Google Home owners beware: Burger King is plotting to hijack your smart speakers with its latest advertising campaign. The 15-second TV ad ends with a Burger King employee asking: 'OK Google - what is The Whopper burger?' - a phrase designed to cause the device to reel off facts about the popular patty. Even those without device won't necessarily escape: Burger King president José Cil told Buzzfeed it'could trigger' other devices too, including Android cell phones - leaving many on Twitter unimpressed. Both the Google Home speakers and those cell phones that have the Google app's voice-activated function active are constantly listening for the phrase'OK Google'. That's a signal for the machine to treat whatever is said next as either a command - the speaker can be used to dim a home's lights, for example - or a search query.

FILE - In this June 22, 2016, file photo, a drone aircraft with a payload of simulated blood flies during a ship-to-shore delivery simulation in Lower Township, N.J. With the number of commercial drones expected to soar into the millions in the next few years, it spells an opportunity for budding drone mechanics to make a good living without spending a lot of time on training. A community college in northwestern Minnesota that has been teaching unmanned aircraft maintenance for larger military-type drones is expanding its program to include smaller drone repair.

Yasuo Kuniyoshi is a man with an extraordinary plan. Kuniyoshi, a professor at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, has been attempting to produce an utterly convincing artificial being for the past 30 years. "A robot," he says, "that has developed the real ability to understand correctly what people are saying, and is able to converse and interact with them naturally, just as humans do with each other, based on its own experiences and bodily sensations." I've been thinking about Kuniyoshi's work since seeing the recent Hollywood remake of "Ghost in the Shell." The original anime from 1995 was hugely influential and, together with "Akira" and "Spirited Away," is one of the most well-known Japanese animes in the West.

If you own an Amazon Echo, you probably know its strange secret: The device records a lot of what you say. Deep inside that dark tower, Echo keeps a vast trove of recordings. Your friends' voices are preserved. Anyone who has ever been to your house and said, "Alexa!" On the upside, this amazing technology puts instant information a voice command away.

Astrophysics and cosmology are rich with data. The advent of wide-area digital cameras on large aperture telescopes has led to ever more ambitious surveys of the sky. Data volumes of entire surveys a decade ago can now be acquired in a single night and real-time analysis is often desired. Thus, modern astronomy requires big data know-how, in particular it demands highly efficient machine learning and image analysis algorithms. But scalability is not the only challenge: Astronomy applications touch several current machine learning research questions, such as learning from biased data and dealing with label and measurement noise. We argue that this makes astronomy a great domain for computer science research, as it pushes the boundaries of data analysis. In the following, we will present this exciting application area for data scientists. We will focus on exemplary results, discuss main challenges, and highlight some recent methodological advancements in machine learning and image analysis triggered by astronomical applications.

Computers can now tell you if the profile picture you use on social media sites or your online dating profile is making the right first impression. Scientists have developed an algorithm that uses artificial intelligence to predict what kind of first impression you will make on other people based on your photograph. The technology could prove useful for ensuring your appearance sends the right signal to prospective employers when going for an interview or what message your Facebook profile picture sends about you. The AI showed that Benedict Cumberbatch was a good choice to play Julian Assange in the Fifth Estate (top). Similarly Joseph Gordon Levitt was rated as a good match to play Edward Snowdon in the film Snowden (bottom).

Machine to Machine (M2M) refers to direct communication between devices using any communications channel, including wired and wireless. The M2M market is undergoing a fast transformation as enterprises are increasingly realising the value of connecting geographically dispersed people, devices, sensors and machines to corporate networks. It is for precisely this reason that the Global M2M market is expected to grow to 27 billion devices, generating $1.6 trillion in revenue in 2024. We reached out to some of the top influencers on our list to ask them for their views on M2M. We spoke to Evan Kirstel (#6), Eric Vanderburg (#7), Lisa Briercliffe (#9), Lisa Pattenden (#12), Fabio Moioli (#20), Dana Blouin (#21) Dez Blanchfield (#22), Dr. James Canton (#24), Ronald van Loon (#26) and Ian M Calvert (#27).

Artificial intelligence (AI) causes a mixture of marvel and fear. A machine's ability to perform a human function is certainly fascinating, but what if machines get so good that they displace the need for humans altogether? It's an understandable dread that conjures up dystopian visions, but only if you fail to see the technology's true potential. As AI takes on human qualities, its mission isn't to threaten, but rather to enhance. Through complex learning algorithms, contextual analysis and image recognition, AI does work that humans, prone to distraction and fatigue, cannot match in accuracy or frequency. AI spots trends and patterns way faster than humans with its seemingly infinite capacity to learn, analyze, recognize and recommend.

Some 70 years ago, computer scientist Alan Turing famously set the bar for artificial intelligence: a computer that could convince a human conversation partner that it was a person. On a recent spring afternoon in the Flow Machines laboratory, located on a quiet street in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris, senior researcher Pierre Roy was more concerned with his music-making AI software's ability to create a convincingly catchy song. "So far, from the technical standpoint, no one knows how to do a proper song, to tell a story," he said. Flow Machines, a project of Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Paris that receives funding from the European Research Council, is developing an AI program that can compose compelling, professional-quality music -- an aim shared by similar ventures such as Jukedeck in the UK and Google's Magenta project. Ever since Turing defined his test, popular culture has fixated on the idea of sentient AI, both benign and catastrophically malign.

Deals to AI startups reached a record high last year, from 160 deals in 2012 to 658 in 2016. Although non-US deal share has been increasing over the time period, well over a majority of deals, around 70%, went to startups in the US in the last 5 years. The top 3 states for deals were California (51%), New York (11%), and Massachusetts (9%). Using the CB Insights database, we mapped the most well-funded AI startups in each of the 34 states where there have been equity deals to an AI company in the last five years. The map only includes companies that have not exited and only includes equity financing.