The maker of the Roomba robotic vacuum, iRobot, has found itself embroiled in a privacy row after its chief executive suggested it may begin selling floor plans of customers' homes, derived from the movement data of their autonomous servants. "There's an entire ecosystem of things and services that the smart home can deliver once you have a rich map of the home that the user has allowed to be shared," said Colin Angle, iRobot's boss. That possibility has led to a shift in direction from the company technologically. While all of the housecleaning robots in its range are capable of navigating around a room, only the most advanced machines it makes do so by creating a mental map of the space; its dumber bots simply move almost randomly until they're pretty sure they've covered the whole area. Angle told Reuters that iRobot, which made Roomba compatible with Amazon's Alexa voice assistant in March, could reach a deal to sell its maps to one or more of the Big Three – Amazon, Apple and Google's Alphabet – in the next couple of years.

Researchers often call 2017 the year of the conversational computer in China. Leveraging recent advances in voice recognition and natural-language processing, e-commerce giant Alibaba and search giant Baidu have both been developing technology to crack voice-based communication. Now voice-operated products derived from Baidu and Alibaba's technology are coming to the Chinese market. The Tmall Genie, which has Alibaba's voice assistant, AliGenie, built in, is akin to the Amazon Echo. It can place online orders, check the weather, play your favorite music, and control other smart devices in your home through voice commands.

Drones will have to be registered and users forced to take a safety awareness test under new regulations announced by the UK government. Dozens of near-misses with aircraft around airports have stoked fears over the safety of drone use. Under the rules, owners of drones weighing more than 250g – heavier than many available on the high street – will have to register their details and demonstrate that they understand safety and privacy laws that affect their use. The move follows research that showed strikes by drones of more than 400g could critically damage helicopter windscreens, while a bigger drone of about 2kg could critically harm airliner windscreens at higher speeds. Pilots have been calling for a clampdown after a series of near-collisions between drones and passenger jets, particularly on approach or take-off from major airports, including Heathrow.

What do we all have in common? Surprisingly, the answer is menopause. But scientists still haven't quite figured out why this phenomenon exists. After all, if the purpose of evolution is to make sure that we most effectively pass on our genes, then why would women stop reproducing after a certain age? A study published on Thursday in PLOS Computational Biology may offer some insight into the evolution of menopause in humans.

Demis Hassabis knows a thing or two about artificial intelligence: he founded the London-based AI startup DeepMind, which was purchased by Google for $650 million back in 2014. Since then, his company has wiped the floor with humans at the complex game of Go and begun making steps towards crafting more general AIs. But now he's come out and said that be believes the only way for artificial intelligence to realize its true potential is with a dose of inspiration from human intellect. Currently, most AI systems are based on layers of mathematics that are only loosely inspired by the way the human brain works. But different types of machine learning, such as speech recognition or identifying objects in an image, require different mathematical structures, and the resulting algorithms are only able to perform very specific tasks.

Ever eaten a dish you didn't know them name of and wished you had the recipe so you could recreate it at home? Soon you might only need a picture of it. Researchers have devised a machine learning algorithm that looks at photos of food and predicts the recipe that created the dish. Nick Hynes at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues trained the algorithm on one million recipes, each with an illustration of the finished result, from dozens of cooking websites. Given a fresh photo of a dish, the system picked the right recipe 65 per cent of the time.

IBM's Watson unit is receiving heat today in the form of a scathing equity research report from Jefferies' James Kisner. The group believes that IBM's investment into Watson will struggle to return value to shareholders. In recent years, IBM has increasingly leaned on Watson as one of its core growth units -- a unit that sits as a proxy for projecting IBM's future value. In the early days, IBM's competitive advantage was its longstanding relationships with Fortune 500 companies. IBM Watson effectively operates as a consultancy where the company engages in high-value contracts with corporates to implement Watson technology for specific business cases.

Over the last several years, a team of roboticists at the University of Tehran has been working on increasingly large and complex life-size humanoids. For their latest project, however, the Iranian researchers decided to build something smaller--and cuter. Surena Mini is a knee-high robot with a sleek 3D-printed body, articulated limbs, and a round head with two camera-eyes. "The main purpose of this robot is to provide researchers and students with a reliable robotic platform for educational and research applications," Aghil Yousefi-Koma, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Tehran, told IEEE Spectrum. He added that his group also has plans to offer the robot "for helping autistic and deaf children."

Visabot, a Facebook-owned artificial intelligence tech company, has launched a $150 service to help the Facebook Messenger users navigate through the complicated process of applying for a Green Card. "We created our own immigration AI so our success rate grows as the bot learns. What you need to do is answer are you a U.S. citizen other thing you should know and the bot will use this info to generate the whole package for you all you have to do is file it with us immigration services," Visabot COO Andrey Zinoviev announced Tuesday. Read: Immigration Reform 2016: Were Green Cards Sent To Wrong People? The service will let you know -- immediately upon entering your data -- whether you qualify for a Green Card.

The clip comes from researchers at the University of Washington, who developed an algorithm to take audio of someone talking and turn that into a realistic video of someone speaking those words. In the video below, you can see a side-by-side comparison of the original audio--which came from actual Obama remarks--and the generated video. Obama was a natural subject for this kind of experiment because there are so many readily available, high-quality video clips of him speaking. In order to make a photo-realistic mouth texture, researchers had to input many, many examples of Obama speaking--layering that data atop a more basic mouth shape. The researchers used what's called a recurrent neural network to synthesize the mouth shape from the audio.