The robots made some unusual choices in the first international beauty contest judged by AI. Beauty.AI 2.0 evaluated more than 6,000 user-submitted selfies using algorithms evaluating youthfulness, skin quality, symmetry, and appearance relative to databases of models and actors. Winners were broken down by age and gender. Apparently, these choices were controversial. Beauty.ai says a lot of contestants wrote in to complain, with one person writing: "What is your'robot' worth??? One walk through a shopping-mall and I will discover more attractive people vs. that ones'won' your Beauty Contest."

MUMBAI: In order to understand its effects on the finance and accounting industry, Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, (CIMA) the world's leading and largest UK based professional body, conducted a global survey across select European, African and Asian countries. A majority of financial leaders are of the opinion that artificial intelligence helps enhance efficiency and accuracy of the business. This recent global study reveals that more than two-thirds (64%) of finance professionals from India encourage increasing automation as it saves time, money and helps ease the indecision process in their organisations. At a global level, Zimbabwe tops the chart with (75%) professionals supporting automation, followed by China with a 67% of acceptance. This indicates that accountants regard the impact of new technologies as an opportunity rather than a threat.

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Prof. Bostrom has written a book that I believe will become a classic within that subarea of Artificial Intelligence (AI) concerned with the existential dangers that could threaten humanity as the result of the development of artificial forms of intelligence. What fascinated me is that Bostrom has approached the existential danger of AI from a perspective that, although I am an AI professor, I had never really examined in any detail. When I was a graduate student in the early 80s, studying for my PhD in AI, I came upon comments made in the 1960s (by AI leaders such as Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy) in which they mused that, if an artificially intelligent entity could improve its own design, then that improved version could generate an even better design, and so on, resulting in a kind of "chain-reaction explosion" of ever-increasing intelligence, until this entity would have achieved "superintelligence". This chain-reaction problem is the one that Bostrom focusses on. He sees three main paths to superintelligence: 1. The AI path -- In this path, all current (and future) AI technologies, such as machine learning, Bayesian networks, artificial neural networks, evolutionary programming, etc. are applied to bring about a superintelligence.

Computer games are as good as drugs at helping children relax before operations, a study found. Boys and girls that played on an iPad ahead of surgery were just as calm as those given powerful sedatives. The find comes from a French study of 112 children aged four to ten who were having day surgery. Half were given a sedative ahead of the anaesthetic, to calm their nerves and to help the actual anaesthetic take better. These'pre-meds' are often given to young children but can also be used to help anxious adults relax.

But over the next few years, AI in the cloud promises to democratize intelligence, potentially making every company and every employee smarter, faster and more productive. Machine learning algorithms can analyse billions of signals to determine which customers are most likely to purchase a particular product or automatically escalate and route customer service calls to the most appropriate agent. From online to in-store, the shopping experience is being transformed by AI. More than 90% of shopping is still done in brick-and-mortar stores today. But soon every customer who walks into a store will be able to interact with a chatbot knowing all of their shopping history, preferences and other relevant information to make recommendations, offer special discounts and handle customer service issues.

A new technique using artificial intelligence to read satellite images could aid efforts to eradicate global poverty by indicating where help is needed most, a team of U.S. researchers say. The method would assist governments and charities trying to fight poverty but lacking precise and reliable information on where poor people are living and what they need, the researchers based at Stanford University in California said. Eradicating extreme poverty, measured as people living on less than 1.25 a day, by 2030 is among the sustainable development goals adopted by United Nations member states last year. A team of computer scientists and satellite experts created a self-updating world map to locate poverty, said Marshall Burke, assistant professor in Stanford's Department of Earth System Science. It uses a computer algorithm that recognizes signs of poverty through a process called machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, he said.

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Humans will journey to Mars in the 2030s accompanied by robots, if Nasa's ambitious plans become reality. The US space agency has launched a 1 million competition challenging engineers to develop the capabilities of humanoid robots, which will help astronauts on their long and arduous journey to the red planet. The Space Robotics Challenge will see teams program a virtual robot modelled on Nasa's advanced Robonaut R5 android, dubbed Valkyrie, to complete a series of virtual tasks that could save human crew members' lives, such as repairing leaks. Valkyrie is a six foot tall, 290 pound humanoid designed to work in extreme environments. It can'see' thanks to sensors and cameras in its head, walk, and grasp objects in its hands, which have three fingers and a thumb.

A company founded in 1984 to produce high-end audio systems is now on the vanguard of the self-driving vehicle frontier with key financial backing from Ford and Baidu, China's largest search engine provider. Velodyne, a Morgan Hill, Calif.-based company, just received 150 million from Ford and Baidu to continue development and production of Lidar, or the 3D light-powered radar that helps self-driving cars see where they are going. With a presence on three continents, Velodyne is now regularly mentioned in research reports that cite leading companies in the niche field of lidar. Lidar emits short pulses of laser light so that software in the self-driving vehicle can create a real-time, high-definition 3D image of what's around it. In addition to cars, the systems also have growing potential for agricultural equipment, mining vehicles and military vehicles.