While the rise of AI can bring many benefits to the world, such as high degrees of quality assurance and increased efficiency, it can also carry many risks if it gets into the wrong hands. A new report has warned that if terrorist organisations, corrupt governments, doomsday cults or "psychopaths trying to add their name to history books in any way possible" develop AI to cater to their motives, then it could spell disaster for humanity. A report from Roman V. Yampolskiy of the University of Louisville and independent researcher Federico Pistono highlights the threat that AI could potentially pose to us. They write in their paper published in Arxiv: "A malevolent superintelligence may attempt to abuse and torture humankind with perfect insight into our physiology to maximise amount of physical or emotional pain, perhaps combining it with a simulated model of us to make the process infinitely long."

Elon Musk, along with a bevy of other smart people, have expressed concern over our experiments with artificial intelligence, particularly with the weaponization of sentient AI. So have these guys been watching too much Terminator, or is there a larger existential crisis we should be worried about? Netflix announces'The Little Prince' release with beautifully moving trailer

Though research is a slow moving and rigid process, one study shows that the rate of scientific study has exploded in the last 50 years. According to the paper, humanity's scientific output now doubles every nine years. In specific areas like healthcare, the doubling rate is even faster -- as much as every 3 years currently with an expected increase to every 73 days by the early 2020s. For overwhelmed researchers navigating the growing stack of science literature -- the value isn't in having so much new information, but finding relevant insights when they need them. According to Jacobo Elosua, a co-founder of Iris AI -- a Singularity University portfolio company -- the research process is very often tedious and unfruitful.

One of the biggest challenges encountered when using big data in marketing is knowing where to start, what to explore first, and what are the most informative initial queries to pose. If data science was a dance, then we would know what to do -- follow the choreographer's lead and take our cues from them. Well, this is critical advice in dancing, and great advice for data scientists too. This should always be your first clue (…cue): What insights do you need to derive from your data? New features to provide deeper insights?

This is part of a series on machine intelligence companies. We interviewed Beagle, Mariana, Beyond Verbal, Preteckt, and Eigen Innovations. Machines don't know what it's like to have feelings. Yet for most of us, emotions are the prism through which we view our lives. What seems like a benign request when we're in a good mood can seem like nagging when we're stressed. We tolerate jokes from our loved ones that we'd never suffer from someone we can't stand.

We're delighted to announce the winner of IK Prize 2016, an annual award that celebrates digital creativity in all its forms. This year we challenged digital creatives to use a form of artificial intelligence to explore, investigate or'understand' British art in the Tate collection. Fabrica's winning idea, RECOGNITION, is an A.I. project that will uncover the hidden links between current events and art from the Tate collection. Imagine an intelligent machine searching the never-ending stream of news images on the internet, learning to analyse thousands of photographs in terms of composition, style and content. What if this image-hungry'brain' could learn to understand great artworks too?

Your.MD, a London-based Artificial intelligence (Al)-powered Personal Health Assistant, has launched a new service that enables users to find relevant and trustworthy health services and products called OneStop. Your.MD launched the beta version of its AI Personal Health Assistant in November 2015 on iOS and Android platforms, marking the world's first Personal Health Assistant to offer medical guidance through end-to-end AI, together with Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Your.MD says OneStop is the first one-stop-shop in digital health to allow people to take full control of each stage of their health issues from understanding their symptoms to finding the best treatment via a chatbot on Facebook Messenger or WeChat. The chatbot aims to achieve three things: Finding out what's wrong with you, suggesting the most likely solution and then offering both public and private services which can help. "Your.MD is truly revolutionary and can make a seismic impact on the global healthcare system by providing accessible, trustworthy and instant healthcare to everyone with a mobile phone," said Your.MD's CEO, Matteo Berlucchi, in the announcement.

Say we want to build system to detect dresses in images using a deep convolutional network. What we have is a database of 64x128 pixels images that either fully contain a dress or another object (a tree, the sky, a building, a car…). With that data we train a deep convolutional network and we end up successfully with a high accuracy rate in the test set. The problem comes when trying to detect dresses on arbitrarily large images. As images from cameras are usually far larger than 64x128 pixels, the output of the last convolutional layer will also be larger. Thus, the fully connected layer won't be able to use it as the dimensions will be incompatible.

This week, a lot of attention was given during the kick-off of the annual Google I/O conference to three of this year's key technologies: artificial intelligence, conversational interfaces and virtual reality. The attractive force of Google's technologies was in full display with the opening viewed by more than 1 million users in China alone. Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, kicked it off by demonstrating that Google had not missed out on the shift to mobile and that 50% of all search engine queries were already today made from phones, including 20% through voice recognition in the United States. Already, the results of a mobile study that were unveiled extend beyond a simple list of links to include "cards" used to preview related content (photos, results, artists) without having to exit the search engine. The head of Google went on to highlight his company's progress with respect to artificial intelligence and concrete applications for search engines.

Google plans on opening a research and development center in Novi, Michigan, just outside of Detroit. Or to put it another way: more self-driving cars are heading to Motor City. "Many of our current partners are based here," read a note on the Google page for Google's Self-Driving Car Project, "so having a local facility will help us collaborate more easily and access Michigan's top talent in vehicle development and engineering." Based on the photo above, though, it seems pretty empty at the moment. Google claims Rousch, Bosch, Continental, FRIMO, LG Electronics, Prefix, and RCO among its partners on the self-driving car project.