The Turing test, the quintessential evaluation designed to determine if something is a computer or a human, may have a fatal flaw, new research suggests. The test currently can't determine if a person is talking to another human being or a robot if the person being interrogated simply chooses to stay silent, new research shows. While it's not news that the Turing test has flaws, the new study highlights just how limited the test is for answering deeper questions about artificial intelligence, said study co-author Kevin Warwick, a computer scientist at Coventry University in England. "As machines are getting more and more intelligent, whether they're actually thinking and whether we need to give them responsibilities are starting to become very serious questions," Warwick told Live Science. "Obviously, the Turing test is not the one which can tease them out." The now-famous Turing test was first described by British computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950 to address questions of when and how to determine if machines are sentient.

We entered the VentureBeat Botathon contest in SF, and after lots of weekend hacking, we won! Our entry is Botender, a bot that helps you order at a restaurant, log what you order to Fitbit for your diet tracking and even pay for your food and drinks. Now Omar Sharif and I are one of 6 international finalists for the Botathon competition, selected from regional hackathons and an online contest. Tomorrow the final choice is made, during the VentureBeat MobileBeat event. Pingpad has Pingbot, a Slack bot that gets smarter every day in it's quest to help teams capture shared knowledge and act on it.

Early this year AI system AlphaGo cracked the ancient Chinese game Go, one of the most complex that ever existed. If there is one thing that fuels the speed of AI development, it's data. In 2011, Benjamin Grosser launched his Interactive Robotic Painting Machine, which paints abstract pictures with oil on canvas and responds to the sounds in its environment. That way Google's AI will be able to learn how creative people work, making itself more creative in the process.

Recently an AI-written novel made it past the first screening round of a Japanese national literary prize. True, the AI still had help from humans and no, it did not win the prize in the end. But what's groundbreaking here, is that AI is starting to display forms of creativity that have the potential to change the face of humankind. Many of us believe that creativity is one of the last beacons of humanity. It's what we believe distances us from animals and robots.

Learning needs to be less like memorization, and more like…Angry Birds. Half of school dropouts name boredom as the number one reason they left. The post is about why the future of education will be about flipping our current model on its head and about how key exponential technologies like AI, VR and gamification are going to drive a revolution in education. In the traditional education system, you start at an "A," and every time you get something wrong, your score gets lower and lower. You start with zero, and every time you come up with something right, your score gets higher and higher. It completely flips the way we currently learn, and it's addictively fun.

TOKYO--Japanese smartphone-game provider DeNA Co. said Thursday it has set up a company with Preferred Networks Inc., becoming the latest major firm to bet on the startup's artificial-intelligence technology for growth. The new joint project may mean Nintendo Co.'s future smartphone games would be powered by the technology, further beefing up the business potential of its popular characters, including Pokémon, for example, which was...

According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report released in 2011, about 820,000 women and men aged 15-24 were newly infected with HIV in developing countries. Over 60% of these were women. Among so many other challenges, developing countries are plagued with serious reproductive health illnesses such as sexually transmitted infections (STIs), unintended pregnancies, and complications from childbirth. A key priority for policymakers, researchers, and health care providers working in developing nations is to emphasize prevention and distribution of information about STIs and other reproductive tract infections (RTIs). This report on Improving Reproductive Health in Developing Countries from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences contains additional information on the topic.

Tools to rapidly and efficiently develop and embed machine learning into applications. Create advanced applications with state-of-the-art algorithms and scalable data structures.

I've looked before at the growing role AI is playing in the development of new medicines, whether it's understanding which compounds to test, or even in the creation of virtual models to test drugs in. At the forefront of this trend is Insilico Medicine, who you may remember I wrote about recently after they'd developed a system that can guess your age accurately just by looking at you. They have certainly been busy and recently published a paper looking at the role of deep learning in predicting the impact drugs might have on the body. The study saw a neural network trained up to predict the therapeutic use of a huge array of drugs. The team measured the differential signaling pathway activation score for a wide range of different pathways to reduce the dimensionality of the data, whilst ensuring that it remained scientifically relevant.

Using artificial intelligence to create smart farms Is the future of farming in the software? Texas TechPulse spoke with Blake about his new startup which got its start in Israel and what it's up to here in Texas. What exactly is Flux all about? Blake Burris: "Flux Farms is about a two year old company, which was started in Israel. We've built a framework technology, which is generic, in a sense, and can be applied to multiple sectors or realms. The first sector we're addressing, is the agricultural sector, and hydroponics. We've built a system that includes both hardware, a cloud platform, and a robust, artificial intelligence back end, which uses machine learning to help both the average Joe grow crops with the yield an expert might get. That might be you or I growing tomatoes on the back patio, or someone growing at scale. For example, we recently visited a possible customer in Lucas, Texas, North of Dallas, who has 8,000 square feet, with the vision to supply Texas restaurants with lettuce, herbs, and other vegetables. We can scale this from your backyard to urban farms, and even to larger, vertical farms in cities around the world."