Harry Shum (left), Microsoft AI and research group executive vice president, and Sam Altman, co-chair of OpenAI, will be working together on artificial intelligence. Microsoft has formed a partnership with OpenAI, an Elon Musk-based company, to research artificial intelligence. The two companies will focusing on "making significant contributions to advance the field of AI" and will work on their "mutual goal of using AI to tackle some of the world's most challenging problems," Microsoft said Tuesday in a blog post. Microsoft add that it is "committed to democratizing AI and making it accessible to everyone." AI is one of the hottest trends in tech right now, fueled by powerful chips, fast networks and the massive trail of data we all leave behind us as we go about our digital days.

There are over 34,000 scholarly, peer-reviewed journals in existence today, collectively publishing some 2.5 million articles every year. It's estimated that a single researcher, depending on their discipline, will read about 270 of them in the same time frame. Scientists will never keep up. They're going to miss key insights. Fortunately, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) tossed them a life preserver.

The only possible culmination of AI research is packing it neatly inside a synthetic body and having sex with it. Or, at least that's what some researchers think. By 2050, sex with robots is predicted to become so commonplace that it'll overtake human on human intercourse. According to one expert, we'll all be okay with that because robot sex will be'mind blowing.' But will these robots replace the desire to have sex with, you know, other humans?

Emerging Technologies Like Advanced Analytics, Machine Learning and Internet of Things Help ... Transparent machine learning: How to create'clear-box' AI NVIDIA (NVDA), Microsoft (MSFT) Enter AI Development Collaboration Focused on Enterprise ... Using AI, Israel's Aperio protects infrastructure from hackers Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

Survival: "Our entire existence is based on having the best detection mechanism possible," says Valerie Bannert-Thurner at Nasdaq. Certain things make Valerie Bannert-Thurner raise an eyebrow when looking for signs of bad behavior on the Nasdaq exchange. "I like the example of excessive cheering because the guys just can't help themselves but cheer," said Bannert-Thurner, who is senior vice president and head of risk and surveillance at Nasdaq. Another worrisome indicator is seemingly too-good-to-be-true trading profits. "If people are excessively profitable given how they trade and in comparison to everybody else trading the same instruments with similar styles, then we ask, is this luck or something else?" Bannert-Thurner said.

Google Photos is the best photo-management tool you can put on your phone, but it won't do you any good if your favorite photos are all in a shoebox. With a new app built to scan your prints, eliminate any glare you'd get from taking a picture of them, and keep them all straightened out in digital form, Google's latest mobile app is good news for anyone with a bunch of packed Fotomat envelopes. The new PhotoScan is a standalone app for both Android and iOS, and scanning a picture is a clever combination of manual shooting and computational photography. Once you take an initial photo of… a photo, the app recognizes the four corners of the frame and displays circular overlays on each corner of the scanned image. You then point your phone camera at each circle, create a robust scan of the image, and PhotoScan gets to work from there.

On its own front, Microsoft has been keen to get more folks developing AI, enough to recently open-source the deep learning tools it used to build Skype Translate and Cortana for users to train their own AI. It's also opened its arms to other tech companies, partnering with Google, Amazon, IBM and Facebook in a coalition to trumpet the benefits of AI and agree on best practices. The initiative left out the Elon Musk and Peter Thiel-backed OpenAI, a research project dedicated to democratizing artificial intelligence. But today, the nonprofit announced a separate team-up with Microsoft to run large-scale experiments on the software giant's Azure cloud platform. Azure's open-sourced tools appealed to the nonprofit, as well as its computation-boosting Batch and machine learning capabilities, Microsoft said in a blog post.

Federal highway safety regulators are gently rebuking a California plan that would compel automakers to show how they are addressing privacy, safety and a host of other questions about their self-driving cars -- a novel technology that could transform the U.S. transportation system. The plan from California's Department of Motor Vehicles would make it mandatory for manufacturers to complete a 15-point report on safety and other issues before testing automated vehicles or allowing them on public roads. It has been criticized by the automotive industry as being overly burdensome and a threat to innovation. The idea for the report came from a set of guidelines from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration that was released in September. But the suggestions were never meant to be mandatory or prescriptive, NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind told members of Congress in a committee hearing Tuesday.

Google is finally going ahead with its plans to build a "landscraper" headquarters in London's King's Cross, more than three years after the project was first announced. The development, which will be Google's UK headquarters, was reportedly thrown into turmoil in 2015 when bosses in California threw out the original plans, by London-based architects AHMM, for being "too boring", and brought in a Thomas Heatherwick, designer of a new London bus, the Olympic cauldron, and the Garden Bridge. Further questions were raised in the wake of Britain's vote to leave the European Union about whether or not the search engine would want to base up to 7,000 employees in London. But in a speech on Tuesday at Google's current campus in King's Cross, chief executive Sundar Pichai confirmed the plans were going ahead. "Here in the UK, it's clear to me that computer science has a great future with the talent, educational institutions, and passion for innovation we see all around us," he said.

Back in August, we talked about machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Recently, 60 Minutes spoke with the CEO of IBM, Virginia Marie "Ginni" Rometty. The information shared by Rometty further supports the belief that machines/computers like Watson, an IBM supercomputer that combines artificial intelligence (AI) and sophisticated analytical software is a "question answering" machine. The supercomputer is named after IBM's founder, Thomas J. Watson. It will not replace people/workers, but rather, it will allow for a faster evaluation of millions of data points that humans could not do as quickly as a computer with machine learning and AI complexities.