The Chinese government produces 488 million'fake' social media posts a year to distract citizens from news critical of the Communist Party, a new study has revealed. According to the study, written by Harvard University professor Gary King, the goal of the secretive army of commenters is to "distract the public and change the subject" in online discussions which paint the government in a negative light. The study is reportedly the first of its kind to show concrete evidence of the existence of the '50 Cent Party', a name which references the 50 cents each worker is thought to be paid for a post. During the study, co-authored by Stanford University's Jennifer Pan and UC San Diego's Margaret E. Roberts, machine learning techniques were used to analyse millions of social media posts, based on leaked emails and databases which detail the work of the group. The research revealed co-ordinated commenting efforts, usually timed to coincide with government announcements or patriotic public holidays.

Neuroscientists at DeepMind, a Google-owned AI lab in London, have teamed up with academics at Oxford University and UCL to try and determine how the human brain navigates an underground train network. The group -- whose work was published in the journal Neuron this week -- asked humans to plan a journey in a virtual subway network. Participants were tasked with getting from A to B while MRI scans of their brain were taken. These scans showed which parts of the brain are involved in planning and making decisions. The group, which included Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, concluded that the brain splits the task of completing a journey into different jobs, with different parts of the brain handling different elements of the task.

"It is exciting to see the power of deep learning applied to potential aging biomarkers. The availability of such markers is an essential prerequisite for any future clinical trials to try to ameliorate the effects of human aging", said Charles Cantor, PhD, CSO of Agena, Inc, former director of the Human Genome Project (DOE). The availability of big data coupled with advances in highly-parallel high-performance computing led to a renaissance in artificial neural networks resulting in trained algorithms surpassing human performance in image and voice recognition, autonomous driving and many other tasks. However, the adoption of deep learning in biomedicine and especially in the pharmaceutical industry has been reasonably slow. In order to outperform more traditional machine learning methods, deep neural nets require large amounts of data and expertise with highly-parallel and high-performance graphics processing unit (GPU) computing.

Tata Sons chairman emeritus Ratan Tata and Unilazer Ventures founder Ronnie Screwvala has invested an undisclosed amount in artificial intelligence-powered chat app Niki.ai. The company said it would use the funds to strengthen its technology and increase the base of partner businesses. Sachin Jaiswal, chief executive officer of Niki.ai, said, "It's a proud moment for the company to have an investment from Tata and for Unilazer to do a follow-on round. With the continued support from our investors, we now want to expand aggressively across categories." Niki uses the method of natural language processing, which enables machines to understand human language inputs, and machine learning, wherein the machine self-learns with increasing data to converse with the customers over a chat interface and helps them to place various orders.

From self-driving vehicles to social robots, artificial intelligence is evolving at a rapid pace, creating vast opportunities as well as complex challenges. Recognizing that, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is co-hosting four public workshops on artificial intelligence -- the first of them May 24 at the University of Washington. Subsequent events will take place in Washington, D.C.; in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and in New York City. Put on by the UW School of Law and the UW Tech Policy Lab, the session will focus on legal and policy issues around artificial intelligence, or AI. Etzioni will provide an overview on the current state of artificial intelligence, followed by two panel discussions.

Google has done well out of its search box. As our collective dependence on computers and the Internet has grown, we have come to use it more and more--helping Google swell to its gigantic size. But on Wednesday Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said it was time to move on from the conventional search engine that his company was built on. He unveiled Google Assistant, an evolution of Google search designed to act like a virtual concierge. If you search Google for "movies tonight" on your phone today, it will display the films in local theaters.

Scientists have designed flying, insect-sized robots that can perch and launch from ceilings. The robots use something called electrostatic adhesion, the same process by which statically-charged balloons stick to walls. The findings, reported in the journal Science, contribute to a decade-long Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory project called "RoboBee". The robots in this study are programmed drones, each around the size of a 10 pence coin. Dr Mirko Kovac, director of the Aerial Robotics Laboratory of Imperial College, London, who was not involved in this study, told BBC News that similar robots were currently being trialled in environmental monitoring and disaster-relief efforts. Equipped with sensors, swarms of these small, relatively cheap robots, Dr Kovac explained, could alert first responders to the most intense areas of forest fires or other natural disasters.

Uber has announced that it is in the early stages of testing self-driving car technology with the ultimate goal of removing the need for drivers from its ride-hailing business. The company, currently valued at somewhere upwards of 60 billion, announced it has begun testing a Ford Fusion retro-fitted with sensors and cameras on the streets of Pittsburgh. "Real-world testing is critical to our efforts to develop self-driving technology," the company said in a blog post announcing the move. "Self-driving cars have the potential to save millions of lives and improve quality of life for people around the world." The tests will be run by Uber's Advanced Technologies Center, which the company opened in Pittsburgh in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University in February last year, with the goal of inducting autonomous vehicles into its fleet by 2020.

"Think about just how interconnected the world is now," said Matt Gould, the co-founder of Arria NLG, a prominent enterprise in the development and deployment of Natural Language Generation (NLG) technologies worldwide. "Think about it from just a personal context. How much data are you generating personally every day?" Modern, connected humans interact constantly online with computers, mobile phones, and many other devices. They pay bills, watch movies, purchase products, interact with medical professionals, use fitness apps, listen to music, and work online. "That whole drifting miasma of invisible data is spilling off you constantly and consistently, and it's happening for at least half the world's population now," said Gould during a recent DATAVERSITY phone interview.

RED SAP Solutions has announced that it is working with SAP on a project that will apply Machine Learning to the recruitment process. The company states that this will transform the process of finding the right candidates, by using artificial intelligence to recommend the best match for any open position. According to RED, it will use the Machine Learning based solution to improve the service it offers to its clients, enabling them to cut time to hire and recruit the best people more quickly, and therefore reduce cost to hire. Together with the expertise and experience of RED's staff, this means its clients will be able to find the best SAP resources for their projects, anywhere in the world. Machine Learning based algorithms, together with RED's vast pool of data, will recommend on what makes a candidate right for a particular position.