BAYOU is an deep learning tool that essentially functions as a search engine for coding: use a few keywords to tell it what sort of program you want to create and it will spit out java code that will accomplish what you're looking for, based on its best guess. A team of computer scientists from Rice University developed the tool with funding from both from the military and Google. In a study published this month on the preprint server arXiv, they outline how they built BAYOU and what kinds of problems it can help programmers solve. In essence, BAYOU read the source code for around 1500 Android apps, which works out to 100 million lines of Java. All that code was fed through BAYOU's neural net, resulting in AI that can program other software.

The rise of technology has given way to reliance on virtual assistants, such as Alexa and Siri, for tasks like playing music, setting alarm clocks, and scheduling appointments. Currently, the Airbus company is engineering a similar mission assistant to help astronauts finish everyday tasks on the International Space Station. Airbus is working on the Crew Interactive MObile CompanioN (known as CIMON for short) in partnership with Space Administration at the German Aerospace Center and will be the first time artificial intelligence (AI) is used on the ISS in this way. CIMON is designed as a spherical, free-flying robot that can move independently around the station. It's about the size of a medicine ball, and weighs approximately 11 pounds.

A new artificial intelligence (AI) venture from tech giant Alibaba could ease a portion of the various issues confronting Chinese farmers in the pork business. China is the world's biggest maker and consumer of pork, and monitoring the country's estimated 700 million creatures is famously troublesome for farmers. They have to give careful consideration to guarantee that piglets aren't squashed to death by their moms, sows aren't reared past their prime, and sick pigs don't pass their diseases on to the remaining populace. Right now, agriculturists track pigs by clipping wireless radio frequency identification (RFID) labels to the creatures' ears. These can be costly, and farmers don't generally have room schedule-wise to fit each pig with a tag and scan them.