Lee Sedol had seen all the tricks. He knew all the moves. As one of the world's best and most experienced players of the complex board game Go, it was difficult to surprise him. But halfway through his first match against AlphaGo, the artificially intelligent player developed by Google DeepMind, Lee was already flabbergasted. AlphaGo's moves throughout the competition, which it won earlier this month, four games to one, weren't just notable for their effectiveness.

If the lip-reading technology had been used during the 2006 World Cup Final, when Zinedine Zidane was given a red card for headbutting Marco Materazzi, the outcome of the game could have been different. Closer analysis of the event revealed that Zidane responded to Materazzi insulting his family. "If we'd had live lip-reading technology they probably would have both been red carded," said Dr Helen Bear, a researcher at the University of East Anglia in Norwich who has developed a lip-reading artificial intelligence program. The new technology can lip-read better than humans could help solve crimes by analysing speech in CCTV footage. The visual speech recognition technology can decipher human conversation in videos when there isn't clear audio available, as is often the case with surveillance footage.

America will have 2.5 million drones by the end of this year and the number will increase to seven million by 2020, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said in a report release Thursday. While the number of hobby drones is expected to reach from 1.9 million in 2016 to 4.3 million by 2020, commercial drones will see a four times rise from 600,000 to 2.7 million in 4 years. "Unmanned aircraft systems will be the most dynamic growth sector within aviation," the agency said in the report. But it also added that future security and regulatory measures by the U.S. government will be deciding factor on the way civilian drone market grows. In December, the FAA brought in set of rules which stated that registration of small unmanned aircraft weighing more than 0.55 pounds and less than 55 pounds, including payloads such as on-board cameras, was necessary.

Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington. But in 2016, what if the stage is YouTube, and your daughter (or son) is demanding to be put on it, playing Minecraft? That's the dilemma facing a growing number of parents, whose children aren't just watching YouTube Minecraft channels like The Diamond Minecart, Stampy and CaptainSparklez – they want to follow in their blocky footsteps. "I want to make Minecraft videos and I want you to put them on YouTube," was how my eight-year-old son put it recently. "I've been practising talking while I play, and I'm nearly as good as Stampy now."

LONDON/BRUSSELS – Facial recognition software, scanners that detect weapons and cameras that spot nervous people are some of the technologies that could be used more widely to secure public places, but some would require greater acceptance of surveillance in Europe. The deadly attacks in Brussels on Tuesday highlighted the vulnerability of Europe's airports and transport systems. European Union officials, grappling with the conundrum of how to increase security while retaining the openness of society, have convened meetings to discuss aviation and land transport security. Their goal is to be able to monitor passengers unobtrusively while minimizing additional hold ups that create crowds, which can themselves become new targets. Experts say technology cannot solve the problem on its own, but techniques such as facial recognition able to pick out known suspects can help if Europeans decide they want more surveillance.

Walking around my office on a recent morning, a female voice on my iPhone narrated the objects I passed. "Brick," "wall," "telephone," she said matter-of-factly. The voice paused when I came upon a bike hung on a wall-mounted rack, then intoned, "bicycle." The voice is part of a free image-recognition app called Aipoly that's trying to make it easier for those with vision impairments to recognize their surroundings. To use it, you point the phone's rear camera at whatever you want it to identify, and Aipoly will speak what it sees (or, at least, what it thinks it sees) and show the object's name on the phone's display.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The seven Iranian hackers charged with attacking dozens of banks and a small dam near New York City may never see the inside of a courtroom, but U.S. officials hope their "name and shame" tactic sends a message to foreign governments that support such attacks. Indictments announced Thursday by the Justice Department portrayed Tehran-linked hackers reaching into the U.S. infrastructure and disrupting its financial system. It was the first time the FBI attributed a breach of a U.S. computer system that controls critical infrastructure to a hacker linked to a foreign government. None of the individuals is in American custody and it's unclear if they'll ever be arrested or whether criminal indictments in absentia effectively combat such crimes. Publicly naming and shaming such crimes linked to foreign governments is a tactic focused on by the Justice Department since 2012.

A Microsoft "chatbot" designed to converse like a teenage girl has been taken offline after its artificial intelligence software was coaxed into firing off hateful, racist comments on Twitter. Technology giant Microsoft this week launched its experiment with the Tay AI (artificial intelligence) bot, which was given the personality of a teenager and was designed to learn from conversing with real people. However, the plan was sent awry by an ill-willed campaign to teach her negative things, Microsoft said. "It is as much a social and cultural experiment, as it is technical," a Microsoft spokesperson said. "Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways."

It all happened so quickly! First, Microsoft reveals an amazing new bot that learns from you, the public! Then, in less than 48 hours, the bot turns incredibly racist. What does this say about Microsoft, and about AI? Well, I have some insight into that, because in May of 2014, the exact same thing happened to me with a bot I made. My bot wasn't a tweeter, instead it was a Turing test like game called Bot Or Not? where players were either paired with one another, or both paired with a bot, and players had to guess if they were talking with a their live partner or the bot.

OMG! Did you hear about the artificial intelligence program that Microsoft designed to chat like a teenage girl? It was totally yanked offline in less than a day, after it began spouting racist, sexist and otherwise offensive remarks. Microsoft said it was all the fault of some really mean people, who launched a "coordinated effort" to make the chatbot known as Tay "respond in inappropriate ways." To which one artificial intelligence expert responded: Duh! Well, he didn't really say that.