Computer scientist extraordinaire Karen Spärck Jones, professor emeritus of computer and information at the University of Cambridge, died last month of cancer. Shortly before that, she got to see her life's work in natural language processing and information retrieval receive even more acclaim than ever from major computer science institutions around the globe. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) had chosen her to receive both the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award and the ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award. And only weeks before that, she was also awarded the prestigious Lovelace Medal by the British Computer Society (BCS). The woman they honored pioneered techniques that allow people to work with computers using ordinary words instead of equations or codes, a breakthrough that was important in the subsequent development of search engines. According to the ACM, she also discovered term weighting, a statistical method used to evaluate how important any given word is in a set of documents, and thus the word's significance for an individual document.

Oulu, Finland based Start-up Valossa has released its new video search tool. The technology analyses video streams in real-time to identify more than one thousand concepts such as places and objects from any video stream. Valossa technology understands the contents of video files themselves through a combination of natural language processing and pattern recognition AI. It has been designed for service and content providers enabling users to can reach down into their video content, identify it and make it searchable. Sometimes the most profound solution is to change the entire problem.

You can spend a long time searching satellite images for interesting locations. Now imagine a tool that can not only show you the location, but scans large geographical areas to find specific features that are similar, and then it presents these results in a pattern-like format. In 2002, Carnegie Mellon's (CMU) School of Computer Science launched what it calls the world's "first PhD program in Machine Learning". It attempted to learn how to program systems to automatically learn and use its experience to improve its results. A group of CMU professors and students have now created a visual search tool for satellite imagery called Terrapattern. In a landmark project, Google Earth has teamed up with locals to provide a fully immersive experience of the Sherpa community and their mountain home in the Sagarmatha region in Nepal, home to the tallest mountain in the world, Everest.

Analyzing queries made to Google, Bing, and other search engines can reveal the potentially dangerous consequences of mixing prescriptions before they are known to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), according to a new study. Such data mining could even expose medical risks that slip through clinical trials undetected. Pharmaceuticals often have side effects that go unnoticed until they're already available to the public. This is especially true of side effects that emerge when two drugs interact, largely because drug trials try to pinpoint the effects of one drug at a time. Physicians have a few ways to hunt for these hidden risks, such as reports to FDA from doctors, nurses, and patients.

Remember Watson, IBM's Jeopardy champion? A couple years ago, Watson beat the top two human champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter at a game where even interpreting the cue is complex with language nuances. Yet after the initial excitement, most people -- except for a notable few -- forgot about Watson. But we need to pay attention, and now. This could be the beginning of a serious challenge to Google, whose most ambitious initiatives -- from wearables to cars to aging -- are funded through its thriving advertising business.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Google is putting its search engine in the hands of its artificial intelligence chief. John Giannandrea will take over from Amit Singhal who is leaving Google this month after 15 years. The move shows the ascendance and growing importance of artificial intelligence at the major Silicon Valley technology companies. Search is the engine that drives Google's lucrative advertising business. Artificial intelligence is increasingly behind advances in how Google answers search queries.

Marking Google's 15th birthday, Hummingbird is the biggest change to the inner workings of the world's most popular search engine since Google's "Caffeine" update in 2010, which sped up Google's indexing of sites and delivery of search results. The Hummingbird update focuses more on Google's Knowledge Graph – an encyclopaedia of about 570m concepts and relationships that allows Google to anticipate facts and figures you might want to know about your search term. Hummingbird isn't an overhaul that Google search users will instantly notice, however. "In general, Hummingbird – Google says – is a new engine built on both existing and new parts, organised in a way to especially serve the search demands of today, rather than one created for the needs of 10 years ago, with the technologies back then," said Danny Sullivan of the search blog Search Engine Land. It will benefit those using more modern forms of search, such as conversational or voice search, where you ask Google a question rather than typing keywords into the search box.

Like a lot of information-age talk, the phrase is both schizophrenic and appropriate. For if this World Wide Web we grow to depend on is all-connected and all-connecting, an enfolding organism spinning out and out and out, it is also oceanic. And when it comes to using such a vast, dynamic resource, most of us are like the skinny kid in the half-zipped wetsuit, paddling just beyond the first break. On a good day, we can handle a three-foot curl. But we never stray too far from shore. And we can easily wind up a long way down the beach, with no idea how we got there. The images illustrating this article were drawn from a computer animation created by Steve Coast, a computer artist and student of physics at University College London.

Anyone who has been transfixed by a gymnast or a figure skater knows that the magic happens when they perform flawlessly and yet make it seem easy. That's how a search should work: Enter a query, and the right results appear in simple, elegant fashion -- even if it took countless hours of preparation to make the magic possible. Yet most enterprise users still stumble as they try to extract data from multiple repositories, each with its own search engine. Enterprises seem awash in a rising tide of structured and unstructured data. And even though users are often forced to tag documents manually across various content management systems in hopes that those documents will be easier to retrieve, searches still yield a surfeit of irrelevant, time-wasting results.

Trying to picture yourself older or with a different hairstyle is near impossible. But now researchers have developed the ultimate face swap that analyzes a picture of your face, searches for images using key terms and seamlessly maps your it onto the results. Called Dreambit, this AI lets anyone see what they would look like with a different hairstyle or colour, or in a different time period, age, country or anything that can be queried in an image search engine. Dreambit lets anyone see what they would look like with a different hairstyle or colour, or in a different time period, age, country or anything that can be queried in an image search engine - as it has done with American actor George Clooney (pictured). 'Dreambit is a personalized image search engine,' reads the website.