Recruiting has become the digital equivalent of looking for an elusive needle in a very, very large haystack. Artificial intelligence (AI) is fast becoming an invaluable tool for recruiters and hiring managers in sifting through that haystack, scouring applicant pools and matching the right talent to the right jobs. Consider the Palo Alto–based startup Connectifier, which is used by companies like PayPal and Netflix. It aggregates publicly available information about potential job candidates--think professional networking profiles and social media interactions--and gathers the data in its own search index. The company's AI algorithm then creates personal profiles of candidates and extracts insights about whether they would be a good match for a job, even if they're not actively searching for a new one.

The machines are now making machines of their own, and there's no assembly required. Researchers in the US have developed 3D-printed robots containing solid and liquid parts which only need to be connected to a motor and power supply before they can scuttle off. By laying down all the components as it goes, the 3D printer can produce the robot's rigid support, flexible components and fluid filled channels as it builds up the layers. Researchers at MIT have developed a 3D printing technique for producing hydraulic components. The method makes it possible to print robots with hydraulic parts, simplifying the production process so even a novice can print their own robot.

If you put water on the stove and heat it up, it will at first just get hotter and hotter. You may then conclude that heating water results only in hotter water. But at some point everything changes – the water starts to boil, turning from hot liquid into steam. Automation, driven by technological progress, has been increasing inexorably for the past several decades. Two schools of economic thinking have for many years been engaged in a debate about the potential effects of automation on jobs, employment and human activity: will new technology spawn mass unemployment, as the robots take jobs away from humans?

The subjects in the team's 26 trial runs showed signs of arousal when Nao asked them to touch its intimate areas. They even touched those parts more quickly, as if they were uncomfortable doing so. However, Li told Mashable that "it isn't necessarily sexual arousal," not when the subjects reacted similarly when Nao asked them to touch its eye. They didn't get "turned on" when it asked them to touch its more accessible parts, like its hands. "One way I thought about it is, the robot is talking like a person, it looks like a person and has social cues like a person [gesturing, looking at the subjects].

A photo snapped by Opportunity Friday (April 1) shows the six-wheeled robot's tracks in the foreground and a Martian twister off in the distance, perhaps giving viewers the impression that the rover is in full retreat from a tornado. But Opportunity is not making a run for it. For one thing, the twister is a dust devil, not a true tornado of the type that can wreak havoc here on Earth. And with a top speed of just 0.1 mph (0.16 km/h) -- and a minimum 8-minute round-trip communication delay between Opportunity and its handlers -- fleeing is never really an option for the rover. So, the newly released image is just a nice, and fortuitously captured, tableau of the Red Planet's 14-mile-wide (22 km) Endeavour Crater.

Teams from both organizations will soon move into what used to be a Stelco office building that's located in the downtown core. "We're re-inventing Hamilton through healthcare," said Dino Trevisani, president of IBM Canada, who is himself originally from Hamilton. "We're going to make this a centre of excellence in Canada and for the world." Trevisani spoke at a well-attended event, held at Hamilton Health Sciences, to publicize the announcement. Significantly, researchers at the new collaboration centre will be the first in Canada to make extensive use of IBM's Watson artificial intelligence software for healthcare.

Facebook and Google are two of Silicon Valley's leaders in artificial intelligence. They have both invested heavily in AI, hiring loads of top researchers to develop projects like the Facebook Messenger "smart" assistant M, or Google's in-the-works AI-powered chatbot. While Facebook and Google are duking it out in international competitions, the two companies are far from alone in their efforts to dominate the space. Welcome to the AI Conspiracy: The'Canadian Mafia' Behind Tech's Latest Craze As for the rest of Silicon Valley, research firm CB Insights recently published a report on the AI investments the tech industry is making.

Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang said that deep-learning artificial intelligence has become a new computing platform, and the company is dealing with hundreds of startups in the space that plan to take advantage of the platform. Speaking at the GPUTech conference in San Jose, California, Huang noted that 5 billion was invested last year in A.I. startups, and there are probably a thousand companies working on the technology for applications ranging from face recognition to self-driving cars. "Deep learning is not an industry," he said. "Deep learning is going to be in every industry. Deep learning is going to be in every application."

Learning machines are capable of working ever more autonomously on ever more complex tasks. In this article, I explore whether it would it be smart for humankind to develop an'intelligent gun'. There are an estimated 875 million civilian, law-enforcement, and military firearms in the world, of which 650 million are in the hands of civilians, either legally or illegally[1]. Given the plethora of high-profile gun attacks in recent months and years – particularly in the US but also in France, Norway, Pakistan and Tunisia to name but a few – it is disturbingly easy to imagine gunmen on the loose in a school or at a public event, shooting indiscriminately and leaving casualties in their wake. Imagine how different things could be if a gun had artificial intelligence built in to it, turning it into an intelligent gun.