Microsoft Corp. is setting up a new research lab focused on artificial intelligence with the goal of creating more general-purpose learning systems. The new lab, called Microsoft Research AI, will be based at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and involve more than 100 scientists from across various sub-fields of artificial intelligence research, including perception, learning, reasoning and natural language processing. The goal, said Eric Horvitz, the director of Microsoft Research Labs, is to combine these disciplines to work toward more general artificial intelligence, meaning a single system that can tackle a wide-range of tasks and problems. Such a system, for instance, might be able to both plan the best route to drive through a city and also figure out how to minimize your income tax bill, while also understanding difficult human concepts like sarcasm or gestures. This differs from so-called narrow AIs, which are just designed to perform a single task well -- for instance, recognize faces in digital photographs.

Artificial intelligence software could generate highly realistic fake videos of former president Barack Obama using existing audio and video clips of him, a new study [PDF] finds. Such work could one day help generate digital models of a person for virtual reality or augmented reality applications, researchers say. Computer scientists at the University of Washington previously revealed they could generate digital doppelgängers of anyone by analyzing images of them collected from the Internet, from celebrities such as Tom Hanks and Arnold Schwarzenegger to public figures such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Such work suggested it could one day be relatively easy to create such models of anybody, when there are untold numbers of digital photos of everyone on the Internet. The researchers chose Obama for their latest work because there were hours of high-definition video of him available online in the public domain.

Donald Trump says he will not reign in his use of Twitter, despite criticism of his online behaviour. He's a known to be a big fan of the social media platform, and chose to keep tweeting from his @realDonaldTrump account even after gaining control of the @POTUS account after becoming President. In recent weeks, he's caused widespread controversy by using the platform to attack Mayor of London Sadiq Khan over his response to the London Bridge terror attack, and by posting an edited video of him wrestling with a man whose head had been replaced with a CNN logo. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Visabot, a Facebook-owned artificial intelligence tech company, has launched a $150 service to help the Facebook Messenger users navigate through the complicated process of applying for a Green Card. "We created our own immigration AI so our success rate grows as the bot learns. What you need to do is answer are you a U.S. citizen other thing you should know and the bot will use this info to generate the whole package for you all you have to do is file it with us immigration services," Visabot COO Andrey Zinoviev announced Tuesday. Read: Immigration Reform 2016: Were Green Cards Sent To Wrong People? The service will let you know -- immediately upon entering your data -- whether you qualify for a Green Card.

The lack of diversity at tech companies is well-established: Less than 10 percent of workers at Google and LinkedIn are non-Asian minorities, for example, and only 31 percent of employees at Google are women. But the technology industry is guilty of another serious blunder that hasn't spurred the same volume of national conversation: a lack of interest, and failure to invest, in the capacity of small and mid-sized cities to shape technology's evolution. Adrian Perkins (@Diplomatofthe8) is a third-year student at Harvard Law School, founder of the marketing tech company E.merge, and strategic technology advisor to his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana. Many of the best-known tech companies were launched and remain headquartered in Silicon Valley, a region that's home to 3 million people. Tomorrow's tech ideas are also being tested in larger cities: witness AmazonFresh Pickup (Seattle) and Uber's autonomous vehicle trials (San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Tempe, Arizona); although smart city initiatives are taking off in smaller cities, the larger cities still have more than their share of smart city projects, not to mention the media coverage that perpetuates larger cities' market advantage.

Panelists at Smart Citites NYC '17 discussed how the city of Columbus, Ohio pulled together $500 million in funding. Turning $50 million into $500 million is one of the greatest feats that Columbus, Ohio has ever accomplished. In June 2016, the city of Columbus landed a much-coveted $40 million grant from the US Department of Transportation and $10 million from Vulcan Inc. as part of the federal Smart City Challenge. The city won the funding in large part because of the it's close partnership with the Columbus business community. Columbus has already turned that original $50 million into half a billion dollars, thanks to an array of investments from the private sector, and more is expected.

Donald Trump is being sued because of his behaviour on Twitter. The president's unprecedented Twitter use – which he has said is "modern day presidential" – has landed him a range of criticism in recent weeks. But the new lawsuit actually focuses not on his tweets but something else more private: his blocking critics on the site. The new case argued that it is unconstitutional to stop people following him on Twitter. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Welcome to the first of a series of posts where we dive into use cases that are shaping and expanding what's possible with machine learning. Each month, we'll post the Top 10 use cases from the IBM Machine Learning Hub -- where IBM hosts data scientists to collaborate on prototypes with our in-house ML specialists. We anticipate the Top 10 will change as industries adopt machine learning at different rates and as entirely new use cases emerge -- so check back. We kick off the Top 10 with a look at three off-the-radar ways that machine learning is driving vital improvements to government agencies. Next month, we explore health care use cases.

Over the past decade, as banks have effectively outsourced debt collection to third parties, this corner of the financial world has slid into an abyss of harassing phone calls, shoddy recordkeeping and wrongful collections. This is reflected in the latest data from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's complaint database. Since the database was opened to the public in June 2012, Americans have aired more grievances about collections than about any other aspect of their financial lives. As of June, the CFPB had received 316,810 complaints about debt collection. "Continued attempts to collect debt not owed," cited by 39% of filers.

Translating audio into realistic looking video of a person speaking is quite a challenge. Often, the resulting video just looks off -- a problem called the uncanny valley, which states that human replicas appearing almost but not quite real come off as eerie or creepy. However, researchers at the University of Washington have made some serious headway in overcoming this issue and they did it using audio and video of Barack Obama. The researchers used 14 hours of Obama's weekly address videos to train a neural network. Once trained, their system was then able to take an audio clip from the former president, create mouth shapes that synced with the audio and then synthesize a realistic looking mouth that matched Obama's.