Robots will need to teach themselves. The common, and recurring, view of the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence research is that sentient and intelligent machines are just on the horizon. Machines understand verbal commands, distinguish pictures, drive cars and play games better than we do. How much longer can it be before they walk among us? The new White House report on artificial intelligence takes an appropriately skeptical view of that dream.

A country's dexterity with artificial intelligence technology might be the next strong source of national pride and international power. Knowing it would lay the foundation for the future of medicine, IBM captured the world's imagination in 2011 with Watson, a supercomputer that not only won Jeopardy!, but beat trivia superstar Ken Jennings in the process. The novel cognitive computing technology was quickly adapted to "read" the thousands of medical research papers published weekly in order to diagnose cancer patients more accurately than human doctors seemingly could. It's a banner technology for IBM, a company that remains no slouch in its 105 years of operation Now five years after Watson's debut, Japanese researchers at Kyoto University and Fujitsu are collaborating to build their own computing technology that's fairly characterized as a response to Watson. Skipping the game shows and going straight to medical applications, the Japanese system aims to close the gap in understanding how our genes determine our health by accounting for a patient's genetic code in its computer-generated diagnoses.

Hinton was only technically an intern at Google. He arrived that summer for what he describes as a trial run -- he was hesitant to leave Toronto, where he has lived with his family for most of the past quarter-century -- and the short-term stint didn't have any other obvious job title. But in the manner of an intern, Hinton still seems chuffed to find himself quite where he is. On a recent morning at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, the first thing he did was enumerate the riches of one of many well-stocked "micro-kitchens." His job is to rove among one of the company's most highly valued teams, seeding the work underway with ideas.

Infosys has invested about $2 million in UNSILO, a Danish artificial intelligence startup focused on advanced text analysis. India's second largest software services firm said it has made the investment from its Innovation Fund. UNSILO is Infosys Innovation Fund's first investment in Europe, according to a stock exchange filing. "UNSILO have built an impressive semantic search engine with best-in-class text intelligence, which powers a range of advanced business processes. We will partner with UNSILO to bring their artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to our global clients. They join and expanding portfolio of innovative young companies from around the world that Infosys works with to help enterprises drive their digital transformation," said Ritika Suri, executive vice president & global head of corporate development & ventures, Infosys.

Machines are capable of understanding speech, recognizing faces and driving cars safely, making recent technological advancements seem impressively powerful. But if the field of artificial intelligence is going to make the transformative leap into building human-like machines, it'll first have to master the way babies learn. "Relatively recently in AI there's been a shift from thinking about designing systems that can do the sort of things that adults can do, to realizing if you want to have systems that are as flexible and powerful and do the kinds of things that adults do, you need to have systems that can learn the way babies and children do," developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, told International Business Times. "If you compare what computers can do now to what they could do 10 years ago, they've certainly made a lot of progress, but if you compare them to what a four year old can do, there's still a pretty enormous gap." Babies and children construct theories about the world around them using the same approach scientists use to construct scientific theories.

ARMONK, N.Y. - 18 Nov 2016: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced several cloud data services and features on Bluemix designed to help organizations accelerate the migration of their data to the cloud and more easily generate business insights. Now available on Bluemix, IBM Decision Optimization, Bluemix Lift and dashDB for Transactions can help organizations overcome this challenge and make more informed business decisions by enabling them to more easily aggregate, ingest and analyze expanding workloads. "Cloud is the platform that enables cognitive intelligence," said John Murphy, Vice President, IBM Watson Data Platform. "We're continuing to grow our catalog of cloud data services on Bluemix so that we can help developers and data scientists better manage and more quickly interpret data for business innovation." IBM Decision Optimization on Cloud (including the CPLEX engines) is now in beta on Bluemix. It can ingest large amounts of data including predictions, master and transactional data, business goals, and business rules to prioritize and rank business decisions such as plans and schedules.

The fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning are moving so quickly that any notion of ethics is lagging decades behind, or left to works of science fiction. This might explain a new study out of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which says computers can tell whether you will be a criminal based on nothing more than your facial features. The bankrupt attempt to infer moral qualities from physiology was a popular pursuit for millennia, particularly among those who wanted to justify the supremacy of one racial group over another. But phrenology, which involved studying the cranium to determine someone's character and intelligence, was debunked around the time of the Industrial Revolution, and few outside of the pseudo-scientific fringe would still claim that the shape of your mouth or size of your eyelids might predict whether you'll become a rapist or thief. Not so in the modern age of Artificial Intelligence, apparently: In a paper titled "Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images," two Shanghai Jiao Tong University researchers say they fed "facial images of 1,856 real persons" into computers and found "some discriminating structural features for predicting criminality, such as lip curvature, eye inner corner distance, and the so-called nose-mouth angle."

Founded by two of the creators of Siri, Apple's signature digital assistant, Viv Labs said its technology represents a "new paradigm" for how people interact with computers. The Viv AI uses something called dynamic program generation that creates software on the fly based on the intent of the request given to it. In a briefing reported yesterday by Reuters, Samsung said the addition of Viv's technology to the Galaxy S8 will enable a wide variety of new services for its customers. The more services that developers integrate with Viv, the smarter the AI will become, according to Samsung Mobile Business CTO Injong Rhee. "Even if Samsung doesn't do anything on its own, the more services that get attached the smarter this agent will get, learn more new services and provide them to end-users with ease," Rhee told Reuters.

In the world of science fiction, robots given artificial intelligence often play a menacing role capable of killing human beings either on their own volition or at the behest of their programmers. Think movies like "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Blade Runner" or even "I, Robot," for instance. However, even with all of the recent advances leading to an increasing daily reliance on artificial intelligence, the prospect of technology running the show and outpacing humans may still be a long ways off, a Google executive said this week. "There is a lot that machine learning doesn't do that humans can do really, really well," Diane Greene, Google's senior vice president of cloud businesses operations, said Tuesday at the Code Enterprise conference in San Francisco. "Nobody expected some of the advances we are seeing as quickly as we're seeing them but, the singularity, I don't see it in my sentient lifetime."

A child can learn from a picture book to associate images with sounds, but building a computer vision system that can train itself isn't as simple. Using artificial intelligence techniques, however, researchers at Disney Research and ETH Zurich have designed a system that can automatically learn the association between images and the sounds they could plausibly make. Given a picture of a car, for instance, their system can automatically return the sound of a car engine. A system that knows the sound of a car, a splintering dish, or a slamming door might be used in a number of applications, such as adding sound effects to films, or giving audio feedback to people with visual disabilities, noted Jean-Charles Bazin, associate research scientist at Disney Research. To solve this challenging task, the research team leveraged data from collections of videos. "Videos with audio tracks provide us with a natural way to learn correlations between sounds and images," Bazin said.