That "galaxy, far, far away" in the famed opening lines of "Star Wars" flicks actually is part of "our reality," according to a commentary released on a key site, KurzweilAI, that deals with artificial intelligence and the like. It's because the newest chapter of the long-running series, "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," has a robot as a key character. The robot previously was part of the "Imperial Empire" but was captured and reprogrammed to become part of the rebel group that sets out to steal plans for the "Death Star" and uncover a fatal flaw. Jonathan Roberts, a professor of robotics at Queensland University of Technology, warns that robotic technology used in military conflicts could be turned back against those who created and released it. "Without giving away too many spoilers, K-2SO is part of the Rebellion freedom fighter group that are tasked with stealing the plans to the first Death Star, the infamous moon-sized battle station from the original Star Wars movie," he said. "Some robotics engineers and researchers are working on exactly this and have started to develop the algorithms that will enable autonomous military robots to be ethical.

The listing carries no penalties but will likely be an embarrassment for Alibaba, which has been trying to burnish its image in international markets. The move by the USTR comes even as the company claims to have used "big data" technologies to zero in, for example, on 13 factories and shops that were selling knockoff RAM modules under Kingston and Samsung brands, according to Alibaba's news hub Alizila. Its counterfeit goods monitoring and identification algorithm, for example, monitors about 100 dimensional characteristics, ranging from price to the online shops decorations, transaction records, product-release pattern and consumer complaints. Merchants and goods are rated on a 0 to 100 scale, with 80 usually treated as a red flag. The company also uses optical character recognition and the scanning and analysis of images and logos for suspicious listings.

Amazon today announced three new artificial intelligence-related toolkits for developers building apps on Amazon Web Services. At the company's AWS re:invent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon showed how developers can use three new services -- Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, Amazon Rekognition -- to build artificial intelligence features into apps for platforms like Slack, Facebook Messenger, ZenDesk, and others. The idea is to let developers utilize the machine learning algorithms and technology that Amazon has already created for its own processes and services like Alexa. Instead of developing their own AI software, AWS customers can simply use an API call or the AWS Management Console to incorporate AI features into their own apps. AWS CEO Andy Jassy noted that Amazon has been building AI and machine learning technology for 20 years and said that there are now thousands of people "dedicated to AI in our business."

It's generating a great deal of interest, getting substantial backing from venture capitalists and even being billed as a must-have addition to the cyber-security arsenal. The idea of machine learning has been around for many years but today's realisations differ radically from earlier technologies. In simple terms machine learning software has no programmed-in knowledge about the domain to which it is to be applied but gains that knowledge by being taught. For example if you want to develop a machine-learning based optical character recognition system you feed it with many images of letters of the alphabet and you tell it "this is an'A' this is a'B'" and so on. Given sufficient data correctly identified, it will get very good at optical character recognition.

Tightening up on the artificial intelligence race against Microsoft and Google, Amazon revealed new AI services, at the AWS re:Invent 2016 conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday. The services will help customers develop applications hosted on AWS that recognize images, add text-to-speech and implement technology from Amazon's Alexa's. Amazon Rekognition is a service that recognizes images. With Rekognition, developers can create applications that detect objects, scenes, and faces in images. It can also be used to search and compare faces.

Keep may forever be one of the more underrated apps in Google's stable, but that hasn't stopped its development. And there's a new version on its way to the Play Store that adds a subtle but important new feature for note-takers. If you're someone who likes to scribble in Keep rather than type, Google has implemented a way to convert your handwriting into text. Once the new update lands in the Play Store (or if you can't wait, sideload the Google-signed APK from APKMirror), you'll see a new Grab image text option in the top-right menu. Tap it when you're done drawing and it will attempt to convert any words it sees to actual text. It's a similar trick to the optical character recognition Keep uses to pull text out of images--and there's no guarantee it will be able to decipher your chicken scratch--but it should be a nifty tool for old-fashioned note-takers.

Amazon today announced three new artificial intelligence-related toolkits for developers building apps on Amazon Web Services. At the company's AWS re:invent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon showed how developers can use three new services -- Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, Amazon Rekognition -- to build artificial intelligence features into apps for platforms like Slack, Facebook Messenger, ZenDesk, and others. The idea is to let developers utilize the machine learning algorithms and technology that Amazon has already created for its own processes and services like Alexa. Instead of developing their own AI software, AWS customers can simply use an API call or the AWS Management Console to incorporate AI features into their own apps. AWS CEO Andy Jassy noted that Amazon has been building AI and machine learning technology for 20 years and said that there are now thousands of people "dedicated to AI in our business."

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Information extraction involves classifying data items that are stored in plain text, and is a major area of research for machine learning scientists. Last week, a research team from MIT introduced a new approach to information extraction for machine learning systems at the Association for Computational Linguistics' Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing, and won a best-paper award. Instead of feeding their system as much data as possible, the team's winning approach takes a different route and focuses on a much smaller data set, a similar process used by human beings – if you're reading a paper that you don't understand, you're likely to do a search on the web and find articles that you are able to understand. This new system approach does something similar; if the system's confidence score is low in assessing a particular text, it will query for more information, pulling up a handful of new articles from the web that correlate with a specific set of terms. In future, this model could be applied to sparse data and save much time in reviewing databases.

As part of Google's slew of artificial intelligence announcements today, the company is releasing a number of AI web experiments powered by its cloud services that anyone can go and play with. One -- called Quick, Draw! -- gives you a prompt to draw an image of a written word or phrase in under 20 seconds with your mouse cursor in such a way that a neural network can identify it. It's both a hilarious and fascinating exercise with broader implications for how AI can self-learn over time in key AI research areas like image recognition and optical character recognition. Quick, Draw! is a great way to familiarize yourself with how neural networks work to identify objects and text in photos, which is one of the most common forms of AI-guided software techniques we see daily on platform's like Facebook and Google Photos. As you start to craft the doodle, Quick, Draw!'s software automaton will start yelling out words and phrases it thinks you're trying to illustrate.