Shortly after being purchased by Apple, two of Siri's founders left the company to begin creating yet another AI assistant. It's called Viv, and The Washington Post reports that it'll be unveiled to the world on Monday. Viv is essentially meant to be Siri, but good. It's an AI assistant that you speak to, but the difference here is that Viv is supposed to be able to handle complex requests and actually carry them out. The idea is that you could ask Viv to book you dinner and a movie, and it would just go ahead and do it.

Viv is planned as an open system -- more like the original Siri prior to being purchased by Apple in 2010 -- and currently features links to apps and services like Uber, FTD, SeatGuru and GrubHub. The example in the article describes ordering a pizza from Domino's without so much as making a phone call or opening an app. Viv can understand everything necessary like selecting toppings or picking a pizza place on its own, or as directed by natural conversation. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and other tech giants are already trying to integrate AI into our daily lives, but Viv's plan is to bypass app stores, device limitations or a messenger window. According to the Post, Google and Facebook have already tried to acquire it, and if its debut during TechCrunch Disrupt next week is everything promised, there will probably be other attempts soon.

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.

This column is a little cheerful, slightly analytical, both confident and tentative and just a tiny bit angry. At least that's what IBM's Watson thinks. Last week, IBM revealed that its Jeopardy-winning supercomputer has a new capability. It's called Watson Tone Analyzer. You can use it like spell check, except instead of checking your spelling, it checks the "tone" of your writing.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Recently a Quebec arts foundation required the Francophone rap group Dead Obies to give back an 18,000 grant they'd been awarded to record their newest album. A word count determined that the group had stirred too much English into their distinctive multilingual lyrics, falling short of the rule that 70 percent of the content be in French. Dough to get I got more shows to rip Dead-O on the road again, c'est mon tour de get Sous le spotlight, viens donc voir le dopest set We just gettin' started et pis t'es captivated Looking at me now, thinking: «How'd he made it?» Dead Obies is used to catching flak for their language mixing. In 2014, they were excoriated by several French-language journalists for their mongrel lyrics. Christian Rioux, writing for Le Devoir, suggested that such language practices were "suicidal" and would likely result in the formation of a "mediocre creole" incomprehensible to speakers of proper French or English.

From a remote farmhouse to a shopping mall and even a bar, films are full of suggestions of where to hide out in the event of a zombie apocalypse. But researchers have developed an apocalyptic simulator that suggests the best thing to do is literally run for the hills - if you live in the US at least. Other advice from scientists-turned zombie experts, includes keeping silent and even mimicking zombie behaviour should you run into one of the fictional reanimated corpses with a taste for human flesh. Use the simulator below to start a zombie apocalyse. Physicists Alexander Alemi, Matthew Bierbaum, Christopher Myers and James Sethna of Cornell University, created a zombie simulator based on techniques used in in epidemiology – the study of how disease spreads – to work out how the apocalypse might play out in the US.

When Tor.com published Daniel H. Wilson's short story "The Nostalgist" in 2009, the author wasn't yet a leading voice on robotics in fiction. Sure, the Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. had won a Rave Award from WIRED in 2006 for his book How To Survive A Robot Uprising, but his bestselling novel Robopocalypse was still a few years off. So when filmmaker Giacomo Cimini wanted to adapt Wilson's story into a film, it wasn't a big ask. After Wilson's novel hit big, though--with Stephen Spielberg and Drew Goddard tapped to direct and write the movie adaptation--the writer had to take more time to think about it. "I was just this Italian director living in London who wanted to adapt one of his short stories," says Cimini.

Think of the gear you can't live without: The smartphone you constantly check. The camera that goes with you on every vacation. The TV that serves as a portal to binge-watching and -gaming. Each owes its influence to one model that changed the course of technology for good. Some of these, like Sony's Walkman, were the first of their kind. Others, such as the iPod, propelled an existing idea into the mainstream. Some were unsuccessful commercially, but influential nonetheless. And a few represent exciting but unproven new concepts (looking at you Oculus Rift). Rather than rank technologies--writing, electricity, and so on--we chose to rank gadgets, the devices by with consumers let the future creep into their present. The list--which is ordered by influence--was assembled and deliberated on at (extreme) length by TIME's technology and business editors, writers and reporters.

Kim Kardashian West probably spoke for far more of her fellow Met Gala attendees on Monday than would care to admit it when she synopsized the look she was going for to an E! Entertainment reporter as, "Blingy, sexy robot." The theme of this year's gala, and the soon-to-open exhibition it's celebrating, is Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology, and Kardashian West rose to the occasion with a body-hugging Balmain gown, silver in color and intricate of design. Husband Kanye also busted out the Balmain – in the form of a bedazzled-to-encrusted denim jacket worn with a pair of jeans with a gaping hole in the left knee. Others enlisting in the robot chic Balmain army for the evening included Jourdan Dunn, Cindy Crawford and Met Gala first-timer Kylie Jenner. Zayn Malik was one of the few men to do the robot thing, opting for a custom black Versace suit with molded metal arms that could have been borrowed from a suit of armor but for the Swarovski crystal and Versace Medusa head details. And while we're not sure who made the geometric silver patchwork and mirror-covered pantsuit beauty entrepreneur Julie Macklowe wore, it definitely gets our vote for most enthusiastic embrace of the cyber chic aesthetic (and an honorable mention for touching off a flurry of social media posts that paired her picture with C-3PO's).