Sky has finally rolled out voice search, letting people control their TV just by talking to it. Until now, the feature had only been hinted at by a strange, mysterious button on the side of the remote. Now, when that's pressed, people will be able to ask their TV for whatever they want to watch. That doesn't simply mean asking for the name of films and TV shows, though the Sky Q box will handle those. They can also ask for something like the "Liverpool game", categories like "films featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone", or even asking for ratings, such as "Tom Hanks movies rated five stars".

Google has launched the developer preview of the next version of Android, giving us our first glimpse into the future of its mobile software. Currently called Android O – and soon to be named after a sweet treat beginning with the letter O – it follows Nougat, Marshmallow and Lollipop. Google hasn't mentioned any major design changes, with its first Android O reveal instead focusing on the tweaks it has in store for a selection of the operating system's core features. Google wants to improve it by limiting the activity of apps running in the background, and has named three particular areas of focus: implicit broadcasts, background services and location updates. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Continued exponential growth of digital data of images, videos, and speech from sources such as social media and the internet-of-things is driving the need for analytics to make that data understandable and actionable. Data analytics often rely on machine learning (ML) algorithms. Among ML algorithms, deep convolutional neural networks (DNNs) offer state-of-the-art accuracies for important image classification tasks and are becoming widely adopted. At the recent International Symposium on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (ISFPGA), Dr. Eriko Nurvitadhi from Intel Accelerator Architecture Lab (AAL), presented research on Can FPGAs beat GPUs in Accelerating Next-Generation Deep Neural Networks. Their research evaluates emerging DNN algorithms on two generations of Intel FPGAs (Intel Arria10 and Intel Stratix 10) against the latest highest performance NVIDIA Titan X Pascal* Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).

Powered by AI, chatbots create an opportunity for the banking industry to take customer relationships to a new level that was not possible until now – providing anytime, anywhere personalized service. There once was an old saying about'banker's hours,' when referencing a standard 9-5 day with no overtime or weekend work. Not to slight dedicated banking professionals, but historically, many bankers did work in brick and mortar offices, where doors closed promptly at 4:00pm (or earlier) every weekday, with extended weekend work rare. Online tools have allowed customers to perform basic tasks like bill payments, money transfers and checking deposits from wherever they want, whenever they want. Still, customers sometimes need answers and help with services that an app can't handle. They want to talk to someone at their bank, but can't because of banker's hours.

But not all processes follow clear, unchanging rules, and most decisions in the real world do not lead to a single unambiguous answer. Machine Learning systems are probabilistic: tasks are executed and decisions are made on incomplete information and outcomes are assigned probabilities of being correct. Machine learning is suited to problems involving classification (dividing objects into two or more classes), regression (discovering relationships between variables) and clustering (grouping objects by similar characteristics).

Advances in clinical uses of artificial intelligence (AI) could have two profound effects on the global medical workforce. AI, which mimics cognitive functions such as learning and problem-solving, is already making inroads into the NHS. In north London it is piloting use of an app aimed at users of the non-emergency 111 service, while the Royal Free London NHS foundation trust has teamed up with Google's DeepMind AI arm to develop an app aimed at patients with signs of acute kidney injury. The hospital claims the project, which uses information from more than 1.6 million patients a year, could free up more than half a million hours annually spent on paperwork. AI raises the prospect of making affordable healthcare accessible to all.

Open source projects are helping drive artificial intelligence advancements, and we can expect to hear much more about how AI impacts our lives as the technologies mature. Have you considered how AI is changing the world around you already? Let's take a look at our increasingly artificially enhanced universe and consider the bold predictions about our AI-influenced future. A recent story on VentureBeat, "How AI will help us decipher millennials," caught my eye. I confess that I haven't given much thought to artificial intelligence--nor have I had a hard time deciphering millennials--so I was curious to learn more.

DARPA is working on a new machine learning technology that could let a future artificial intelligence grow up, learning from its experiences over the entirety of its unnatural life. Essentially, DARPA wants to turn every interaction the A.I. has into an opportunity to collect data. The Lifetime Learning Machines (L2M) initiative's goal wouldn't be surveillance, though that's certainly a concern, but rather improving artificial intelligence by exposing it to new data and experiences and letting it learn from them -- just like a biological brain. The project's leaders call this a "new computing paradigm" that could supplant classical A.I. coding, in which knowledge and behaviors must all be specified in advance. Though the four-year program to let A.I.s become "responsive and adaptive collaborators" with humans is still just getting started, the machine learning goals for its contributors are clear: to allow A.I.s to learn from incidental experiences.

Venture capital firm Octopus Ventures has raised a £120 million fund to invest in UK technology startups, The Financial Times reports. The London-based investment company, part of UK fund management firm Octopus Group, has reportedly now raised a total of £660 million, fuelled in part by a string of successful UK startup exits. Natural language processing pioneer Evi Technologies, predictive keyboard startup SwiftKey, and AI video startup Magic Pony are all in the Octopus Ventures portfolio, as are companies like LoveFilm and property website Zoopla. "Evi Technologies in Cambridge was sold to Amazon and now powers Alexa, the voice-activated speaker," Alex Macpherson, chief executive of Octopus Ventures, told the FT. "We also backed Swiftkey which went to Microsoft last year [for $250 million; £200 million] and made a seed investment in Magic Pony, which went to Twitter [for $150m; £120 million].

BEIJING – A years-long crime spree by Chinese toilet paper thieves may have reached the end of its roll after park officials in southern Beijing installed facial recognition technology to flush out bathroom bandits. Park managers at the Temple of Heaven, an expanse of imperial landmarks in the capital, spent three years testing ways to foil the toilet looters, including fingerprinting and laser sensors, before they settled on the new technology, which was introduced over the weekend. Elderly square dancers taking their bathroom breaks on Tuesday were greeted by a robotic voice: "Welcome! Please stand in the recognition zone." One by one, they obediently positioned themselves on a yellow square marking and watched their faces pop up on a blinking blue screen mounted to the wall.