Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

The aim of their collaboration is to achieve machine-based translation between the languages of the European Union so that comprehensible texts are achieved for as many language combinations as possible. Two of the EU-funded research projects are being led by the Saarbrücken computer linguist Josef van Genabith. Anyone who wants to learn Finnish has to be prepared to deal with a complex grammar that includes fifteen different cases. The grammatical cases are marked in part by appending syllables to nouns resulting in a dizzying array of word forms and expressive possibilities. "Teaching a computer to understand all these grammatical nuances and to translate them correctly into another language is exceptionally difficult," says Josef van Genabith, Professor of Translation-Oriented Language Technologies at Saarland University and a Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). His team is therefore following a different path.

The White House wound up a nationwide series of workshops on artificial intelligence today on a cautionary note: Yes, AI promises to ease many of humanity's ills, but humanity needs to make sure that flesh-and-blood policymakers are firmly in charge. Latanya Sweeney, director of the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard's Institute of Quantitative Social Science, said AI programs should be made to reflect the norms agreed upon by human society. "I want the people we elect controlling those norms, not the technology itself. Those norms should include supporting social equity and diversity, said Alicia Glen, New York City's deputy mayor for housing and urban development. "At its best, artificial intelligence can be a tool to promote equity, and it obviously can create huge economic opportunity for a lot of people," she said. "But it can also have discriminatory effects, whether they're intended or unintended.

President Obama's top economic adviser does not sound too excited about universal basic income. In a speech at New York University on Thursday, Jason Furman -- the chair of the president's Council of Economic Advisers -- talked about artificial intelligence and the effect it is having, and will have, on the US economy. And when one mentions AI, the subject of universal basic income (UBI) is often not far behind. UBI is more or less exactly what it sounds like: You give every citizen a set amount of money, whether they work or not. But Furman, despite declaring at the top of his speech that he worries we're not utilizing robots and AI enough in the US, said a solution for any future economic tension created by the proliferation of robotics is unlikely to come in giving every citizen money.

Reuters – The fatal crash of a Tesla Motors, Inc. Model S in Autopilot mode has turned up pressure on auto industry executives and regulators to ensure that automated driving technology is deployed safely. The first such known accident, which occurred in Florida in May, has highlighted tensions surrounding efforts to turn over responsibility for braking, steering and driving judgments to machines. It may delay the U.S. government's plan to outline guidelines for self-driving cars this month. The cause of the Model S crash is still under investigation by federal and Florida state authorities, which are looking into whether the driver was distracted before his 2015 Model S went under a truck trailer. Shares of Tesla and Mobileye NV, the maker of the camera vision system used in the Model S, rose on Friday as analysts said the accident was likely a short-term setback.

Software governs much of our daily lives from behind the scenes, from which sorts of information we consume, to who we date. For some, secretive algorithms decide whether they are at risk of committing a future crime. It's only natural to want to understand how these black boxes accomplish all this, especially when it impacts us so directly. Artificial intelligence is getting better all the time. Google, for example, recently used a technique known as deep learning to kick a human's ass at Go, an incredibly complex board game invented thousands of years ago.

Pieter Abbeel is an associate professor in UC Berkeley's EECS department, where he works in machine learning and robotics--in particular his research is on making robots learn from people (apprenticeship learning) and how to make robots learn through their own trial and error (reinforcement learning). Pieter's robots have learned advanced helicopter aerobatics, knot tying, basic assembly, and organizing laundry. He has won various awards, including best paper awards at ICML and ICRA, the Sloan Fellowship, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program (AFOSR-YIP) Award, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program (ONR-YIP) Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award (DARPA-YFA), the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program Award (NSF-CAREER), the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award, the MIT TR35, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Early Career Award, and the Dick Volz Best US PhD Thesis in Robotics and Automation Award.

Maybe it's just FOMO, but it seems like every internet company wants to be in the car business these days, and Japan's DeNA is no exception. The app maker's automotive wing had a special event in Tokyo today (via Reuters) to reveal its first self-driving vehicle, a 12-person bus which will begin operating in Japan's Chiba prefecture at a shopping center next month. DeNA is probably a familiar name for TechCrunch readers, but the company's highlight moment to date might be its selection as Nintendo's partner in bringing its iconic gaming characters and brands to mobile devices. DeNA has had an automotive business for a while now, though, and now it's launching its first production vehicle in partnership with French driverless tech company EasyMile, which makes the EZ10 Robot Shuttle currently being trialled in a number of global projects. The EasyMile EZ10 can hit a max of 40km or around 25 miles per hour, and employs a variety of sensors, cameras, GP and other systems in order to operate. It's not a full-featured city dweller, though; EasyMile's vehicles are designed specifically for use in private environments, where they don't have to contend with the added complexity of human traffic.

In a project that sounds like something from a sci-fi movie, defense specialist BAE Systems plans to chemically'grow' drones in large vats. The U.K.-based defense company is working with the University of Glasgow on the concept, which aims to'grow' Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in large-scale labs using chemistry. The project could help create specially-designed aircraft in weeks, rather than years. At the heart of the initiative is a "Chemputer" machine that would use advanced chemical processes to grow aircraft and some of their electronic systems. Very much a future project, scant details are available on how the Chemputer will work, although BAE systems says the machine could conceivably "grow" the drones from a molecular level.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display