes on a charge, depending on what it is doing. SpotMini is one of the quietest robots we have ever built. It has a variety of sensors, including depth cameras, a solid state gyro (IMU) and proprioception sensors in the limbs. These sensors help with navigation and mobile manipulation.

Twitter Inc. agreed to acquire a London-based artificial intelligence startup to make tweeted live videos look more professional. In a blog post Monday, Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said he was buying Magic Pony Technology "so Twitter can continue to be the best place to see what's happening and why it matters, first." Seeking to shore up slowing growth, the social media company has in recent months begun emphasizing video on its site. Magic Pony uses machine learning, a way of teaching software to perform tasks without explicit programming instructions based on pattern recognition, a technology that's "increasingly at the core of everything we build at Twitter," Dorsey said. Twitter paid about 150 million for Magic Pony, according to a person familiar with the matter.

If you're a child of the '80s like me, you might recognize this famous line from the movie WarGames. This innocent-sounding question comes not from one of the movie's human stars, but from a military super-computer named Joshua, after a bored high school student, played by Matthew Broderick, accesses the computer's hard drive. Thinking he's hacked into a video game company, Broderick's character accepts Joshua's challenge and chooses the most intriguing game he can find: global thermonuclear war. Joshua is an intelligent computer programmed to learn through simulations like the one Broderick's character initiates. And because the computer actually does control the arsenal of U.S. nuclear weapons, it's a "game" that puts the planet on the brink of World War III.

Gensim users and developers have shaped the newest release 0.13.0 through their comments, requests and Python code contributions. The release includes new features like Word Movers Distance (WMD) and offers a new tool which is used to tune Topic Models. RaRe Technologies today announced a major update of the software package Gensim, an open source machine learning toolkit for understanding human language. Gensim users and developers have shaped the newest release 0.13.0. This release includes new features like Word Movers' Distance (WMD)*, a novel distance function between unstructured text documents, plus new Tutorials and Quickstarts.

IHS Technology has announced that AI in new vehicles is projected to increase over 1700 percent by 2025. Car manufacturers shipped seven million AI systems in new cars throughout 2015, and that number is expected to be 122 million in 2025. AI systems are expected to be varied and perform multiple functions. "An artificial-intelligence system continuously learns from experience and by its ability to discern and recognize its surroundings," said Luca De Ambroggi, principal analyst at IHS Technology. "It learns, as human beings do, from real sounds, images, and other sensory inputs. The system recognizes the car's environment and evaluates the contextual implications for the moving car." Areas of development include eye-tracking, driver monitoring, natural language interfaces, and speech and gesture recognition.

Based on the agreement, both parties will work together on new technology innovation, enhanced user experience and developing a new e-commerce platform for enterprise-level products. Together, the companies are dedicated to driving the next generation of e-commerce artificial intelligence solutions, and conducting associated research and development for high-speed interconnect products. A key technology that JD.com has developed is JD Camera, an application for image recognition and similar image search in mobile terminals. JD Camera facilitates ease-of-shopping for users by allowing customers to quickly and easily search for their favorites products with just a photo rather than detailed language descriptions. "In the future, with the help of the Joint Lab, Camera will be enhanced from general photo-based searches to more advanced imaged-based searches that will allow users to view, select and purchase from suggested recommendations with an advanced image match algorithm for such items as clothing, make-up, furniture, etc.," said Weng Zhi, vice president of technology, JD.com.

National Harbor, MD - 16 Jun 2016: Local Motors, the leading vehicle technology integrator and creator of the world's first 3D-printed cars, today introduced the first self-driving vehicle to integrate the advanced cognitive computing capabilities of IBM (NYSE: IBM) Watson. Starting today, Olli will be used on public roads locally in DC, and late in 2016 in Miami-Dade County and Las Vegas. "Olli offers a smart, safe and sustainable transportation solution that is long overdue," Rogers said. "Olli with Watson acts as our entry into the world of self-driving vehicles, something we've been quietly working on with our co-creative community for the past year. We are now ready to accelerate the adoption of this technology and apply it to nearly every vehicle in our current portfolio and those in the very near future. I'm thrilled to see what our open community will do with the latest in advanced vehicle technology."

Both Amazon and Google are advancing their efforts in machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence that lets computers learn without being explicitly programmed. It's often associated with cloud computing, because it requires the considerable computing power the cloud makes easily available. Amazon's efforts will get a boost when Alexander Smola, a professor in the machine-learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, leaves that position July 1 to head Amazon's cloud machine-learning platform. Smola revealed his plans in this blog post. "This is a terrific task, and it was an offer that I could not turn down," Smola wrote.

Google announced today that it is expanding its largest non-U.S. The new Machine Learning Research Group will be based in Zurich, Switzerland, which is already home to Google's largest research center outside the U.S. The company did not say specifically how many positions will be added. But in a blog post, Google executives said machine learning has become critical to the company's development efforts across a wide range of services. "Google's ongoing research in Machine Intelligence is what powers many of the products being used by hundreds of millions of people a day -- from Translate to Photo Search to SmartReply for Inbox," wrote Emmanuel Mogenet, head of Google Research in Europe. Indeed, the Zurich research center has already had a sizable impact on Google.