Apple has revealed a 29 armed robot that can rip apart an iPhone in 11 seconds for recycling. It is hoped the machine will help recycle silver, tungsten and other metals from the handsets. The system started to operate at full capacity last month and can take apart one iPhone 6 every 11 seconds to recover aluminum, copper, tin, tungsten, cobalt, gold and silver parts, according to Apple. The system started to operate at full capacity last month and can take apart one iPhone 6 every 11 seconds to recover aluminum, copper, tin, tungsten, cobalt, gold and silver parts, according to Apple. It has already been installed near Apple's HQ in Cupertino, and it plans to build a second in Europe.

What are the most interesting things Facebook is doing in ML research? The Applied ML team I am a part of is Facebook's applied research arm. We work on core ML, on computer vision, on computational photography and on language technologies. We work very closely with Facebook AI Research (FAIR) who is pushing the state-of-the-art on these areas, and we are complementary in that we focus more heavily on applications. I would like to highlight a couple of recent pieces of research I find very exciting.

The ubiquity of using technology for technology's sake to resolve problems that don't even exist is well documented and the cause of lots of frustration among both consumers and businesses. Thankfully this naive behavior is being replaced with a new refreshing outlook that concentrates on how high-tech computing or automation can deliver real value or make a difference to our lives. Rather than jumping headfirst into solution mode, it increasingly feels that our digital maturity has helped us realize that we need to understand a particular problem fully before even thinking about moving forward in implementing a fix. Recently we had seen clear evidence of this when health workers approached technical experts for help from Google's London-based company DeepMind. The significant challenge faced by hospitals was detecting and communicating problems with patients quickly and efficiently.

Those who work in professions from warehouse staff to hotel concierges may soon count a robot among their colleagues. While Amazon has pioneered the use of robots in its fulfillment centers, its robots are still largely separated from human workers (see "Inside Amazon"). The next generation of workplace bots will work in much closer proximity to regular employees. Some will replace workers entirely, but most will simply take on the more mundane tasks of a human's job. Clearpath Robotics, a company based in Ontario, Canada, launched a robotic platform designed to take on the work done by forklift truck drivers in warehouses and factories.

"I wish I could touch you," Theodore says, laying in bed. Until she speaks up, tentatively. "How would you touch me?" It's a famously poignant scene from the movie Her, as the character Theodore is about to make vocal love to an artificial intelligence living in his ear. But according to half a dozen experts I interviewed, ranging from industrial designer Gadi Amit to the usability guru Don Norman, in-ear assistants aren't science fiction. In fact, a notable pile of discreet, wireless earbuds enabling just this idea are coming to market now. Sony recently released its first in-ear assistant, the Xperia Ear. Intel showed off a similar proof-of-concept last year. The talking, bio-monitoring Bragi Dash will be reaching early Kickstarters soon, while fellow startup Here has raised 17 million to compete in the smart earbud space.

The Department of Defense announced in early February, in an address to the Economic Club of Washington by Defense Scretary Ashton Carter, that its Strategic Capabilities Office was innovating "new roles and game-changing capabilities to confound potential enemies." The Washington Post's Dan Lamothe wrote an exclusive piece on the SCO, a hitherto unknown agency within the DoD, on March 8. In that piece, Lamothe explained that the future of war is now- and the future is the SCO's artificial intelligence. The SCO's drone program, Perdix, originated at MIT in 2010- 2011. They fit easily in the hand and are surprisingly light-weight.

Robots learn socially accepted behavior by reading and understanding children's books, particularly stories about chivalry. Researchers developed a technology called "Quixote" that can teach robots how to align their goals with proper human behavior in social settings. The increasing growth of artificial intelligence has come with fear that these robots could be a threat to humanity. To lessen this anxiety, a team of researchers developed a method that will train AI how to behave in social settings. The new technology is called "Quixote" and it teaches robots to read children's stories, understand acceptable social behavior in societies and learn standard event sequences.

In the artificial intelligence market, IPsoft and IBM lead the field when it comes to the breadth of solutions they can offer, according to a comparison of providers conducted by PA Consulting Group.

When a person's intelligence is tested, there are exams. When artificial intelligence is tested, there are games. But what happens when computer programs beat humans at all of those games? This is the question AI experts must ask after a Google-developed program called AlphaGo defeated a world champion Go player in four out of five matches in a series that concluded Tuesday. Long a yardstick for advances in AI, the era of board-game testing has come to an end, said Murray Campbell, an IBM research scientist who was part of the team that developed Deep Blue, the first computer program to beat a world chess champion.

Google's AlphaGo computer program has won a third and decisive encounter with a top-ranked player of the Chinese board game Go in a victory marking significant developments in artificial intelligence. Lee Sedol, who is the world's second best player of the strategy game, lost three games in a row in Seoul this week, with the latest AlphaGo victory on Saturday handing Google the best-of-five match. "I've never played a game where I felt this amount of pressure, and I wasn't able to overcome this pressure," Lee said at a post-game press conference. Go has simple rules, but is highly intuitive and complex in practice. Mastering it has been an exceptionally difficult task for even the world's best IT designers.