X Prize to demonstrate artificial intelligence is humanity's friend, not foe

An X Prize unveiled on Wednesday promised millions of dollars to a team that could best show that artificial intelligence is humanity's friend, not its enemy.
X Prize founder Peter Diamandis and the newly-appointed head of Watson at US technology veteran IBM David Kenny challenged software savants to demonstrate "how humans can collaborate with powerful cognitive and AI technologies capable of solving some of the world's grand challenges."
Diamandis and Kenny announced a $5 million X Prize on the stage of a prestigious annual TED Conference here, telling the audience it would be here that the ultimate winner would be picked by the audience in the year 2020.
"Personally, I am sick and tired of the dystopian conversation around artificial intelligence," Diamandis said, referring to high-profile public debate whether self-aware and smart machines would annihilate humanity or help it thrive.
Diamandis weighed in on the side of AI being vital to surmounting huge problems in the world and hoped that would be made clear when three finalists for the new prize take to the TED stage in four years.
Competing teams will be free to define challenges their AI creations are designed to tackle.
A half-million dollars in prize money will be awarded during an elimination process at IBM World of Watson conferences intended to whittle the field down to three teams that will use AI to deliver "jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring" TED talks.
Conference attendees will pick the one they think is best. The winning team will get $4.5 million in Watson X Prize money.
"X PRIZE and IBM believe that the partnership between humans and technology has produced some of society's most groundbreaking modern advancements, from landing a man on the moon to addressing climate change to mapping the human genome," the AI prize partners said in a joint release.
"We believe there's an opportunity today for others to push the boundaries yet again."
Teaching machines to think the way people do has been a hot topic in technology, with companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple working to build smarts into services or products.
Watson, which gained fame in 2011 for defeating human opponents on the "Jeopardy" quiz show, has been reaching into its computing power since then for an array of other services.
The quest to build real brains into machines has caused some to fear it could turn on humanity in terrifying ways depicted in science fiction films along the lines of "The Terminator."

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

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