As AI surpasses human abilities in Go and poker – two decades after Deep Blue trounced chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov – it is seeping into our lives in ever more profound ways. It affects the wa...
More than 50 million Americans suffer from sleep disorders, and diseases including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s can also disrupt sleep. Diagnosing and monitoring these conditions usually requires a...
From the Australian government’s new “data-driven profiling” trial for drug testing welfare recipients, to US law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology and the deployment of propr...
There are few things social media users love more than flooding their feeds with photos of food. Yet we seldom use these images for much more than a quick scroll on our cellphones. Researchers from MI...
Laparoscopy is a surgical technique in which a fiber-optic camera is inserted into a patient’s abdominal cavity to provide a video feed that guides the surgeon through a minimally invasive procedure...
In episode two of season three Neil takes us through the basics on dropout, we chat about the definition of inference (It's more about context than you think!) and hear an interview with Jennifer Chay...
Science and technology are essential tools for innovation, and to reap their full potential, we also need to articulate and solve the many aspects of today’s global issues that are rooted in the pol...
This week I attended an “Artificial Intelligence (AI) Roundtable” of leading scientists, entrepreneurs and venture investors. As the discussion focused mainly on basic statistical techniques, I l...
Last week I had the pleasure of debating the question "does AI pose a threat to society?" with friends and colleagues Christian List, Maja Pantic and Samantha Payne. The event was organised by the B...
Talking Machines is entering its third season and going through some changes. Our founding host Ryan is moving on and in his place, Neil Lawrence of Amazon is taking over as co-host. We say thank you ...
The many potential social and economic benefits from advances in AI-based technologies depend entirely on the environment in which these technologies evolve, says the Royal Society. According to a new...
In the past 10 years, the best-performing artificial-intelligence systems — such as the speech recognizers on smartphones or Google’s latest automatic translator — have resulted from a technique...
From self-driving cars to the internet of things, artificial intelligence (AI) has reached new levels of sophistication in recent years. With that in mind, this week MIT’s Computer Science and Artif...
"Robot’s Delight - A Lyrical Exposition on Learning by Imitation from Human-Human Interaction" is a video submission that won Best Video at the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot...
In a surprise move which shook Baidu's stock, Andrew Ng, Baidu's Chief Scientist and partner with Baidu's founder Robin Li Yanhong in expanding Baidu's AI activities into machine learning, driverless ...
Amongst all the activity in autonomously driven vehicle joint ventures, new R&D facilities, strategic acquisitions (such as Mobileye being acquired by Intel) and booming startup fundings, two bi...
Whether an A.I. ought to be granted patent rights is a timely question given the increasing proliferation of A.I. in the workplace. Examples: Daimler-Benz has tested self-driving trucks on public road...
A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox....
Artificial intelligence (AI) already plays a major role in human economies and societies, and it will play an even bigger role in the coming years. To ponder the future of AI is thus to acknowledge th...
From Jeopardy winners and Go masters to infamous advertising-related racial profiling, it would seem we have entered an era in which artificial intelligence developments are rapidly accelerating. But ...
Science fiction likes to depict robots as autonomous machines, capable of making their own decisions and often expressing their own personalities. Yet we also tend to think of robots as property, and ...
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell repeatedly mentions what has become known as the “10,000-hour rule”, which states that to become world-class in any field you must devote 10,000 hours of “...
Computer scientist Regina Barzilay is working with MIT students and medical doctors in an ambitious bid to revolutionize cancer care. She is relying on a tool largely unrecognized in the oncology wor...
There’s a great deal of concern over artificial intelligence; what it means for our jobs, whether robots will one day replace us in the workplace, whether it will one day lead to robot wars. But cur...
Every other year, the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling hosts a competition in which computer systems designed by conference participants try to find the best solution to a...
Machine ethics offers an alternative solution for artificial intelligence (AI) safety governance. In order to mitigate risks in human-robot interactions, robots will have to comply with humanity’s e...
A recent Conversation piece pointed out that the British electricity mix in 2016 was the cleanest in 60 years, with record capacity from renewable energy, mainly from wind and solar power. But one pro...
Part 2: Autonomous Systems and Transparency
In my previous post I argued that a wide range of AI and Autonomous Systems (from now on I will just use the term AS as shorthand for both) should be reg...
It’s a fact of nature that a single conversation can be interpreted in very different ways. For people with anxiety or conditions like Asperger’s, this can make social situations extremely stressf...
Modern character AI could be better.
I’m unaware of any NPCs or electronic toy characters that can sustain an illusion of life over more than an hour. They suffer from predictability, simplicity, a...
On the 15th November 2016, the IEEE’s AI and Ethics Summit posed the question: “Who does the thinking?” In a series of key-note speeches and lively panel discussions, leading technologists, leg...
Part 1: Autonomous Systems and Safety
We all rely on machines. All aspects of modern life, from transport to energy, work to welfare, play to politics depend on a complex infrastructure of physical...
The population of the scenic ski-resort Davos, nestled in the Swiss Alps, swelled by nearly +3,000 people between the 17th and 20th of January. World leaders, academics, business tycoons, press and in...
In this fascinating animation from Oxford Sparks, we take a look at how statistics and computer science can be used to make machines that learn for themselves, without being explicitly programmed....