AI & Robotics

What might be the key to chatbots or voice-enabled assistants that respond in more natural, human-like ways? Researchers at Rasa, a Berlin, Germany-based startup developing a standard infrastructure layer for conversational AI, believe selective attention might play an outsized role. In a preprint paper published this week on Arxiv.org, they detail a system that can selectively ignore or attend to…

Border gateway protocol (BGP), a routing protocol used to transfer data and information between different host gateways, is fundamental to the internet’s design. Unfortunately, it’s flawed in two respects: It lacks route authentication and basic origin validation. That makes BGP liable to cause connectivity issues in the event of misconfigurations, and worrisomely opens the door to malicious…

Rovio’s Angry Birds, a title that tasks players with slingshotting colorful fowl toward ill-intentioned, egg-stealing swine, has been characterized by one reviewer as “one of the most mainstream games out right now.” It’s spawned dozens of graphic novels and books (including cookbooks), two movies, and four animated series, not to mention countless spinoff games on mobile and other…

Following the success of its Stranger Things and Dark Crystal games, Netflix is adding another title to its gaming catalog: The 3% Challenge, based on hit Brazilian series 3%. The free-to-play episodic game, coming to Amazon Alexa today and Google Assistant later this week, is a prequel to the Netflix series, taking players into a dystopian future where citizens of the impoverished Inland…