Emerging Tech

Russian President Vladimir Putin last week poked the nest of anxieties over the use of artificial intelligence to gain power in a video address to students at 16,000 selected schools. "Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia but for all humankind," he said. "Whoever becomes the le...

GADGET DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES

Gadget Ogling: Samsung's Return, Ultrasonic Tea, and Roaming Fridges

In 2016, Samsung's smartphone division wasn't so much on the rocks as dangling by a single fingernail, millimeters from plunging into a deep, dark chasm. The Galaxy Note7 had a terrible habit of exploding or catching fire. Not exactly the best look considering people prefer not to be injured while c...

Alexa, Cortana Become New BFFs

Microsoft and Amazon this week announced a deal that will let their voice-controlled digital assistants, Cortana and Alexa, engage in cross-platform communications. Microsoft customers will be able to access Alexa voice commands by saying "Cortana, open Alexa" on any device that supports Cortana, wh...

The SIGGRAPH conference is a year event that focuses on the latest in computer graphics and other interactive arts. It is a multidiscipline show, mixing computer imaging with other physical creations. It is also a crossroads for the film, video game, commercial, research and education industries. It...

Amazon's Alexa has a new musical talent, the company announced Tuesday. "Today, we're making Alexa even smarter with an all-new feature that lets you play music synchronized on multiple Echo devices to provide room-filling music throughout your home," said Amazon Alexa Vice President Toni Reid. Sett...

HP is the new turnaround king -- but is it better than Apple? By "better," I mean a better potential investment. IBM was the king of tech in the 1980s, but in the 1990s it was the king of turnarounds, after almost going under but managing to come back from a negative brand equity, which occurs when ...

Microsoft has unveiled a new deep learning acceleration platform designed for real-time AI, codenamed "Project Brainwave." The platform has three main layers: a high-performance, distributed system architecture; a hardware deep neural network engine synthesized onto field programmable gate arrays; a...

The recent rumor that iRobot had engaged in talks with Apple, Amazon and Google parent Alphabet to sell the data its Roomba vacuum cleaner gathers caused widespread privacy concerns. Roomba maps the environments it works in, and the data it collects would be valuable to any of the major players ba...

ANALYSIS

Merged VR: Augmented Reality Cubed

There is considerable development activity at the high end of hardware and content creation for virtual reality and augmented reality, as well as such AR aliases as mixed reality, extended reality and others. Most industry investment is aimed at leading-edge gaming and industrial application develop...

The folks who made The Emoji Movie apparently were worried about its Rotten Tomatoes score -- it had earned a 0 percent rating at one point, based on a scattering of early reviews -- so they stopped critics from publishing further reviews until just before previews began running. The result was a gr...

"I care about helping more women get into technology, so I spend a lot of time teaching girls from sixth grade to high school so that they're more educated about STEM fields," said CTO Heather Wilde. "I'm also chair of the engineering school's advisory board at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, t...

Developers combing through the code for the Apple HomePod have found clues to what appear to be features in the next generation of iPhones, and they tweeted their discoveries on Sunday. The firmware for HomePod, Apple's $349 smart speaker expected in December, apparently contains much of the codebas...

Two of Silicon Valley's most influential visionaries, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, this week engaged in a public spat over the future of artificial intelligence and whether the government should take the wheel to counter the threat this emerging technology might pose to mank...

The next version of Microsoft's HoloLens may be better at navigating reality than the current version of the mixed-reality headset, thanks to a new coprocessor the company announced Sunday. The second version of HoloLens' custom multiprocessor -- called a "holographic processing unit," or HPU -- wil...

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