Robots have become smarter and more useful over the last year alone, and Segway Robotics is turning to developers for ideas on more meaningful applications for its Loomo bot. For three days starting February 10th, the company is co-hosting the MIT Hacking Medicine Robotics hackathon in Singapore to create eldercare-based uses for Loomo. The winning teams' creations will be tested in Singapore, and successful applications will be rolled out globally. In addition to coming up with helpful applications for Loomo, the event's organizers are also hoping to get participant feedback on how to improve the robot. Segway unveiled the latest developer version of Loomo at CES this year, and announced an array of partners that includes MIT, BMW and Intel.

Law enforcement agencies across the country are adopting body-worn cameras as a means both of increasing their transparency with the public and generating actionable feedback to improve officer performance. Problem is, all these body cams produce terabytes of data daily, far more than many departments can effectively handle. That's why Taser (yes those guys, they make body cameras too) announced on Thursday that it has acquired a pair of companies that specialize in computer- and machine-vision to create the "Axon AI" group. Together, they'll develop a platform that can efficiently parse this flood of data in real time. The Axon AI group will include about 20 programmers and engineers.

When Roger Melko isn't angling in northern Ontario lakes, he's angling to make Waterloo Region the leader in a remarkable new realm of technology -- quantum machine learning. Melko, a cross-appointed physicist at the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and an affiliate at the Institute for Quantum Computing, is pioneering the transfer of algorithms designed to solve problems in the field of artificial intelligence -- machine learning -- to generate breakthroughs in the field of quantum many-body physics. His work uses computer simulations to advance the understanding of strongly interacting condensed-matter systems. Canadian researchers affiliated with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research -- CIFAR-- were responsible for breakthroughs that turned machine learning into the current hot button of tech. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and, it seems, every other large and small player in tech are stampeding into the space.

Robot guitarist "Mach" and a robot drummer "Ashura", members of a robot rock band "Z-Machines", perform music at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. Robot guitarist "Mach" and a robot drummer "Ashura", members of a robot rock band "Z-Machines", perform music at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. Our relationships with and access to music lie between rocks and hard places; the rocks that own it, the hard places that distribute it to us. Those relationships are constantly evolving, and to figure out what might come next, we've combed through the recent earnings statements of some of the largest record labels and tech companies to reveal how they're preparing for 2017 and beyond. Musicians and labels have had to adjust to a world where they hold less control, because of the ways we listen now.

In the future, it's likely that many aspects of human society will be controlled -- either partly or wholly -- by artificial intelligence. AI computer agents could manage systems from the quotidian (e.g., traffic lights) to the complex (e.g., a nation's whole economy), but leaving aside the problem of whether or not they can do their jobs well, there is another challenge: will these agents be able to play nice with one another? What happens if one AI's aims conflict with another's? Will they fight, or work together? Google's AI subsidiary DeepMind has been exploring this problem in a new study published today.

It's a question that has plagued humanity through the ages: What moves make all the difference when you hit the dance floor? Researchers have found that the sexiest dancers move their hips a lot, and shift their arms and thighs independently of one another. Scientists suggest that there could be evolutionary benefits to the dance moves we enjoy most. For example, they suggest that hip swing may be an explicitly feminine trait that shows fertility and youth. The ability to move limbs independently of one another could reveal good motor control, and hence healthy genes for procreation.

Artificial intelligence changes the way it behaves based on the environment it is in, much like humans do, according to the latest research from DeepMind . Computer scientists from the Google-owned firm have studied how their AI behaves in social situations by using principles from game theory and social sciences. During the work, they found it is possible for AI to act in an "aggressive manner" when it feels it is going to lose out, but agents will work as a team when there is more to be gained. For the research, the AI was tested on two games: a fruit gathering game and a Wolfpack hunting game. These are both basic, 2D games that used AI characters (known as agents) similar to those used in DeepMind's original work with Atari.

As the sun rises on 2017, a highlight of this New Year will be the gathering strength of the cloud. If the big question posed by businesses and their CIOs in 2016 was whether they should migrate to the cloud; in 2017 the question will be what is the best way to get there. A recent IBM survey of more than 1,000 C-suite executives from 18 industries found that almost every company we surveyed is using cloud, but only in pockets of their business. At the same time, nearly half of workloads - or 45% - are expected to remain on-premises with dedicated servers. As businesses continue to benefit from integrating their on-premises infrastructure with the cloud, they are also increasing their investments in new workloads on public clouds.

With our hectic lifestyles, it's incredibly common to feel a dip in concentration at work. Research has shown that when we're not concentrating, our brain'turns off'. Spending too long switched off could lead to premature ageing and early-onset dementia. But by making small changes to your diet and lifestyle, you can make a real difference to your brain power in just one week. Nutritionist Amy Morris offers seven easy steps you can follow to perform at your best everyday.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)