Mining social networks for every scrap of information about our online lives is now common practice for marketers, academics, government agencies, and so on. Text in tweets, blogs and other posts is valuable because it's searchable, analyzable, and not terribly costly to crawl, fetch or store. But ongoing computer vision …

A joint investment venture backed by China's Baidu is offering 10 billion yuan (£1.1bn) for 100 autonomous driving projects anywhere in the world. Other companies have announced similar money bags. Samsung, for example, launched a $300m (£222m) Automotive Innovation Fund on September 14. Baidu, which unveiled its own open- …

Unity, the most popular cross-platform game engine favored by video game developers, on Tuesday opened up its platform for machine learning researchers to test their algorithms. Reinforcement learning is a strand of machine learning that teaches agents to perform a specific task in a given environment. It’s been useful for …

Eggheads have produced a machine-learning system that has studied millions of passwords used by folks online to work out other passphases people are likely to use. These AI-guessed passwords could be used with today's tools to crack more hashed passwords, and log into more strangers' accounts on systems, than ever before. …

Microsoft on Sunday bragged its artificial intelligence technology is behind the, er, success of the massively underperforming Renault Formula One team. In a poorly timed bit of marketing, the Redmond software giant talked up its partnership with the racing team just as the latter finds itself sitting 433 points behind leader …

A startup called Bodega AI, facing an unanticipated Twitter tempest, has rushed to reassure people that it isn't out to kick mom-and-pop stores to the curb. The venture-funded firm, which makes software and hardware to create "delightful automated stores" – what normals might call vending machines, but for their Ikea affect – …

Software can take a decent stab at identifying looters, rioters and anyone else who hides their faces with scarves, hats, and glasses, a study has shown. A paper by a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge, UK, the National Institute of Technology in Warangal, India, and the Indian Institute of Science, describes …

Earthquakes are, by their nature, unpredictable. Although geologists understand why and how the tremors occur, forecasting them more than a few minutes ahead is very difficult. A team of scientists believes that machine learning could help solve this problem one day. A paper published Wednesday in the Geophysical Research …

A group of physicists has trained an artificial neural network to analyze gravitational lensing images ten million times faster than normal computational methods. Gravitational lensing is "the formation of multiple images of distant sources due to the deflection of their light by the gravity of intervening structures," …

London's Metropolitan Police have been urged to back down on plans to once again use facial recognition software at next weekend's Notting Hill Carnival. Privacy groups including Big Brother Watch, Liberty and Privacy International have written to police commissioner Cressida Dick (PDF) calling for a U-turn on the use of the …

Analysis Convinced that intelligent conversational assistants like Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri are neither particularly intelligent nor capable of sophisticated conversation, computer boffins last year began testing a crowd-powered assistant embodied by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. The chatbot, a people-powered …

Microsoft has dropped any mention of mobility from its strategic vision. The change emerged last week in Redmond's Form 10-K, the annual warts-and-all documents public companies are required to lodge with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Microsoft's vision is usually outlined in a section of the 10-K …

Facebook’s language translation is now finally powered by several large neural networks. The social media giant announced on Thursday it has switched to using neural networks for translating people's posts and status updates. It’s not the first outfit to make this kind of jump – Google and Microsoft upgraded their translation …

Two chatbots have reportedly been removed from Chinese messaging app QQ after issuing distinctly unpatriotic answers. According to the Financial Times, chatbots BabyQ and Xiaobing (or Xiaoice) had been available to some of the 800 million users of Tencent's app QQ until Wednesday. However, the pair seem to have been hastily …

Feature The magic AI wand has been waved over language translation, and voice and image recognition, and now: computer security. Antivirus makers want you to believe they are adding artificial intelligence to their products: software that has learned how to catch malware on a device. There are two potential problems with that. Either …

Facebook has acquired Ozlo presumably to help the gigantic social network improve its virtual assistant M on its Messenger platform. Based in Palo Alto, California, Ozlo is a startup specializing in trying to get software to understand text. The team built an app fronted by a blue cartoon yeti-like robot, which does things …

DEF CON The world chess champion who was beaten by a computer today told the DEF CON hacking conference that we shouldn’t fear AI systems, but instead need to embrace them. Garry Kasparov was the chess wunderkind of his day but was creamed by IBM’s Deep Blue computer in 1997. That wasn’t even close to being an AI system, he said, …

The electronics markets of Shenzhen are bewildering. These football-field-sized buildings seemingly sell almost anything, any bit of electronics – chip, component, connector – if you know where to look among the myriad stores in the ten-storey towers. To find find what you need in that riot of abundance you have to ask someone …