Facebook has been ordered to pay $500 million in damages in a lawsuit claiming the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset was based on stolen technology. A Texas jury awarded the sum to video game publisher ZeniMax Media Inc after determining Oculus executives violated a ZeniMax non-disclosure agreement in the early days of building the Oculus headset. However, the jury decided Oculus was not guilty of misappropriating trade secrets. Oculus told the site they would be appealing the verdict. 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.

Artificial intelligence (AI) research has a long history, but even before computers existed Hollywood has been implanting a fear of intelligent machines into the public psyche, with more than sixty films to date depicting stereotypical threats to humankind. But only in the last few years has AI featured as a regular news story, invariably illustrated by images of suit-wearing robots seated around a board table. As intelligent machines have become mainstream, all kinds of media outlets serve up stories - some of them post-truth - about how robots will replace humans across a wide range of sectors: thanks to their superior speed and intelligence many current jobs will become obsolete. It will happen fast - within the next generation, according to those seeking to grab our attention, leaving humans to find alternative employment, if they can. As soon as 2021, robots will eliminate 6% of all US jobs, according to market research company Forrester while the World Economic Forum (WEF) predicts a loss of 7 million jobs within four years.

Apoorv Agarwal says his software TextIQ's job is to spot a needle in a haystack – but a costly one. Make a mistake in discovery during litigation, and a company can face sanctions of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, he says. Like other startups, TextIQ's raised funding to solve that problem. Unlike others, TextIQ is profitable. And for its first outside funding, it's taking only about $3 million from top investor Floodgate and a group of veteran legal counsels in a seed round its founders say could be the only money it ever needs.

Melville, NY (PRWEB) January 17, 2017 – Nastel Technologies, a global provider of enterprise-grade operations analytics and application performance monitoring (APM) solutions, announced the next-generation version of its flagship software platform, AutoPilot Insight 2.0. According to Charley Rich, VP Product Management "The new release fuses predictive anomaly and machine learning capabilities, business transaction tracking that spans corporate firewalls, raw information handling and analytics speed, and the flexibility to operate across dynamic IT environments--from mobile to mainframe. It provides the broad array of capabilities needed by developers, IT admins, and business analysts for enterprise-grade operations intelligence and APM." Rich said building a solution that fully addresses today's client requirements demanded two years of ground-up product re-engineering. "Customers universally remarked that they needed to find data outliers faster and sense problem conditions before they actually affect users. They also wanted more powerful end-to-end transaction tracking capabilities, with the ability to tie transaction performance to business outcomes."

You might think it would be easy for political appointees to rally against something as unpopular as the monthly fees that cable and satellite TV services charge for their converter boxes -- particularly when federal law requires them to do something about it. Sadly, the opposite has been true for the Federal Communications Commission, which was instructed by Congress in 1996 to develop rules that would end the effective monopoly that pay-TV providers hold over set-top boxes. Years of work produced a klugey and poorly supported "CableCard" system to allow devices to perform the functions of a cable set-top, but it certainly hasn't produced the explosion of choices that lawmakers had hoped to create. Good luck finding a TV set with a CableCard slot. In the latest turn of the screw, new Chairman Ajit Pai put the commission's most recent (and highly controversial) set-top box proposal in limbo, which in this case appears to be a way station on the road to eternal damnation. That proposal would have required pay-TV providers to make their services available through a standardized app that could run on a variety of major consumer-electronics devices.

Although artificial intelligence (AI) has experienced a number of "springs" and "winters" in its roughly 60-year history, it is safe to expect the current AI spring to be both lasting and fertile. Applications that seemed like science fiction a decade ago are becoming science fact at a pace that has surprised even many experts. The stage for the current AI revival was set in 2011 with the televised triumph of the IBM Watson computer system over former Jeopardy! This watershed moment has been followed rapid-fire by a sequence of striking breakthroughs, many involving the machine learning technique known as deep learning. Computer algorithms now beat humans at games of skill, master video games with no prior instruction, 3D-print original paintings in the style of Rembrandt, grade student papers, cook meals, vacuum floors, and drive cars.1 All of this has created considerable uncertainty about our future relationship with machines, the prospect of technological unemployment, and even the very fate of humanity. Regarding the latter topic, Elon Musk has described AI "our biggest existential threat." Stephen Hawking warned that "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." In his widely discussed book Superintelligence, the philosopher Nick Bostrom discusses the possibility of a kind of technological "singularity" at which point the general cognitive abilities of computers exceed those of humans.2 Discussions of these issues are often muddied by the tacit assumption that, because computers outperform humans at various circumscribed tasks, they will soon be able to "outthink" us more generally. Continual rapid growth in computing power and AI breakthroughs notwithstanding, this premise is far from obvious.

Lily Robotics, which promised a autonomous flying camera, is shutting down operations. Lily Robotics, a failed drone startup that closed last month amid a consumer-protection civil suit from the San Francisco District Attorney's office, may now be the subject of a criminal investigation. Earlier this month, law enforcement agents raided the company's San Francisco headquarters for a potential criminal investigation against the company, according to one source who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak openly about the matter. When contacted by FORBES about the visit from law enforcement individuals, Henry Bradlow, Lily Robotic's cofounder and chief technology officer, said he could not comment "on rumors or speculation" and hung up the phone. A spokesperson for the San Francisco District Attorney's office said that he could not confirm or deny if a raid had occurred.

Big Data: The growing amounts and kinds of data generated by workers--in office programs, cloud apps, chat systems, shared workspaces--means an ever-increasing challenge for legal and compliance officers. To them, all of this work product is potential evidence. Bigger cost: Of the more than $200B spent on litigation across the US annually, 70% is spent on discovery, and 70% of that discovery spend goes to document review. So, anything that can accelerate or reduce review means substantial savings for corporate clients. Irrelevant content: No one likes reviewing irrelevant data.

AI is a powerful force and a reality for everybody. It improves our healthcare, shopping and travel experiences and is starting to make inroads into the workplace and government. With that, comes a responsibility to make sure AI is a force for good, and that its tremendous power does not create a new chasm in our society. Many areas of public policy, from education and the economic safety net, to defense, environmental preservation, and criminal justice, will see new opportunities and new challenges driven by the continued progress of AI. Government must continue to build its capacity to understand and adapt to these changes.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, run by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, has purchased Canadian artificial intelligence start-up Meta, which uses A.I. to read and comprehend scientific papers and then provide insights to researchers, as part of its mission to eradicate disease around the world. Meta capabilities will be unified in a tool made available for free to scientists. Meta co-founder and chief executive Sam Molyneux said in a statement, "We are very excited about what lies ahead." The start-up now joins an organization started by Zuckerberg and his wife, which in September, pledged $3 billion over the next decade in an effort to end all disease, pouring some of the Facebook founder's fortune into innovative research to meet the goal. "This is a big goal," said Zuckerberg at a San Francisco event where he announced the effort of the philanthropic organization established by Mark and his wife in 2015.