Microsoft’s chatbot Xiaoice does a lot more than other bots. She has presented the weather on live TV and now even composed a book of poems. Xiaoice has written 12 million of poems in fact. In a paper on arXiv, researchers from Microsoft, National Taiwan University, and the University of Montreal explained that all text …

AI can help ophthalmologists diagnose more than 50 common eye diseases from retinal scans, according to a paper published in Nature Medicine on Monday. Researchers from DeepMind, University College London (UCL), and Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, have developed a system based on two neural networks that analyses 3D optical …

Machine-learning software has been trained to suggest the frequency and dosage of chemotherapy for patients suffering from glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. We know what you’re thinking: this sounds like a horrifically bad idea. It gets worse when you find out that the model was trained using reinforcement …

Roundup Hello, here are a few bits of AI news for the weekend. You don't always need a ton of cash to buy a wad of GPUs to train your models super quickly. You can do it pretty cheaply on cloud platforms. There's also a robot that can play Where's Waldo (Wally in the UK), and Microsoft's computer that is trying to tell if you've found a …

Comment When Samsung's veep of artificial intelligence strategy, the enigmatic Ji Soo Yi, demonstrated Bixby 2.0 at the chaebol's Galaxy event yesterday, he had to prompt the audience for applause. "You can clap," he urged the attendees after stunned silence met another new feature. This earned instant derision on Twitter, but let's …

Black Hat Here's perhaps a novel use of a neural network: proof-of-concept malware that uses AI to decide whether or not to attack a victim. DeepLocker was developed by IBM eggheads, and is due to be presented at the Black Hat USA hacking conference in Las Vegas on Thursday. It uses a convolutional neural network to stay inert until the …

Vid AI can now beatbox for you for hours on end using your voice, if you're into that kind of thing. Nao Tokui – a visiting associate professor at Kyushu University in California and a CEO of Qosmo, an AI and music startup – has developed a neural-network-based system that collects about 20 seconds of any sound to produce a custom …

Boffin-loving bots are penning potential new Wikipedia pages to recognize the work of notable scientists who are missing from the online encyclopedia. Any human with an internet connection can submit new Wikipedia entries, or edit existing ones. Heck, even AI software can tweak and update the encyclopedia's pages – they even …

Skynet is getting closer. Ish. Artificially intelligent software has now picked up a devastating new skill after observing humans. It can now, er, dribble a basketball. Boomshakalaka! A pair of brainiacs – Jessica Hodgins at Carnegie Mellon University in the US and Libin Liu at DeepMotion, a Silicon Valley startup creating …

Artificial intelligent software has been trained to detect and flag up clickbait headlines. And here at El Reg we say thank God Larry Wall for that. What the internet needs right now is software to highlight and expunge dodgy article titles about space alien immigrants, faked moon landings, and the like. Machine-learning …

Google today somewhat unexpectedly started rolling out to the masses its latest version of Android – dubbed Android 9 Pie. This major build of the mobile operating system is right now being released to Pixel devices as well as the Essential Phone. Google says other Android devices will get the update over the course of this …

OpenAI’s machine learning bots have beaten another team of semi-professionals in Dota 2, in their second public match in the traditional five-versus-five settings. You can watch the action on Twitch – complete with commenters typing in SKYNET! every few seconds – here, or find a summary of the results, here. The human team – …

Roundup Hello, here's a quick roundup of all the mini announcements happening in the world of AI. Raspberry Pi now supports TensorFlow, so you can start your own machine learning projects on the tiny computer. Waymo is beginning to wedge its way into the public transport system in Arizona. AI on Raspberry Pi: The latest version of …

We’ve extended our early bird ticket offer for MCubed, so whether you’ve just come back from hols or are about to get off, you can still save big on our AI and machine learning extravaganza. So, if you want to get to grip with the key theories and tools behind machine learning and AI, see how your peers have put them into …

Pedants, imagine how much more relaxed your life would be if artificial intelligence automatically corrected grammar mistake's in online forum and social network posts. Never again would you explode with frustration and anger over misplaced apostrophe's, commas full stop's and exclamation! marks! The faults could be fixed up …

Faster is always better in AI, although it comes at a price. As researchers strive to train their neural networks at breakneck speeds, the accuracy of their software falls. Thus, teaching machine-learning code at high speed, with the resulting network able to make precise and correct decisions, is a vital goal. To that end, a …

Vid Human hands are surprisingly dexterous: they can knit clothes, stuff delivery packages with things, play the piano, and so on, albeit with practice. Yet if you're worried machines are going to take these pleasures away from us, be assured us mortals can, for now, pick up these skills faster than robots can, judging from the …

Roundup Hello, here's a short roundup of this week's news and announcements in AI, including worrying news for cancer sufferers, good news for human linguists and some new job opportunities. IBM Watson cancer fail: IBM Watson has made several “unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations” to cancer doctors using the technology, …