Artificial intelligence developed by a group of Australian research teams has replicated a complex experiment which won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001. The intelligent machine learned how to run a Bose-Einstein condensation – isolating an extremely cold gas inside a beam of laser light – in under an hour, something the team "didn't expect". Results have been published in the Scientific Reports journal. The algorithm has also been uploaded to GitHub for other researchers working on "quantum experiments". "A simple computer program would have taken longer than the age of the universe to run through all the combinations and work this out," said Paul Wigley, co-lead researcher of the study and professor at the School of Physics and Engineering at the Australian National University.

Law firms are embracing artificial intelligence (AI) in a bid to improve efficiency. Developed in conjunction with tech start-up RAVN, BLP's'contract robot' can complete legal work which would take a team of paralegals and associates months to do within seconds. It is currently assisting the firm's real estate team. Called LONald, the robot extracts data from Land Registry documents and enters it into a spreadsheet in the same way staff would do. It cross-checks data points to remove duplicates and then uses the spreadsheet to send queries out.

I've been skim-reading articles in The Economist, The Sunday Times and The Evening Standard lately about the coming wave of robotics and automation. Those articles are all the same. They talk vaguely about how robots will replace lots of white collar workers within ten years. And they skim over the question of how the technology works. Ten years is a nice time scale for a prediction: far enough out that you can make amazing claims, close enough that they seem vaguely urgent.

IBM researchers have just revealed a new storage memory breakthrough that has the potential to speed up machine learning and access to the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as mobile phone apps and cloud storage. For the first time, scientists have demonstrated reliably storing three bits of data per cell using a new memory technology known as phase-change memory (PCM). While memory types span from DRAM to hard disk drives to flash, over the past few years, PCM has become quite popular in the industry as well, due to its combination of read/write speed, endurance, non-volatility and density. The experimental multi-bit PCM chip used by IBM scientists is connected to a standard integrated circuit board. For example, unlike DRAM, PCM doesn't lose data when powered off, and it can endure at least 10 million write cycles, while an average flash USB stick tops out at 3,000 write cycles.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Google is expected to dive deeper into virtual reality and artificial intelligence Wednesday during an annual conference that serves as a launching pad for its latest products and innovations. Although Google keeps its plans under wraps until the big event, the conference agenda makes it clear that virtual reality and artificial intelligence, or "machine learning," will be among the focal points. That has spurred speculation that Google is getting ready to release a virtual-reality device to compete with Facebook's new Oculus Rift headset, as well as the Samsung's Gear VR and the Vive from HTC and Valve. Reporters and bloggers from around the world will attend, ensuring that whatever the company unveils will also be featured in stories, pictures and video delivered to a vast audience of consumers. The three-day showcase also attracts thousands of computer programmers, giving Google an opportunity to convince them why they should design applications and other services that work with its gadgets and an array of software that includes the Chrome Web browser and Android operating system for mobile devices.

At this year's Google I/O developer's conference, the trends of the moment like artificial intelligence, chat bots and virtual reality could be poised to take center stage. The two-day annual event, which begins Wednesday for this year, is Google's biggest showcase and an opportunity for the company to interface with developers as they work together to shape new technology -- and how it can be used by the public. While Google isn't revealing its playbook yet, recent announcements from its competitors have set expectations. "Facebook came out and launched a couple rudimentary bots, Microsoft released an entire developer's kit," Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy told ABC News. "We are really at another crossroads here, which is: Does Google come up with something different or do they join the bot party?"

Google is expected to dive deeper into virtual reality and artificial intelligence Wednesday during an annual conference that serves as a launching pad for its latest products and innovations. Although Google keeps its plans under wraps until the big event, the conference agenda makes it clear that virtual reality and artificial intelligence, or "machine learning," will be among the focal points. That has spurred speculation that Google is getting ready to release a virtual-reality device to compete with Facebook's new Oculus Rift headset, as well as the Samsung's Gear VR and the Vive from HTC and Valve. Reporters and bloggers from around the world will attend, ensuring that whatever the company unveils will also be featured in stories, pictures and video delivered to a vast audience of consumers. The three-day showcase also attracts thousands of computer programmers, giving Google an opportunity to convince them why they should design applications and other services that work with its gadgets and an array of software that includes the Chrome Web browser and Android operating system for mobile devices.

I understand basic neural networks (input layer, hidden layers, output layer) and gradient descent learning. However I keep hearing about news talking about neural networks painting and making jazz music. As I understand a neural network, you feed it the input data (i.e. a picture, music, ...) and it gives you some kind of classification on the result. But by reading those results it looks as if they were using the neural network to generate new results based on a training dataset. Because of that, I'm thinking the kind of neural networks they're referring to is essentially different from the ones I've studied, so I'd like to ask: What are the differences between classic neural networks and the ones used to run these experiments? What makes them fundamentally different so that they are able to generate results similar to its input?

Google is expected to dive deeper into virtual reality and artificial intelligence Wednesday during an annual conference that serves as a launching pad for its latest products and innovations. Although Google keeps its plans under wraps until the big event, the conference agenda makes it clear that virtual reality and artificial intelligence, or "machine learning," will be among the focal points. That has spurred speculation that Google is getting ready to release a virtual-reality device to compete with Facebook's new Oculus Rift headset, as well as the Samsung's Gear VR and the Vive from HTC and Valve. Reporters and bloggers from around the world will attend, ensuring that whatever the company unveils will also be featured in stories, pictures and video delivered to a vast audience of consumers. The three-day showcase also attracts thousands of computer programmers, giving Google an opportunity to convince them why they should design applications and other services that work with its gadgets and an array of software that includes the Chrome Web browser and Android operating system for mobile devices.

I will be in London, UK, at the Centre for Central Banking Studies, invited as a keynote speaker for a major conference.