Over the years, a world full of supermarkets and shopping malls has desensitized our relationship with the environment and each other. We no longer know where our food or clothes come from, and the cashier will only make eye contact to take our payment. By contrast, when shopping online, it seems that almost every website knows all of our preferences in a personalized experience. FiveStars is a loyalty and shopping analytics platform for small brick-and-mortar retailers that aims to restore the balance. FiveStars has logged more than 35 million visits from 10 million consumers who have used the loyalty app through over 10,000 merchants.

Professor Stephen Hawking says he believes pollution and human "stupidity" remain the biggest threats to mankind, while also expressing his concerns over the use of artificial intelligence in warfare. The world's leading theoretical physicist argued "we have certainly not become less greedy or less stupid" in our treatment of the environment over the past decade, during an interview on Larry King Now, which is hosted on Ora TV. Professor Hawking said: "Six years ago, I was warning about pollution and overcrowding, they have gotten worse since then. The population has grown by half a billion since our last interview, with no end in sight. "At this rate, it will be eleven billion by 2100.

If you're old enough to have had an AOL Instant Messenger account, then you may remember Jill020306, a curious teenager who kept getting creepy phone calls she couldn't resist answering. As part of the marketing campaign for the 2006 horror flick When A Stranger Calls, the ad agency Universal McCann built a chatbot that would play the part of Jill Johnson in an AOL Instant Messenger conversation. What's old is new again and today Sequel, "the chatbot platform that enables creators and brands to build conversational personas for entertainment and media," has launched an experience to help market Now You See Me 2. Things have changed, technologically and otherwise, in the past ten years. Sequel's bot focuses on Kik and Facebook Messenger, not AOL. Besides the platform changing, the bigger question worth answering is, has the technology powering chatbots improved to a point where they might offer something more than a mildly amusing piece of marketing campaign?

The fatal crash of a Model S that was in autopilot when it collided with a truck in Florida is prompting a preliminary evaluation of the feature by the National Highway Transportation Safety Board.

Sequencing is a task for children that aims to improve understanding of the temporal occurrence in a sequence of events, so that they sort various images (sometimes with captions) into a coherent story. Researchers from Virginia Tech and TTI Chicago have proposed the task of machine-learning sequencing – given a jumbled set of aligned image-caption pairs that belong to a story, the task is that the computer needs to sort them in a way that they form a consistent story. They have used stories from the Sequential Image Narrative Dataset where a set of 5 aligned image-caption pairs together form a coherent story, and given a jumbled input story, they have trained machine-learning models to sort them. They have proposed a task of visual story sequencing and implemented two approaches to solve the task. The first one is based on individual story elements to predict the position, and the other one is based on the pairwise story elements to predict the relative order of the story elements.

Watching the AI machine AlphaGo defeat the world Go champion Lee Se-dol, one might have felt a disturbed or even sinister force at work. What can we do to coexist with such a potentially powerful AI? After the shock of AlphaGo's victory, responses about the situation are divided. One says that Korea should focus more on developing artificial intelligence. The other says that we should support and reinforce tasks that only humans can do such as creative problem solving and education.

Artificial intelligence that can understand and answer any work-related question it is asked has been made available in the UK for the first time. The computer software, called Starmind, uses machine learning to understand queries, then source answers from previous staff conversations on a subject or track down experts within the company who are able to help. Its creators refer to it as'brain technology', adding its aim is to become a central knowledge bank within any company, an instant database of information that can be accessed by anyone. Artificial intelligence software which understands and answers work-related questions has been made available in the UK. Starmind co-founder Pascal Kaufmann said of the technology: 'Thousands of human brains connected can outsmart any machine today.

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The first paper raising the concern over AI safety came out in 1994. Only in the last couple of years have we seen a concerted interest in making sure that AI and robots cannot intentionally or unintentionally harm individuals or themselves. This is due to a number of public statements of concern from Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Nick Bostrom. But it is a sentiment expressed by many people who are seeing some amazing advances play out in the public press, such as AI systems driving cars, playing Atari at human-like skill levels, and publicly beating humans in the games of Jeopardy! Scientists have already started conducting research in "AI Safety".

ALPHA, whose destiny was once just to help train fighter pilots in simulated exercises, has proved to be so good that the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is investigating whether the bot could provide the AI blueprint for combat drones in the future, potentially flying missions alongside human pilots. "ALPHA is an incredibly difficult opponent to face," its developer Nick Earnest, CEO of Psibernetix told Digital Trends. "Even flying against other pilots when ALPHA has severe handicaps to a number of its systems -- including speed, turning, missile capability and sensors -- it is able to win," Earnest said. "There is additional work to be done to both increase ALPHA's capabilities and improve its model fidelity -- but these results represent a significant breakthrough," said Earnest, University of Cincinnati graduate said. ALPHA was created using a Genetic Fuzzy Tree (GFT) system that uses genetic algorithms to train independent and interconnected systems.