Tech columnist Jennifer Jolly shows the best robotic sidekicks. If you grew up watching The Jetsons, Star Wars, or even WALL-E, at some point, you likely dreamed of having a robot sidekick. Seriously -- how great would it be to have a Rosie of your own, making dinner, folding laundry and basically making your every household chore her cheerful command? No such luck for us grown-ups (yet), but the latest robotic toys are more advanced than ever, and the cool factor extends far beyond mere child's play. Here are the best I've reviewed to date.

Apple CEO Tim Cook hinted that Japan has a big part to play in the company's ongoing development of AI, as he continued his travels around the country via bullet train on Monday. Speaking to Nikkei Asian Review, Cook revealed that Apple's new advanced R&D center in Yokohama, currently scheduled for completion in December, would focus on "deep engineering" and would be "very different" from the R&D base Apple is building in China, without giving away specifics. Photo via Tim Cook However, Cook intimated that one of its main focuses would be on developing Apple's artificial intelligence services – which recently drew some criticism in the press – and emphasized that the company wanted to leverage specifically Japanese expertise in the field. "AI is horizontal in nature, running across all products, and is used in ways that most people don't even think about," said Cook. "We want the AI to increase your battery life, to recommend music to Apple Music subscribers... [to] help you remember where you parked your car."Japan's robotics heritage is legendary, coming on the back of years of successfully building industrial robots, however the state of its AI research remains ambiguous, given its relative lack of investment in deep learning from large amounts of analyzed data, which U.S. companies like Facebook and Google are already heavily researching. To improve on this front, Japan has just opened a Center for Advanced Integrated Intelligence Research in Tokyo (RIKEN), which specifically aims to develop systems of AI that will be able to solve problems using "Big Data".

You can star alongside Leo when cinema enters its'karaoke' phase The blockbuster era will come to a close in about 2042 with the colossal failure of Jedi Transformers V Jurassic Avengers 12: Revenge Of The Minions, an expensive crossover epic that bankrupts all the Hollywood studios simultaneously. By that time, the idea of "going to the movies" will have evolved anyway. Films will no longer involve two hours sitting in a cinema, predicted futurologist Faith Popcorn in The Hollywood Reporter: "They'll be gameified and will unfold in real time all around you. You pay for a time slot, tune in your technology, and literally become one with the action. Endings and events will be changed as you go; smells, tastes, sensations will all be experienced live. Casts will be comprised of your own avatars; you will be the star."

In the movie Transcendence, Johnny Depp plays Dr Will Caster, a researcher in artificial intelligence at Berkeley trying to build a sentient computer. Stuart Russell is Will Caster's real life equivalent. He works on artificial intelligence at the University of California at Berkeley, and is co-author of the definitive textbook on AI. He has also been very vocal about the risks of research in AI succeeding. Earlier this year, Google's DeepMind taught a computer program to play a wide variety of Atari video games at a superhuman level in a matter of hours.

OpenAI wants to build the technology that will finally create a computer that can converse in a way that is indistinguishable humans. The nonprofit, backed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, brought on NVIDIA's supercomputer DGX-1, which has 170 teraflops of computing power, to help hone machine learning systems to create algorithms that can comprehend language and teach robots to respond appropriately. That should solve one of the biggest hindrances to making AI systems that can learn complex interactions: the slowness of current computers. "The speed of our computers is in some sense the lifeblood of deep learning," OpenAI research director Ilya Sutskever in an NVIDIA video. The goal of this project is to allow a robot to become smart enough to not only recognize speech, but to also use the data it gathers to formulate appropriate responses on its own--and to do that, computers need to digest data more quickly than they are currently capable of. The DGX-1, which is optimized for an arm of machine learning called deep learning, can feed copious amounts of natural language data into OpenAI's network much quicker than ever before.

Hi Reddit Machine Learning Community, I dont know if this question suits this subreddit so apologies for my ignorance. I am planning to get my feet wet in the deep learning and eventually using amazon/azure for data processing purposes. But till then I want to experiment with initial Kaggle data-sets like Titanic, MNIST etc. and I am planning to buy a gaming laptop for the same. I am not in a position to buy a desktop as I dont have the space for it ( currently sharing room with roommates) and I want my workstation to be mobile. Can anyone provide me any suggestions opinions?

The Internet is in transformation. Initially, we started with the Web and digitized content. The market then moved to tracking and controlling the digitized world with for example General Packet Radio Service ( GPRS). Machine-to-Machine ( M2M) introduces a completely different connectivity model and application use case. And now we embark on Machine Learning where machines have the capability to make decisions with either supervised or unsupervised controls.

ThinkTV is proud to announce the formation of an independent laboratory to carry out cutting-edge research into the performance of TV advertising, in partnership with leading international media academic Professor Karen Nelson-Field (pictured above) and Media Intelligence Co. The laboratory's forthcoming two-year research program will help advertisers and media agencies get the best out of TV by providing robust evidence and greater clarity about how multiplatform TV advertising delivers business results. The ThinkTV Smart Lab is directed by Karen Nelson-Field, Professor of Media Innovation at the University of Adelaide and CEO of research joint venture, Media Intelligence Co. (MIC). The purpose-built facility will examine TV's impact on brand and advertiser performance and will use artificial intelligence technologies to remove human error and bias. It is funded by ThinkTV but remains independent to ensure research rigour and credibility.

I am a 3rd year CS student and I am trying to create an application which will auto-group photos of the same person like google photos does. I understand that I can use methods such as k-means, but that would be too slow. Is there a deep learning alternative I can use?. I have alright knowledge of basic neural networks and cnns having done the cs231n course. But all of the methods they discuss are supervised ones...can someone point me in the right direction?

The AI system, called FlowMachines, works by first analyzing a database of songs, and then following a particular musical style to create similar compositions. The final result does have a human touch, however. In the case of both songs above, French composer Benoît Carré arranged the songs and wrote the lyrics.