China has built the world's fastest supercomputer - almost twice as fast as the previous U.S. record holder - with speeds equivalent to more than 338 million normal PCs. The Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way 2, was developed by the National University of Defense Technology in China's Changsha city and is capable of sustained computing of 33.86 petaflops per second. That's the equivalent of 33,860 trillion calculations per second, with the average everyday computer performing around 100 million per second (although some are faster and others may be slower). China's supercomputer Tianhe-2 has been declared the Top500 fastest supercomputer title. It was developed by the country's National University of Defense Technology and is capable of operating at the equivalent of 33,860 trillion calculations per second China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which means Milky Way 2, knocked the U.S. Department of Energy's Titan machine off the number one spot.

Computers and the Internet: Listening to Girls' Voices – Dorothy Ellen Wilcox concludes that "instead of socializing adolescent girls toward docility, non-hierarchical technology like the Internet may provide a discourse for development of higher-level cognitive skills and the ability to unmask inequities in power and politics."

Dr. Venu Govindaraju, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, is the founding director of the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors. He received his Bachelor's degree with honors from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1986, and his Ph.D. from UB in 1992. His research focus is on machine learning and pattern recognition in the domains of Document Image Analysis and Biometrics. Dr. Govindaraju has co-authored about 400 refereed scientific papers. His seminal work in handwriting recognition was at the core of the first handwritten address interpretation system used by the US Postal Service.

We cannot increase people's living standards, or expect America to lead the world, unless we rapidly increase productivity. But productivity growth over the last decade has been the slowest since the government started measuring it in 1947. This is why the economy has been mired in sluggish growth. Productivity is the measure of how much we produce in our work days; the economy expands as each worker produces more. The recent slowdown has given fodder to a cottage industry of economic pessimists who tell us we better get used to it. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers argues we are in an age of structural stagnation.

China has built the world's fastest supercomputer, capable of making 93 quadrillion calculations a second. And for the first time, it's entirely powered by Chinese-made processors, following a US ban on exporting chips for devices suspected to be used for nuclear research. The Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, which is located at the state-funded Chinese Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, a city near Shanghai in eastern China, is more than twice as powerful as previous record-holder Tianhe-2, according to TOP500, a research organization that ranks the powerful computers twice a year. The milestone comes a year after the United States barred exports of computer chips to China for use in its supercomputers, citing concerns that the machines had been used in "nuclear explosive activities." In turn, by ramping up development of its own chips, China has come to surpass the US' own achievements in supercomputing: the top-placing American creation, the Department of Energy's Titan, secured third place ranking on TOP500's list, below China's two-record breaking supercomputers. "It's not based on an existing architecture.

Can Donald Trump make artificial intelligence "great again?" A new Twitterbot is analyzing the way Mr. Trump speaks and using the data to generate tweets. The end result is intended to be an autonomous program capable of crafting tweets that sound like Mr. Trump and it has already garnered thousands of fans. "Much of my actual robotics research deals with these types of modeling techniques," Mr. Hayes said in a MIT article about the project. "I thought this would be a good way to learn more about some of the concepts, and have a little bit of fun in the process."

Like a lot of teenagers, Aanya Nigam reflexively shares her whereabouts, activities and thoughts on Twitter, Instagram and other social networks without a qualm. But Aanya's care-free attitude dissolved into paranoia a few months ago shortly after her mother bought Amazon's Echo, a digital assistant that can be set up in a home or office to listen for various requests, such as for a song, a sports score, the weather, or even a book to be read aloud. After using the Internet-connected device for two months, Aanya, 16, started to worry that the Echo was eavesdropping on conversations in her Issaquah, Washington, living room. So she unplugged the device and hid it in a place that her mother, Anjana Agarwal, still hasn't been able to find. "I guess there is a difference between deciding to share something and having something captured by something that you don't know when it's listening," Agarwal said of her daughter's misgivings. The Echo, a $180 cylindrical device that began general shipping in July after months of public testing, is the latest advance in voice-recognition technology that's enabling machines to record snippets of conversation that are analyzed and stored by companies promising to make their customers' lives better.

If all goes as planned, this June in Pomona Calif., 25 humanoid robots built by different companies will make their way through an obstacle course meant to resemble a disaster area. Started in 2012, the annual contest is hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's high-tech research unit. DARPA had previously selected eleven companies as finalists. On Thursday, the agency announced the final 14. Gill Pratt, a program manager of the Robotics Challenge, told LiveScience that the participants will have one hour to finish the course, which involvesfirst driving a vehicle to a simulated disaster zone and walking about 30 feet through a field of obstacles. After that the robots must close a valve, do some wiring, cut a hole through a wall, climb stairs, and exit the building, according to the report.

Before NASA sends its first humanoid robot to Mars, it will send it to college – in prototype form, of course. The space agency announced Tuesday will award two Valkyrie robots, a 6-foot-tall, 290-pound humanoid, to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass., and Northeastern University in Boston for intensive research and development into the robot's applications in extreme environments. "Advances in robotics, including human-robotic collaboration, are critical to developing the capabilities required for our journey to Mars," said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator for the Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We are excited to engage these university research groups to help NASA with this next big step in robotics technology development." The space agency became urgently interested in robotics following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station incident in Japan, which the agency says "illustrated, rather candidly, how inadequate current robotic technologies are for use in highly unstructured human environments."

Despite development of increasingly intelligent computers, scientists from Cornell University and the Human Computation Institute in Fairfax, Va., say that they wouldn't leave the task of solving the world's most complex problems – from environmental to economic to social – to computers alone. Instead, the researchers call for a sophisticated form of "human computation," a computer science technique that taps the strengths of humans and computers to accomplish tasks that neither can do alone. A human-computer collaborative system could incorporate human experiences, reason, and creativity into computer intelligence to solve the world's most nuanced problems, say researchers in a column published in the January 1 issue of the journal Science. Today, human computation works when computers assign micro tasks to many people, or to sets of people who can analyze and improve on preceding contributions. Wikipedia is an example of how this works.