Scientists in Toronto are developing an artificial intelligence system that would help people with Alzheimer's disease or other cognitive impairments live safely at home. The Toronto Rehabilitation Institute is working with University of Toronto researchers to make home-based computer systems that would assist elderly people with memory loss in living independently. More than 750,000 Canadians will have Alzheimer's or a related dementia by 2031, according to the researchers. "Often when a person gets moderate to severe levels of impairment, they are taken out of their home and put into a care facility," lead scientist Alex Mihailidis said in a written statement. "We are using artificial intelligence to support aging-in-place so that people can remain in their homes for as long as possible."

A brain-to-computer technology that can translate thoughts into leg movements has enabled a man paralyzed from the waist down by a spinal cord injury to become the first such patient to walk without the use of robotics, doctors in California reported on Wednesday. The slow, halting first steps of the 28-year-old paraplegic were documented in a preliminary study published in the British-based Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, along with a YouTube video. Fritz works out with a spinal cord injury recovery specialist. He spent months training so a computer could recognize his leg-movement brain waves. The feat was accomplished using a system allowing the brain to bypass the injured spinal cord and instead send messages through a computer algorithm to electrodes placed around the patient's knees to trigger controlled leg muscle movements.

Google has acquired a University of Toronto startup to improve its speech and object recognition research, the university announced this week. DNNresearch, incorporated in 2012 by computer science professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of his graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, focuses on speech recognition, computer vision and language understanding. It has developed a system that "dramatically improved the state of the art in object recognition," according to the university's media release. The three-person team also received a $600,000 grant earlier from Google's Focused Research Awards, which support research in computer science and engineering. The announcement makes DNNresearch the 9th Canadian company acquired by the search giant.

Artificial intelligence researchers should focus on ensuring AI systems "do what we want them to do," rather than just advancing and improving the capabilities of the technology, researchers and experts say. An open letter from the Future of Life Institute this week called for expanded research to ensure AI systems are "robust" and benefit society. Works of science fiction like the film Terminator Genisys have long portrayed artificial intelligence taking over the world and destroying humankind. The open letter says it's time to focus research on making AI safe and beneficial to humans. It says: "Our AI systems must do what we want them to do." Max Tegmark, co-founder of the institute, said in an email that the letter is mainly directed at the AI research community and anyone who funds it. It has been signed by hundreds of researchers and other AI experts, along with physicist Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, who have both spoken publicly about the risks of AI.

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.

ManpowerGroup, one of the world's largest jobs companies, released a report detailing how the technological revolution is going to change the employment market forever. The company released the report, entitled "The Skills Revolution," on conjunction with the World Economic Forum's meeting of the most powerful political and business leaders across the globe in Davos, Switzerland. It surveyed more than 18,000 employers across 43 countries and six industry sectors. While technological developments will cause greater automation, a decrease in headcount or slow growth in hiring in some areas, it will actually create a lot of jobs too, according to Manpower. But the key to this is to make sure the world's workforce "upskills" to be qualified enough to take on new positions.

Sargur N. Srihari, director of the University at Buffalo's Center of Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR) and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, has won the 2011 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) Outstanding Achievements award. He is being honored with the award for his outstanding and continued contributions to research and education in handwriting recognition and document analysis, and for his service to the community. Srihari recently traveled to Beijing to accept the award and serve as a keynote speaker at the conference, held bi-annually by the International Association for Pattern Recognition. His speech, entitled "Probabilistic Graphical Models in Machine Learning," focused on the design of computer programs that learn and are able to modify their behavior in an environment of constantly changing information. Without machine learning, many computers that deal with rapidly changing data would require constant reprogramming.

For someone who devised a computer chess program as an MIT undergraduate in the late 1950s, helped create the world's first video game, and held a leadership role with the World Wide Web Consortium, Alan Kotok got his start in an inauspicious fashion -- or so he was told. Subscribers to the Boston Globe get unlimited access to our archives.

Joseph Weizenbaum, an MIT professor and a pioneer in artificial intelligence whose famed computer program Eliza seemed to converse with humans in 1964, spent the rest of his life speaking out against substituting machines for human decision-making. "He was a critic of society and science and a true humanist who really touched people," said Peter Haas, a Vienna-based filmmaker who made the 2007 documentary "Weizenbaum. Mr. Weizenbaum, whose parents fled Nazi Germany when he was a boy, died March 5 in Groben, Germany, from cancer. One of his four daughters, Sharon Weizenbaum, recalled playing with the Eliza program in her father's study at her childhood home in Concord. "Eliza was something that was fun to fool around with," she said.

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.