PARIS – Sheep learned to recognize Barack Obama after seeing his photo a few dozen times, says a study that suggested our four-legged friends may be smarter than we think. The former U.S. president was one of four celebrities used in a test of the woolly creatures' face-recognition skills, along with Harry Potter actress Emma Watson, British TV host Fiona Bruce and American actor Jake Gyllenhaal, the research team said. "We chose these people because there were lots of images of each person available online, both front-on and taken at different angles," said study co-author Jennifer Morton of the University of Cambridge. "We also chose them because we were sure that our sheep had never met them in person." Morton and a team trained eight sheep to recognize the faces from a frontal photo of each of them.

This week, The Forbes School of Business and Technology at Ashford University in San Diego hosted a'thought leadership' summit. Forbes CEO Steve Forbes keynoted, and the school invited executives, military leaders, and select Forbes contributors. I was honored to receive such an invitation, so I attended in order to cover the event for the Forbes.com The topics covered many areas of interest to executives, including leadership, capital allocation, human resources, technology, and marketing. From my perspective focusing on digital transformation – essentially, stories of disruption in the enterprise – I sought out such stories at the event.

Today, Amazon and the Max Planck Society announced that they intend to enter into a strategic collaboration to promote research in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Amazon plans to build an Amazon Research Center adjacent to the campus of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tuebingen. As part of the Cyber Valley initiative, the new center intends to bring together international key players from science and industry to concentrate their research activities in the field of AI. Amazon plans to invest 1.25 million Euro over the coming years to fund research groups in Tuebingen's Cyber Valley tech initiative. Cyber Valley was launched in December 2016 and focuses on AI research, such as robotics, machine learning and computer vision.

Amidst all the talk about how artificial intelligence (AI) is threatening society with great harm--beginning with taking over human-held jobs and then, eventually, becoming more intelligent and taking over the entire world--some experts believe that AI shouldn't be feared. Foremost among these experts is Google's director of engineering and notable "future teller" Ray Kurzweil, who has said time and again that the technological singularity won't necessarily go down as expected. Kurzweil discussed the future of AI at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, D.C. on Friday. And, while he agreed with Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk who warned of the potential "existential risks" a super-intelligent AI could bring, Kurzweil said that humanity would be able to overcome these "difficult episodes," if they ever actually happen. He continued by noting that scientific and technological advancements always come with inherent risks and that AI should not be considered any more (or less) of a threat.

The Renault Group announced today that its autonomous vehicle control system can avoid obstacles just as well as professional test drivers. The company said that in designing the system, it was actually inspired by these drivers' abilities and used them as a sort of benchmark as to what level its technology should be performing. "Despite popular belief, the reality is that human beings are pretty amazing drivers, with less than one fatality per 100,000,000 kilometers in most developed countries," Simon Hougard, director of the Renault Open Innovation Lab, wrote in a Medium post. "Reaching and exceeding that benchmark is essential to improve safety and realize our dreams of autonomous cars, providing more productivity during our morning commutes and robo-vehicle services in city centers." The technology is a result of Renault's collaboration with Stanford University Dynamic Design Lab Director Chris Gerdes, who's also a former US Department of Transportation Chief Innovation Officer, and Renault says it will help with its goal to be one of the first companies to bring "mind off" technology to the public.

Currently, to plan out a day's worth of work on Curiosity, it takes scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) about eight hours to first process information gathered by the rover the day before, plan out the next day's tasks, engineer those projects, bundle them up in digital instructions, and send more instructions back to Mars. Engineers spend about a half hour to an hour alone processing the images that Curiosity sends back, stitching together wide angle photos, or lining up stereo images that let humans--or rovers--deduce information about depth from two-dimensional pictures. "For things like driving or operating the arm, we take a picture with the left camera and a picture with the right camera" Justin Maki, the imaging scientist for Mars 2020, says. "Then we match up pixels between the two images to create a 3D image of the terrain. Because we have these wider field of view lenses, we end up with better quality stereo terrain maps."

Eight years after launching its self-driving "moonshot," Waymo, aka Google's driverless car company, is having its Neil Armstrong moment. The company is now running its autonomous minivans around Phoenix, Arizona, with no human inside to grab the wheel if things go bad, CEO John Krafcik announced Tuesday. And in just a few months, it will invite passengers to climb aboard the world's first driverless ride-hailing service. This launch brings up a host of unanswered questions about the details and practical elements of such a service, but what's already clear is Waymo is taking one of the final steps on the long road toward taking the human driver out of the picture, and finally cashing in on the profits and safety benefits that come with the transition to robot chauffeurs. "Fully self-driving cars are here," Waymo CEO John Krafcik said at Web Summit in Lisbon this afternoon, where he announced the move.

The emerging field of artificial intelligence (AI) risks provoking a public backlash as it increasingly falls into private hands, threatens people's jobs, and operates without effective oversight or regulatory control, leading experts in the technology warn. At the start of a new Guardian series on AI, experts in the field highlight the huge potential for the technology, which is already speeding up scientific and medical research, making cities run more smoothly, and making businesses more efficient. But for all the promise of an AI revolution, there are mounting social, ethical and political concerns about the technology being developed without sufficient oversight from regulators, legislators and governments. The report found that AI had the potential to add £630bn to the economy by 2035. But to reap the rewards, the technology must benefit society, she said.

When Timothy Evans, Andrew Mark Settles, James Titus, and John Kennard touched down at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, they looked a little pale. The four men had just spent 45 days voyaging millions of miles through the galaxy to collect soil samples from a near-earth asteroid. Yet, they hadn't been to space. Instead, they'd simulated a fake mission inside the Human Exploration Research Analog, a 636-square-foot metal capsule that helps NASA understand how humans behave when cooped up in a spacecraft for so long. Space may be infinite, but spaceships are kinda small.

When I was a scrawny little chap, shortest in my high school class, I always wanted a super power. Wanted doesn't capture the feeling. I would have given a limb for a super power. I read a lot of books back then (and now) and landed on a super power that had something to do with the brain. I eventually landed on Prof. Xavier of the X-Men.