The question I've been asked most frequently by reporters in the last couple of weeks is whether Apple's Siri personal assistant is behind its competitors, and whether it can catch up. The answer is more complicated than just yes or no, and having some context for next week's Apple's Developer Conference is important for properly evaluating the announcements. First, many comparisons at the moment are of apples and oranges (no pun intended). We're at a particular point in the calendar where all the other major consumer tech companies have already held their developer events this year, so we're comparing their 2016 products (including announcements of products that aren't yet available) to Apple's AAPL, 0.80% versions from 2015. Moreover, many of these new products aren't actually available yet, and won't be for months.

Tinder has today banned under-18s using the service after it was revealed teenagers were using the service to meet with children as young as 13. Child protection campaigners have been upset that since 2012 the online dating app has allowed people aged between 13 and 17 to hook up. But it has emerged that adults have been posing as teenagers to have sexual contact with children, or 16 and 17-year-olds have been grooming boys and girls under the age of consent. Yesterday a serving police officer admitted he had groomed a 15-year-old girl he met on the Tinder and would later film the girl performing a sex act on him. Stephen McMillan, 26, sent a photo of the underage girl's naked breasts to three friends - leading to her becoming suicidal and taking a drug overdose, magistrates were told.

Starting next week, Tinder will discontinue the use of the dating and hookup app for anyone under age 18. Since Tinder launched in 2012, Tinder users had to be at least 13. Users age 13 to 17 could only match with others in that group. Now, users must be at least 18, TechCrunch reports. "On a platform that has facilitated over 11 billion connections, we have the responsibility of constantly assessing our different user experiences," Tinder's official statement said.

The way to make a social home robot seems to be pretty standardized: basically, you cram a tablet computer into a cute robot body with some degrees of freedom and do your best to make sure that your voice recognition and conversation algorithms are as good of an experience as you possibly can, using a screen to help you out when necessary. This is fine, if you can get it to work well, but there's a concern that it's just going to turn into an experience that's essentially talking to a gussied-up version of your phone. A group of researchers including Michal Luria, Guy Hoffman, Benny Megidish, Oren Zuckerman, and Sung Park from IDC Herzliya, Cornell, and SK Telecom have developed a prototype social robot called Vyo. Vyo is "a personal assistant serving as a centralized interface for smart home devices." Nothing new there, but what sets Vyo apart is how you interact with it: it combines non-anthropomorphic design with anthropomorphic expressiveness and a tactile object-based control system into a social robot that's totally, adorably different.

Hi there, nice comments about the top 12 secret shortcuts of Dataiku DSS convinced me to write another one: this time it's about plugins, movies, APIs, and how to choose the best one to watch with friends. A friend of mine has a list of all her DVDs (and takes note of who borrowed what;-). How do I choose the top 5 movies I'd like to borrow? I'm not a movie maniac and I don't know most of the titles of her collection. And when I do know one, it's most often because I have already seen it (and would prefer to watch a new one).

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

In the past two decades, we've seen chess grandmasters and the best Jeopardy players in the world alike fall in competition to computers. Heads-up No-limit Texas Hold'em poker may be next. But the future of artificial intelligence (AI) is about way more than games. Last April and May, Carnegie Mellon University's AI, Claudico (developed by Professor Tuomas Sandholm and his team), played an 80,000-hand tournament against four poker pros. When the game ended, three of the four players had bigger hands than Claudico.

Google Home And Google Assistant Essential Guide About a year ago, Amazon announced Amazon Echo, an artificial intelligence Bluetooth speaker. Somehow similar to Apple's Siri assistant, only that it is called Alexa. The device is a speaker and also a personal assistant.

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference next Monday will be all about the brains behind Apple devices--the operating systems. It's not likely we'll see any new gadgetry (I could be wrong; it's happened), but we'll get a busload of information about new tricks in iOS, Mac OS, watchOS, and tvOS. At last year's WWDC, you may remember, Apple introduced OS X 10.11 (El Capitan), iOS 9, and WatchOS 2. The News app debuted, Maps added public transit directions, and HomeKit and CarPlay both got updates. This year we'll hear a lot about how Siri is moving deeper into Apple's major OSs, and about her advances in general smarts and usefulness. And Apple execs will probably talk about how the company has further integrated its cloud services into its OSs and apps.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans. Knowledge engineering is a core part of AI research. Machines can often act and react like humans only if they have abundant information relating to the world. Artificial intelligence must have access to objects, categories, properties and relations between all of them to implement knowledge engineering. Artificial intelligence uses algorithms to comprehend and react towards a human activity.