If you love to dance, but fear that your partner might step on your toes, then a new virtual, computer-controlled dancer might be for you. And this virtual dancer may even teach you some new moves when you tango with it, a new project finds. The computer-generated dancer -- dubbed virtual artificial intelligence -- is the brainchild of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The virtual dancer "watches" a person dancing, and then improvises moves of its own based on its earlier dancing experiences, the researchers said. Once the human dancer responds to the virtual dancer's moves, the virtual dancer responds again, making an impromptu dance with its deft artificial intelligence.

"Here" is a funny word. So says Scott Hassan, the media-shy Silicon Valley billionaire who once set out to build the first fully autonomous humanoid robot, and ended up hawking what looks like a flatscreen atop two long legs with wheels. If Hassan has his way, this seemingly simple device--called a Beam--will close the loop between cyberspace and meat-space. The Beam was designed as a video conferencing tool, allowing instant, face-to-face communication--kind of like FaceTime or Skype, except you can drive the screen on legs around the room remotely, with a keyboard. It could one day become much more.

In one week from now, Google I/O 2016 will have come and gone, and we could very well be revelling in new services, features and if we're lucky, new products. Considering we are only a few days away, there have been very few leaks out of Mountain View, hopefully, that isn't a reflection on the quality of what Google has in store for us all. Our Editor in Chief Dan Tyson will be on the ground again this year, bringing us both hands on coverage as well as seeking out the Australian perspective on everything announced at I/O. No I/O would be complete without just a little speculation on what is coming, however, before we get to that it is important to remember that at its heart I/O is a developer conference, it is intended to let Google inform developers of how to utilise Google's service new and existing, and let developers get up close and personal with Googlers and their knowledge. Now let's get down to guessing speculating on what Google may have in store.

Machine learning is not a new term, but in the last few years it has been brought to the spotlight due to technological advances and bets made by major players like Google and Facebook. We have to go back to 1959, and see Arthur Samuel define it for the first time as the "Field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed", but since that it has evolved. Classification: For when you want the algorithm to discriminate and categorize classes on the data available. For example we want it to select from a set of images, the ones who have a computer in it. Regression: In this case it gives us a correlation of outcomes, based on the past experience. In a simple example, if a team always looses when it's raining, the algorithm can show that correlation and the coach can see how can he solve that problem.

A couple of us here built a topic-based group texting app and thought it'd be fun to add a chatbot to find restaurants, where to get coffee, etc. We trained it on a lot of movie scripts and connected it to a bunch of APIs. Love for you guys to test it out and give us some feedback. Once you are in the app, the chatbot is under the "Channelbot" channel. Love to hear areas of improvement from you all, so we can figure out how to further improve it.

Qualcomm, Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM) is bringing neural networks to its Snapdragon 820 chips. The chipmaker has announced that it will be shipping out software development kits later in 2016 giving its chips some new smart features. Qualcomm is making use of its 820 system on a chip's "heterogeneous compute capabilities" with its Qualcomm Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine built atop of the company's Zeroth Machine Intelligence Platform. Developers can use the SDK to turn Qualcomm's chip into a deep learning machine on which to develop and compile neural network models. The potential applications for portable deep learning in mobile devices are inexhaustible.

Deep learning users can now access pre-configured NVIDIA DIGITS Titan-X GPU instance starting at 49 cents per hour on Nimbix! Data Scientists and Deep learning users can now try the single-click solution on Cloud Service Provider Nimbix to launch an instance configured to run NVIDIA DIGITS on Titan-X GPUs at as low as 0.49/hour, the most affordable high performance GPUs compared to anywhere in the cloud, powered by Bitfusion Boost's Software Defined Supercompute technology. The NVIDIA Deep Learning GPU Training System (DIGITS) puts the power of deep learning in the hands of data scientists and researchers. Best of all, DIGITS is a complete system so you don't have to write any code. You can train neural network models, including pre-built AlexNet and GoogleNet models.

Conversations about basic income, a government-funded salary given to every citizen, used to take place in the dingy offices of extremist left-wing politicians, or in the campus dorm rooms of idealistic students determined to fix the problems of the previous generation. The conversation was about social responsibility. It wasn't an economic case, it was a moral one. A sharp uptake in technology designed to automate jobs and replace human workers is bringing new voices to this old debate. Today's society could be disastrously affected by artificial intelligence and growing automation, and scientists and technologists are looking for ways to stop that damage before it happens.

Virtual assistants are coming of age. Viv, a new virtual assistant with advanced natural language processing skills that allow her to understand complex commands, is set to disrupt the customer experience. What does it mean for the enterprise? In this week's Searchlight, Site Editor Fran Sales details the new AI-powered assistant and explores the potential impact it will have on businesses and IT departments. Having a clear-cut IT strategy is key establishing a competitive advantage over any competition.

There are a lot of major problems today with tangible, real-world consequences. A short list might include terrorism, U.S.-Russian relations, climate change and biodiversity loss, income inequality, health care, childhood poverty, and the homegrown threat of authoritarian populism, most notably associated with the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party, Donald Trump. Yet if you've been paying attention to the news for the past several years, you've almost certainly seen articles from a wide range of news outlets about the looming danger of artificial general intelligence, or "AGI." For example, Stephen Hawking has repeatedly expressed that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," and Elon Musk -- of Tesla and SpaceX fame -- has described the creation of superintelligence as "summoning the demon." Furthermore, the Oxford philosopher and director of the Future of Humanity Institute, Nick Bostrom, published a New York Times best-selling book in 2014 called Superintelligence, in which he suggests that the "default outcome" of building a superintelligent machine will be "doom." Should we really be worried about a takeover by killer computers hell-bent on the total destruction of Homo sapiens?