Computers have got much better at translation, voice recognition and speech synthesis, says Lane Greene. But they still don't understand the meaning of language I'm afraid I can't do that." With chilling calm, HAL 9000, the on-board computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey", refuses to open the doors to Dave Bowman, an astronaut who had ventured outside the ship. HAL's decision to turn on his human companion reflected a wave of fear about intelligent computers. When the film came out in 1968, computers that could have proper conversations with humans seemed nearly as far away as manned flight to Jupiter. Since then, humankind has progressed quite a lot farther with building machines that it can talk to, and that can respond with something resembling natural speech. Even so, communication remains difficult. If "2001" had been made to reflect the state of today's language technology, the conversation might have gone something like this: "Open the pod bay doors, Hal." "I'm sorry, Dave.

It doesn't quite have the cachet of something like the Winston Cup (yet), but the Drone Racing League says its 2017 campaign will be called the Allianz World Championship Series. In another move cribbed from traditional motorsports, the drone pilots will have sponsors too. This season is airing on TV again with 12 hour long episodes that will come to ESPN/ESPN2. Those identical DRL Racer 2 drones will fly through 3D courses at more than 90mph, with the league promising bigger courses and faster drones this season. The action kicks off in June, but for now, there's a preview trailer to feast your eyes on.

Joab Rosenberg is the former deputy head analyst for the Israeli government and CEO of Epistema. Nature magazine announced in late January that a computer designed by Google's DeepMind defeated a human master in the ancient Chinese board game, "Go." This impressive achievement once again raised the expectations for a predicted future in which computers will have artificial intelligence, with major media outlets worldwide touting this anticipated future. One of the major questions raised in response to DeepMind's achievement is what are the outer limits, if any, of intelligent machines? In November of last year, Dr. Kira Radinsky, a computer scientist and "machine learning" expert, argued in the Israeli newspaper "Ha'aretz" that computers will be able to accurately predict the outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

We have seen a fast growing interest in current activities around AI startups and research in the last couple of months. Headlines like "2016 was the year AI came of age", "AI was everywhere in 2016", and "The Great A.I. Awakening" were all over the media in the ending weeks of 2016 and we are curious about what 2017 will bring. I found particularly interesting that the current applications, future potential, and possible risks even attracted interest beyond the tech community through TV shows like Westworld, coverage on traditional media and even Obama's farewell address. Sadly, for many of us tech enthusiasts here in Europe, we sometimes feel like there is way less movement on this side of the Atlantic than in the Silicon Valley. However, with major acquisitions like DeepMind, Magic Pony Technology, Movidius, Vision Factory, and Dark Blue Labs, Europe has shown that it is actually leading the way in AI and machine learning.

Netflix instant streaming is both one of the best and the worst products to be developed in the recent years. Best, because its helped make sitting at home for eight hours on a Saturday, binge watching the latest "water cooler TV" almost feel productive. The worst, because Netflix isn't smart enough (yet) to understand my mood and my general indecisiveness with "easy" decisions, I suffer from analysis paralysis when deciding what to watch. Should I watch something silly? Let me spend 20 minutes searching through a seemingly endless selection of mediocre movies I have never heard of eventually to settle on an episode of Arrested Development I've already seen 14 times.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. You may recognize some of the robots featured in this 10-minute overview of DLR's Robotics and Mechatronics Center: Rollin' Justin, Toro, LBR iiwa. But the one that caught our attention (starting at 5:40) is the super sleek ROboMObil vehicle.

Software Engineer / Research Scientist - Machine Learning Team New York Posted Jan 20, 2017 - Requisition No. 56583 Apply Now News stories move the financial markets. In addition to being the second largest producer of news, Bloomberg ingests more than 70,000 different news feeds to help our clients stay in the know. This data would be unmanageable without our help. Bloomberg's Machine Learning Group - a group of specialists, researchers and software engineers who have a passion for solving complex problems. On the Pattern Recognition team, we are building machine learning models for predicting the impact of news stories on company prices, unique recommendation systems and various other problems involving text and time series.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a man of the future, he was onto the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) way before everyone else. Once again, something that seemed possible only in science-fiction films or a very distant future, turned out to become reality. That is, the Artificial Intelligence part, not the killer- robot-with-laser-gun part, thank god. Slowly but surely though, awareness about AI in HR is increasing, and there has been a lot of speculation about its future potential and applications. It's about time we had a closer look at Artificial Intelligence ourselves.

The UK's biggest internet service providers (ISPs) recently started sending "educational messages" to customers recorded using their web connection to share pirated content. One such alert sent to an anonymous customer by Sky has been published by TorrentFreak, and it reveals a few more details about how the Get It Right from a Genuine Site campaign works. 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 ...

In the battle for the 21st century workplace, computers are winning. A January 2017 report from the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that roughly half of today's work activities could be automated by 2055, give or take 20 years. Bottom line is robots want our jobs. And no one is going to build a wall around them or tariff them out of existence. In a way this is nothing new.