Let's get the basics over with," W said to M when they met on a 4-minute speed date. I am fresh from the shower, wrapped in just a towel and smelling of mild herbal soaps (both shower and soaps are required), standing at the door to the tank. It resembles a shower door--knee-high, sliding--and opens to reveal a...READ MORE They talked about where they were from (she hailed from Iowa, he from New Jersey), life in a small town, and the transition to college. An eavesdropper would have been hard-pressed to detect a romantic spark in this banal back-and-forth. Yet when researchers, who had recorded the exchange, ran it through a language-analysis program, it revealed what W and M confirmed to be true: They were hitting it off. The researchers weren't interested in what the daters discussed, or even whether they seemed to share personality traits, backgrounds, or interests.

People are being urged to look up common phrases used in messages received from potential matches online, along with the term "dating scam", to avoid becoming a victim of criminals. A new UK campaign, starting on Sunday, aims to raise awareness about the growing problem of online dating fraud. Date Safe suggests checking the phrases, which could flag whether they are commonly used by scammers. A new report claims the average victim of a scheme is aged 49. It also reveals that money is transferred within 30 days of initial contact with the perpetrator.

As of last month, Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft are all joining forces to create a new AI partnership called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society. The collaboration, aside from having a lengthy name, will advance public understanding of AI, and agree on a list of standards for future development. Although there's currently a clear domestic trend, AI has uses that stretch beyond analysing the traffic. A number of companies involved with AI research are looking well beyond family applications. Right now, though, the immediate aim seems to be to get consumers to adopt AI as part of their everyday lives.

The Galaxy S8 may come with a curved screen like the one on this, the Galaxy S7 Edge. The Galaxy S8 is shaping up to be perhaps the most important smartphone Samsung has ever developed, and rumours about the details of its specs continue to emerge. According to The Wall Street Journal the home button may be removed from the front of the smartphone and moved to the back, freeing up space for the screen -- something that Samsung's Chinese rival Huawei did on its P9 smartphone last year. The paper reports that the device, which is expected to be launched later this month, will come with a curved screen as standard, a feature Samsung debuted on its Galaxy S6 Edge and which has proved popular with customers. The S8 will also feature a Samsung-developed voice-powered digital assistant which will apparently be called Bixby, in an attempt to rival Apple's Siri and Google Now.

It's very likely that you'll see Google Assistant on new Android devices beyond the Pixel line, but when... and what about the device you already have? The AI helper might be coming sooner than you think. Google has inadvertently given beta testers an alpha release of its Android search app that enables Assistant support on non-Pixel hardware. It's not working for everyone, but people carrying everything from the Nexus 6P to Alcatel's Idol 4S say they've had success. The software has introductory messages that are clearly targeted at people who previously didn't have Assistant, so it's not an accidental inclusion.

Recent innovations around the autonomous car have shaken up the automotive industry. Manufacturers and their suppliers are all accelerating their work on the cars of the future, both regular human-operated cars as well as driverless or semi-autonomous vehicles. But beyond just issues of autonomy, these cars of the future are undergoing a fundamental shift in human-machine interaction. Consumers today crave more relational and conversational interactions with devices, as evidenced by the popularity of chatbots and virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa – and the automotive industry has taken notice. As such, next-generation cars are emerging as advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems that will power an entirely new automotive experience in which cars will become conversational interfaces between the driver, passengers, the vehicle itself and its controls -- all connected to the IoT and mobile devices we use.

Babak Hodjat believes humans are too emotional for the stock market. So he's started one of the first hedge funds run completely by artificial intelligence. "Humans have bias and sensitivities, conscious and unconscious," says Hodjat, a computer scientist who helped lay the groundwork for Apple's Siri. "It's well documented we humans make mistakes. For me, it's scarier to be relying on those human-based intuitions and justifications than relying on purely what the data and statistics are telling you."

Computers have got much better at translation, voice recognition and speech synthesis, says Lane Greene. But they still don't understand the meaning of language I'm afraid I can't do that." With chilling calm, HAL 9000, the on-board computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey", refuses to open the doors to Dave Bowman, an astronaut who had ventured outside the ship. HAL's decision to turn on his human companion reflected a wave of fear about intelligent computers. When the film came out in 1968, computers that could have proper conversations with humans seemed nearly as far away as manned flight to Jupiter. Since then, humankind has progressed quite a lot farther with building machines that it can talk to, and that can respond with something resembling natural speech. Even so, communication remains difficult. If "2001" had been made to reflect the state of today's language technology, the conversation might have gone something like this: "Open the pod bay doors, Hal." "I'm sorry, Dave.

LG Electronics will put Amazon's Alexa voice-enabled virtual assistant in a new Smart InstaView refrigerator, allowing people to ask questions, play music, check calorie counts, and add items to their shopping lists by talking to their fridge. "I could just simply say, 'Alexa, add milk to my shopping list,' " explained David VanderWaal, LG vice president for home appliances and consumer electronics, unveiling the partnership at the company's news conference at CES this morning. "Or you could buy the milk if you wanted," added Mike George, vice president of Echo, Alexa and Appstore at Amazon, underscoring the tech giant's ambitions in the grocery business. The fridge, which runs the WebOS operating system, features a large touch-screen display and comes with a panoramic camera that can send an internal view of the refrigerator to the user's mobile phone, to check what's on hand when they're at the grocery store. It's the latest in a series of Amazon Alexa integrations expected to be announced at CES this week.

Today's artificial intelligence industry is not easy to quantify. Besides the lack of consensus on a coherent definition for "artificial intelligence" as a term, the field's nascent stage of development makes it difficult to carve out silos or hard barriers of where one industry or application ends, and another begins. In one of our more popular recent articles, we aimed to derive a valuation of the artificial intelligence market, based on current market research and our own insights. In this week's article, I've set out to determine more of a "lay of the land" of the AI industry, including it's various segments and application areas. If you're interested in how developments in machine learning and AI might impact your own company or business, then keeping an eye on trends in industry and application growth is pertinent.