In any scientific arena, good research is able to be replicated. If others can mimic your experiment and get the same results, that bodes well for the validity of the finding. And if others can tweak your study to get better results, that's of even more benefit to the community. These ideas are the driving force behind OpenAI Gym, a new platform for artificial intelligence research. OpenAI, announced earlier this year, is the brainchild of Elon Musk, Y Combinator's Sam Altman, and former Googler Ilya Sutskever.

Creativity is alive and well at Samsung, which is developing several cool devices in its labs, including a home companion robot called Otto. The multi-talented robot can answer questions and double as a part-time security system when needed.

In January, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington DC gave its annual Luddite Award to "a loose coalition of scientists and luminaries who stirred fear and hysteria in 2015 by raising alarms that artificial intelligence (AI) could spell doom for humanity". The winners -- if that is the correct word -- included pioneering inventor Elon Musk and physicist Stephen Hawking.

Google's self-driving car just got a boost from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. SAN FRANCISCO - Federal auto safety and standards regulators should set rules governing self-driving cars and not state agencies that may not have the technological know-how to assess the rapidly evolving technology. That was the message delivered to federal administrators Wednesday by Chris Urmson, the chief architect of Google's seven-year-old autonomous car program. Urmson was one of a variety of auto experts speaking at a Stanford University forum organized by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is soliciting comments as it aims to establish a set of guidelines later this summer for companies developing autonomous cars. The event took place the day after Google announced it was part of the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, a lobbying group of autonomous-car focused companies that also includes Ford, Lyft, Uber and Volvo.

Creating mood sensing technology has become very popular in recent years. There is a wide range of companies trying to detect your emotions from what you write, the tone of your voice, or from the expressions on your face. All of these companies offer their technology online through cloud-based programming interfaces (APIs). As part of my offline emotion sensing hardware (Project Jammin), I have already built early prototypes of facial expression and speech content recognition for emotion detection. In this short article I describe the missing part, a voice tone analyzer.

In current analytics, there is a bias towards using statistical correlations to understand causes. An effective AI system, however, will understand the reasons behind the correlations and can handle uncertainty.

We live in the era of data. Its almost inevitable now that we need to delegate our knowledge and understanding of the world to computers who can model this behaviour on a large scale. So, this is the age of machine learning. With the advent of BIG data, enterprises are sitting at lots of data that is not being utilized effectively. By iteratively exploring data, computers can be made to find hidden patterns in the data, without explicitly programming where to look for it.

A robot assistant lifeguard called EMILY is making waves by helping migrants cross the Mediterranean Sea safely. In the wake of unrest, over 500 refugees have drowned attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Turkey to Greece. Members from the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station's (TEES) Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) and Roboticists Without Borders gathered at the Greek island of Lesvos to assist the local Coast Guard and lifeguard organizations to prevent this from happening in the future. Dr. Robin Murphy, Raytheon Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, aided authorities in Lesvos alongside CRASAR, of which she is an active member. She is working with students to continually improve the lifesaving device, which can carry up to eight people at once.

The world is on the precipice of an artificial intelligence revolution, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says. Mr Wozniak told the Advance Queensland Innovation and Investment Summit in Brisbane on Thursday, via a live feed from Orlando in Florida, machines were closer than ever to emulating the human brain. "I looked at the brain my whole life thinking we would never understand how it's wired, never know what consciousness is, we would never know what intuition is," he said. "And now we're seeing so many signs that are getting so close - we speak to our phones, we can get answers." Mr Wozniak said the artificial intelligence revolution would be separate from, and have just as big an influence on the world, as the digital revolution that proceeded it.

Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, research lab was awarded the ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award for groundbreaking contributions in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Horvitz's work has primarily been focused on exploring the interrelationships between artificial intelligence and fields like decision science, cognitive science and neuroscience. The Newell award is given to a researcher whose work falls within the field of computer science or spans multiple disciplines. Horvitz's coworkers describe his impact as "immeasurable", and describe him as "an epic example of those brilliant researchers who have this huge confidence -- not over-confidence, but just confidence -- to keep pushing forward,". His research is described as delving into the ideas of how artificial intelligence can help to augment human intelligence, focusing on concept such as the principles of bounded rationality, and how computing systems immersed in the real world could make the best decisions in time-critical situations.