Scientists and engineers led by Duke University neuroscientist Miguel A. Nicolelis report that a group of spinal-cord-injury patients who trained to walk using a brain computer interface (BCI) in combination with an Occulus Rift virtual reality device and with a robotic exoskeleton have regained the ability to voluntarily move their leg muscles and to feel touch and pain in their paralyzed limbs. The study, the results of 12 months of training, is the first long-term BCI experiment to show significant recovery from such severe injuries, the researchers say. The researchers reported their results today in the journal Scientific Reports. A non-invasive electroencephelogram-based brain computer interface was central to the therapies. During the virtual reality excercises, patients were told to imagine walking through a virtual scene.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your baby-loving Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. We got a teaser about the Omnicopter during Raff D'Andrea's most recent TED Talk, but this dedicated video shows it off much better: Like all the coolest robots, the things it can do look like CGI, right? On July 27, 2016, Michigan-based Vayu, Inc., in collaboration with the Stony Brook University Global Health Institute completed the first ever series of long-range, fully autonomous drone delivery flights with blood and stool samples, setting records in the process.

Hello my AI enthusiasts, I heard a lot about Deep learning, machine learning,... in the news. I already have some programming skills (mostly Java, Python tho) and I guess I am not a complete newb to tech and the interwebs. Anyway, you all know that there is one problem with all the information on the Internet: There is too much of them. And that's why I ask you. Is there a guide / tutorial to machine learning?

Plenty of people still like to read their comics on paper, but increasingly, phones and tablets are the devices of choice for keeping up with the Justice League. Last year, Google introduced a new reading experience for comics in its Play Books store for Android that makes it easier to follow along with the story. Today, the company is launching yet another update to the comics reading experience -- this time with a focus on making the speech bubbles in comics more readable on small devices. As Google's Head of Product for Play Books Greg Hartrell told me, the team looked at the feedback it got from the last update. While readers liked the new reading experience, they complained that it was still too hard to read the text on a small screen.

Just a few short years ago, artificial intelligence was seen as nothing more than a villain in sci-fi movies. This revolutionary technology was used to insist that innovating too fast can lead to a future of robot overlords and murderous machines. From Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey to Skynet in Terminator, artificial intelligence was in need of a good public relations person to change it's image. Fortunately, the tech community has been happy to oblige and AI technology has taken off like a self-landing rocket. According to data from CB Insights, investments in artificial intelligence have been through the roof in recent years. While investments hovered around 700 million in 2013, they have reached astronomical levels at nearly 2.4 billion in just a few short years.

Look no further than Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), SoftBank's acquisition of ARM (SoftBank hopes to be a big player in AI), and now a venture-backed startup rolling out a family of "Deep Learning" computers. That startup is Wave Computing, based in Campbell, Calif. The six-year-old company came out of stealth mode Thursday (July 21), revealing its design of a massively parallel dataflow processing architecture called the Wave Dataflow Processing Unit (DPU) for deep learning. Derek Meyer, Wave Computing CEO, told EE Times, "In order to accelerate deep learning, the world needs a new computing architecture." Traditional computer architectures are designed for control flow-oriented applications.

Curious to know what an Australian soldier fighting in WWI had for brekkie? Now you can ask him yourself, along with anything else that comes to mind. The Wizeline bots team has partnered News Corp Australia to launch the AnzacLive chatbot, an innovative way to share history with a modern audience. The chatbot was created to commemorate Anzac Day, which recognizes the anniversary of the first major military action fought by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. in WWI -- namely the historic battles of Fromelles and Pozieres in July 1916. How did our bots team create a cross-century AMA? Journals from one of the soldiers, Archie Barwick, have been powered by technology.

MedyMatch Technology Ltd., announced today that it has been ranked in the list of "100 Most Promising BigData Solution Providers" by CIOReview. "The companies selected for our 100 Most Promising BigData Solution Providers 2016 list are an elite group of companies whose products and solutions are changing their respective industries," said Jeevan George, Managing Editor of CIOReview. "We are proud to feature MedyMatch Technology in this edition for its effort in helping organizations to easily and quickly adopt BigData analytics as a core part of their business and accelerate conversion of data into valuable business insights." "It is an honor to be recognized by CIOReview for MedyMatch's achievements in cognitive analytics, artificial intelligence and medical imaging," said Robert Mehler, coFounder & COO. "It is a testament to the accomplishments and capability of our product development team in conjunction with our medical big data clinical partnerships," adds Mehler.

As the pioneer in artificial intelligence field, Baidu chose the Inspur NF5568M4 heterogeneous supercomputing server in its unmanned auto road condition model training. Artificial intelligence has advanced through the years and voice recognition, intelligent hardware, and driverless cars are all technologies that influence our lives. Behind artificial intelligence technology is a neural network that is built from deep learning -- mimicking mechanisms of the human brain when interpreting data. In order to meet all the latest deep learning requirements, a high-performance CPU GPU co-processing acceleration server is growing to become the essential foundation for artificial intelligence hardware.

The artificial intelligence and voice recognition space has been growing rapidly. According to a Gartner report, by 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human. This is pretty much likely, as we are already teaching our machines to interpret data into logical solutions. Apps running on artificial intelligence should make a user's life easy, but what goes into building such apps? In a #Bitesize interview with us, Xavier Amatriain, VP of engineering at Quora, explained the key to successful machine learning in developing products.