Abhishek Singh graduated from NYU's ITP program and clearly he learned a lot about the future of computing. During his tenure there he quickly fell in love with hardware startups and, with a little grit and programming work, he created Peeqo, a robot that responds only in GIFs. That's right: this is a robot that replies only in animated video clips. "I've always been fascinated by robots and I built this as part of my thesis at ITP. One of the reasons I wanted to build this bot was because I feel a lot of the conversation on social robotics today centers around their inability to express emotion or to be relatable," he said.

Major AI researchers and textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents", where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success. John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1955, defines it as "The science and engineering of making intelligent machines". AI research is highly technical and specialized, deeply divided into subfields that often fail to communicate with each other. Some of the division is due to social and cultural factors: subfields have grown up around particular institutions and the work of individual researchers. AI research is also divided by several technical issues.

For those of you mourning the end of'Planet Earth II', there's good news – a new animal documentary is set to hit our screens this week. Spy in the Wild is the BBC's latest documentary, in which cameras are concealed within lifelike robots, tracking how animals interact with them in the wild. In the first episode, a group of langur monkeys mistakes a robot as one of its own, and even goes into a state of grief when the robot is mistakenly dropped from a height. At first sight they look exactly like the real thing – cute, cuddly and in some cases terrifying creatures of the wild. It's only when you take a closer look that you realise the stars of BBC1's brilliant new wildlife series Spy In The Wild are nothing of the sort.

Tim Cook has said that the "best" of the iPhone is still yet to come, as Apple celebrates its 10th birthday. The first phone was introduced on 9 January 2007 at a Macworld event in San Francisco, by Steve Jobs. The late Apple co-founder described the pocket computer as three products in one – "a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communications device". Now, 10 years later, the company is celebrating the anniversary by promising that the upcoming phones – presumably including the much-rumoured iPhone 8 – will bring updates better than those seen in the phones since 2007. 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.

From winning Jeopardy in 2011 to helping write a sad song last year, IBM's Watson cognitive computing platform is all over popular culture. Press releases fly out about Watson producing a movie trailer, powering a Macy's shopping app, even controlling lights on an internet-connected dress -- along with more serious applications like working on cancer treatments. It seems, from IBM's hype, that Watson can do everything. But Bernie Meyerson, IBM's chief innovation officer, wants to dial back the hype in some ways, calling Watson "just the first step on a very, very long road." Watson can be helpful in a lot of industries, such as medicine, which are awash in data, but it can't replace people, he says.

Silicon Valley is so male-dominated that there's a name for the young, brash men who populate the region's many start-ups and high-tech firms: "brogrammers". Brogrammers are not your standard, introverted computer programmers. They are a more recent stereotype: the macho, beer swilling players who went to top schools and are often hired by their friends or former fraternity brothers in the technology industry. "If there's a group of a hundred candidates and they're from multiple different backgrounds, different races, different genders, we noticed across the board there was a certain type of programmer that would still move forward in interviews," says Iba Masood, the 27-year-old chief executive and co-founder of Tara.ai, an artificial intelligence project manager that aims to change the world by combating bias. "The brogrammer," says Ms Masood when asked what type of candidate she is referring to. "It's a type that's known in the Valley."

Krafcik said the company felt the system would work better if it was developed specifically for self-driving instead of using off-the-shelf parts. He said Waymo was also able to significantly lower the cost of the system.

Streaming songs, ordering pizza, and booking cabs are no-brainers for Alexa, the voice-activated assistant installed on Amazon Echo devices. But Alexa also unfortunately appears to enjoy engaging in a little unintentional retail therapy. Recently, a six-year-old girl in Texas was able to order a $170 dollhouse and four-pounds worth of sugar cookies through Amazon's Echo Dot. But at least in that case, the kindergartner was actually talking directly to Alexa. On the morning of Jan. 5, California television channel CW-6 was reporting on the little girl's purchases when it accidentally caused a slew of other Alexas to also attempt shopping sprees.

The impact of fake news on the recent election has focused public attention on this multi-tentacled and growing problem. Vast swaths of the population fall prey to such misinformation, while others struggle to discern unbiased truth from the morass of lies and distortions that surrounds us. Experts recommend that we to follow basic principles of information hygiene to separate fake from real, including checking sources, looking for bad grammar and typos, and seeking out corroborating information. And top of the list: never believe anything you read on . However, none of these techniques is particularly effective.

Those amazing, lifelike robots, reports Jefferson Graham on #TalkingTech. LAS VEGAS --The one, coolest thing from this year's 2017 CES is an easy pick -- those amazing robots. We saw robots to make your morning coffee, pour candy, fold your clothes, turn on and off your lights, project a movie on the wall, handle your daily chores and most impressively, look just like a human, or in this case, legendary scientist Albert Einstein, with facial expressions and movement. Why did robots dominate CES? You can thank the popularity of Amazon's Alexa for showcasing the technology of a voice-activated personal assistant.