With the robotics industry rapidly growing, MEPs have warned that rules are needed to'guarantee a standard level of safety and security.' In a resolution voted today, MEPs are asking the EU Commission to enforce regulatory standards for robotics, and have stressed that the key issue lies with self-driving cars. They have suggested that a European agency for robotics and artificial intelligence should be set up, to supply public authorities with technical, ethical and regulatory expertise. They also asked for specific legal status for robots as'electronic persons' in the long run, in order to establish who is liable if they cause damage. MEPs have warned that robots need to be fitted with'kill switches' to prevent a Terminator-style uprising against humans If a robot unlawfully kills someone in the heat of battle, who is liable for the death?

IBM-Machine–Learning-Watson IBM launches machine learning for mainframe computers on the cloud for private companies.

NASA needs help finding space objects, so the government agency teamed up with astronomy site Zooniverse for a new project that will recruit the public to help aid in the search for hidden planets and other solar system objects beyond Neptune. The NASA-funded project, named Backyard Worlds: Find Planet 9, launched on Zooniverse Wednesday. Participants in the project will search through data collected by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and separate actual celestial objects like brown dwarfs and low-mass stars from image artifacts that can sometimes appear to be real objects, referred to as false positive. WISE has pumped out hundreds of thousands of images but the computer system was unable to determine actual space object from image errors. "Spiky images of stars, especially variable stars, are everywhere. Worse, are the optical ghosts, blurry blobs of light that have been scattered around inside WISE's instruments. These can hop back and forth, or even change color. These artifacts can easily fool our image processing software," Zooniverse said in a statement.

For today's knowledge workers, heavy workloads and slow productivity growth is a major challenge. Some products and services emphasize processes and systems such as continuous improvement and removing wasteful steps. Others emphasize the human aspects of productivity -- a manager training a junior employee to take over a task, for example. AI assistants offer another approach to the workplace productivity challenge, but are they ready for "prime time" use in the enterprise? As with user interface and design innovation, consumer AI assistants have made important early contributions that are finding their way into enterprise solutions.

When it comes to robot-human relations, the conversation typically centers on the welfare of the sentient. Science fiction paints us as petrified by our own creations; fears of a bot planet have influenced everything from Asimov's "Laws of Robotics" to HAL 9000's homicidal impulses to Skynet's global genocide. These human-centric anxieties are understandable. However, as our assorted bots and bits gain skills and personalities, should they be afforded some form of protection from us? It's a question people are starting to seriously ponder. Last month, the European Parliament's legal affairs committee issued a report on the use and creation of robots and artificial intelligence (AI).

Automation has become an increasingly disruptive force in the labor market. Self-driving cars threaten the job security of millions of American truck drivers. At banks, automated tellers are increasingly common. And at wealth management firms, robo -advisers are replacing humans. "Any job that is routine or monotonous runs the risk of being automated away," Yisong Yue, an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, told Business Insider.

Fan Hui is speaking to a chatty audience at the 2016 European Go Congress in St. Petersburg, Russia, gushing over a game of Go played by one of his mentors. Hui's enthusiasm is infectious--the room's chatter subsides as he pulls up slides of the complex Chinese game, whose players battle to dominate a 19 19 board with black and white tiles called stones. Hui's mentor, AlphaGo, has studied strategies built over the game's 4,000-year history, and has played thousands of practice matches. But a training regiment that took Hui years to perfect, AlphaGo did in about four weeks. The game Hui showed to the Saint Petersburg audience is one that the machine played against itself, and to Hui, is an example of the beauty of AlphaGo's strategic mind Even the smartest humans miss patterns that computers see instantly. Problems like file-compression, translation, and custom drug fabrication have millions of variables and data points whose limits exceed human understanding dozens of times over.

Bono and The Edge are excited by Nuritas' potential for impact and profitability. Try to imagine walking into your local grocery store ten years from now. You head towards the back, as you've done countless times before, to snatch a handful of your favorite cereal bars. Only this time, the packaging looks a bit different. You notice that there are two new versions, each with a label below the brand name.

NEW YORK--Are you ready to turn your car, washing machine or running shoes into a point of sale? Visa is teaming up with IBM Watson to bring secure payment experiences to all sorts of connected products and services, embracing the ecosystem techies inelegantly refer to as the Internet of Things. IBM and Visa announced the collaboration Thursday at an event in Munich, Germany, where IBM is opening up a $200 million Watson Internet of Things headquarters. Via the partnership, the companies say they can support payments and commerce on virtually any of the 20 billion connected devices that Gartner estimates to be part of the global economy by 2020. "What we've seen over the last 12 months is serious companies committing serious business to IoT," says Brett Greenstein, vice president for IBM Watson IoT. Watson is IBM's cognitive computing platform, which leverages natural language processing and machine learning to learn from and extract patterns and meaning from mounds of unstructured data, from health care to sports.

IBM Machine Learning leverages parts of the Watson supercomputer to be used with the IBM z System Mainframe. The tech giant's initiative aims to train and deploy analytics models in the private cloud. According to Tech Republic, IBM plans to bring soon some of the core machine learning technology from IBM Watson to the private cloud and mainframes, as the company announced on Wednesday, Feb. 15. The tech giant has called its new cognitive platform IBM Machine Learning. The upcoming machine learning platform will be launched first on the z System mainframe.