When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Did Microsoft do anything right in 2025? From AI overload to price hikes, little Microsoft did during 2025 was worth applauding. Can you name one single, solitary, success Microsoft had in 2025? In the years that PCWorld has catalogued Microsoft's wins, failures, and head-scratching "WTF" moments, there's always been a mix of high points and lows.

A popular book app's AI has been scrapped after being deemed'bigoted and racist'. Fable, a social media app for book enthusiasts, used an AI to create a Spotify-like'wrapped' experience, summarising users' reading habits throughout the year. However, outraged readers soon complained that the feature, designed to offer a'playful roast', was lashing out with racist putdowns. One user was shocked when the app told them to'surface for the occasional white author' after spending the year reading'Black narratives and transformative tales'. Another was slammed by their AI summary as a'diversity devotee', with the app questioning whether they were'ever in the mood for a straight, cis white man's perspective'.

The Find-the-Remote event was considered the most challenging of the events in the 1997 AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition. It required a broad range of both hardware and software capabilities. I discuss the rules and rationale for the event as well as the results. It involved fetching a known set of objects from unknown, but constrained, locations in a known environment. In real life, such functions might be useful for in-home care of the elderly or the physically disabled. This event was extremely difficult because it forced teams to implement both manipulation (the grasping and moving of objects) and visual object recognition. Furthermore, it explicitly required teams to implement them for a wide range of objects. It therefore eliminated a broad range of special-purpose sensing and manipulation strategies that would be specific to one or another class of objects. It also required that objects be lifted from a variety of surfaces (real furniture) at a variety of heights.

The growing field of three-dimensional (3-D) computer vision-programs that can interpret the world from sensor data-is the topic of Three-Dimensional Computer Vision by Yoshiaki Shirai (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1987, 297 pp., $95.00) The term "three-dimensional" is used to distinguish the field from two-dimensional pattern (2-D) recognition, such as character recognition or the recognition of silhouettes. The 3-D scene-understanding problem is made difficult by shadows, uneven lighting, texture, and objects that occlude other objects The sensors used include those that obtain a greylevel or color-intensity image of a scene, methods that project a sheet of light on an object to reveal its 3-D structure, and distance-measuring devices that provide a "range image" in which the value of each picture element represents a distance from the sensor to a point in the scene Such range sensors are important because they are not affected by lighting conditions and shadows. This book, not to be confused with Takeo Kanade's Three-Dimensional Machine Vision (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987), describes the fundamental technology of 3-D computer vision for various applications The first four chapters are devoted to basic methods of computer vision. This is followed by chapters on image feature extraction (edge analysis, edge linking and following, and region methods) and image feature description (representing lines, segmenting a sequence of points, fitting line equations, and converting between lines and regions). Once these preliminaries are completed, the author concentrates on the 3-D world.

MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory The MIT AI Laboratory has a long tradition of research in most aspects of Artificial Intelligence. Currently, the major foci include computer vision, manipulation, learning, Englishlanguage understanding, VLSI design, expert engineering problem solving, commonsense reasoning, computer architecture, distributed problem solving, models of human memory, programmer apprentices, and human education. Understanding Visual Images Professor Berthold K. P. Horn and his students have studied intensively the image irradiance equation and its applications. The reflectance and albedo map representations have been introduced to make surface orientation, illumination geometry, and surface reflectivity explicit. Recent work has centered on modelling the effects of the atmosphere which distort intensity values and make classification of terrain and related computations using the albedo map inaccurate.

This, coupled with limited bandwidth and latencies, motivates on-board autonomy that ensures the quality of the science data return. Increasing quality of the data requires better sample selection, data validation, and data reduction. Robotic studies in Mars-like desert terrain have advanced autonomy for long-distance exploration and seeded technologies for planetary rover missions. In these field experiments the remote science team uses a novel control strategy that intersperses preplanned activities with autonomous decision making. The robot performs automatic data collection, interpretation, and response at multiple spatial scales.

This article describes a method for building a cognitive map of a virtual urban environment. Our routines enable virtual humans to map their environment using a realistic model of perception. We based our implementation on a computational framework proposed by Yeap and Jefferies (1999) for representing a local environment as a structure called an absolute space representation (ASR). Their algorithms compute and update ASRs from a 2-1/2-dimensional (2-1/2D) sketch of the local environment and then connect the ASRs together to form a raw cognitive map. Our work extends the framework developed by Yeap and Jefferies in three important ways.

The AAAI-90 Workshop on Qualitative Vision was held on Sunday, 29 July 1990. Over 50 researchers from North America, Europe, and Japan attended the workshop. This article contains a report of the workshop presentations and discussions. The AAAI-90 Workshop on Qualitative Vision was organized into seven sessions, with each session focusing on a specific topic. The first session was on the approaches and psychophysical bases of qualitative vision, addressing the question of what is qualitative vision.

"Microsoft Monday" is a weekly column that focuses on all things Microsoft. This week, Microsoft Monday includes details about the Windows 10 upgrade program fully ending, the shutdown of Outlook.com When Microsoft originally released Windows 10, it was available as a free upgrade PCs running on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. After a year, the free upgrade offer was extended for people that were seeking enhanced accessibility features. This workaround will no longer be available after December 31, 2017.

Hurtigruten cruise line introduces a new way to see what lurks beneath the world's most remote polar waters. On its expedition ships, the company is introducing an underwater drone that streams real-time video of orcas, leopard sharks, penguins and other creatures beneath the water. Or passengers can wear masks with digital displays that may make them feel like they're on a dive deep in the ocean Hurtigruten plans to start by outfitting two hybrid-powered ships -- the Roald Amundsen and the Fridtjof Nansen -- with the new underwater drone. "[W]ith underwater drones on our ships we can take our guests to areas less explored than the surface of Mars," company Chief Executive Daniel Skjeldam said in a statement.