Stories by Katherine Noyes

5 tech trends that have Turing Award winners worried

Technology has considerable potential to make the world better, but those benefits are far from guaranteed. Plenty of downsides can pop up along the way, and some of them have Turing Award winners especially worried.

This new imaging system can read closed books

They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but a new imaging system from MIT can see right through the cover and read the book while it's still closed.

High technology: How IT is fueling the budding cannabis industry

The goal is to track every plant, product and person associated with the production and sale of marijuana and maintain legal compliance.

This new Skype bot lets you chat with Spock

Microsoft has made no secret of its grand plans for chat bots, and this week it rolled out five new ones for Skype. Surely the most fun is "Spock," a bot that promises to help you "learn the ways of Vulcan logic."

Don't look now, but Harry Potter's invisibility cloak just got a big step closer

Harry Potter fans, take note: Scientists have made an object "disappear" using a cloaking device similar in many ways to the invisibility cloak imagined by author J.K. Rowling.

How 'human-aware' AI could save us from the robopocalypse

Much virtual ink gets spilled each week enumerating the many horrors that could be ours in an AI-filled world, but top researchers in the field are already thinking ahead and making plans to ensure none of that happens.

Google's AI is learning how to save your life

AlphaGo's uncanny success at the game of Go was taken by many as a death knell for the dominance of the human intellect, but Google researcher David Silver doesn't see it that way.

Deep learning wins the day in Amazon's warehouse robot challenge

Amazon is always on the lookout for new robotic technologies to improve efficiency in its warehouses, and this year deep learning appears to be leading the way.

These graduate students had no idea their teaching assistant was a robot

On the Internet, "nobody knows you're a dog," as the old meme goes, and today, the same can increasingly be said of robots.

What do you get when you cross Star Wars and famous art? This algorithm can show you

Artificial intelligence has been dabbling in art to increasing acclaim over the past few months, but a new study brings its uncanny proficiency to the far-more-complicated world of video.

MIT uses 4D maps to help robot teams navigate moving obstacles

It's one thing to keep robots from crashing into fixed obstacles like walls or furniture, but preventing collisions with other moving things is a much tougher challenge.

This big-data startup combines AI with human savvy to help make sense of your data

Spare5 on Wednesday released a new platform that applies a combination of human insight and machine learning to help companies make sense of unstructured data.

'Your face is big data:' The title of this photographer's experiment says it all

Got privacy? You may think you do, but a recent experiment by a Russian photographer suggests otherwise.

IBM puts Watson to work on cancer with new patient-advisor tool

IBM has announced a new weapon in the battle against cancer that will put Watson to work in a new way.

This little robot wants to help you shop

SoftBank's Pepper robot may still be the better-known contender, but a new humanoid device from Hitachi aims to be the in-store sales rep of the future.