Enlarge / A rendering of 851 W. Randolph Street in Chicago. Last year, a report from the Chicago Tribune claimed that Google was "close to finalizing a lease" for a flagship retail store in Chicago. The 14,000-square-foot space would have been Google's first major retail space that wasn't a temporary pop-up store or a demo…

Data ethics is now a cause célèbre. “Digital ethics and privacy” shot into research and advisory company Gartner’s top ten strategic technology trends for 2019. Before that it barely raised a mention. In the past year governments, corporations and policy and technology think tanks have published data ethics guides. An entire cohort of expert data…

Google's teaser #1. Teaser #2. The mid-range Pixel 3. The back has this strange "C" logo. A headphone jack! These slots on the bottom edge are new. With the missing bottom-front speaker grille, at least one of these is probably a speaker. A neon power button. A few years have gone by since we've seen…

Winter isn’t coming. At least not for the world of artificial intelligence. Jeff Bigham, program director of the Human-computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon, believes we’ll soon reap the bounties of an AI autumn instead. An AI winter is a period in which research and funding freeze up and it becomes difficult to break new…

Enlarge / Shadow Fiend, looking shadowy and fiendish. Over the past several years, OpenAI, a startup with the mission of ensuring that "artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity," has been developing a machine-learning-driven bot to play Dota 2, the greatest game in the universe. Starting from a very cut-down version of the full game,…

Google is digesting its third whopping antitrust penalty from the European Commission, having been fined €1.5 billion (£1.3 billion) for abusing its market dominance around online advertising. The case concerned web publishers embedding a Google-powered search engine on their site, and being prevented from letting third parties place search adverts at the top of search…

The absolute final vote on the incredibly controversial Copyright Reform was held today, with 19 EU member states voting in favor of making it EU law. Despite the Netherlands, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Finland, and Sweden voting against the Copyright Reform — and Estonia, Belgium, and Slovenia abstaining — it’ll now be mandatory for all EU…

Reminders of the fragility of our bodies are unavoidable. You just have to hope that your next injury won’t be too painful or long-lasting. My most recent started in 2014, with knee pain. It felt like a little electric shock to the outside of the knee joint. At first it was the odd jab, the kind…

Credit: howwegettonext.com NASA spent much of the 20th century commissioning painters and illustrators to imagine the future of space exploration. When Jeff Norris, the head of Mission Operations Innovation at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), wanted a way to inspire a new generation of potential engineers, scientists, and astronauts, he turned to a modern alternative to those…

Separating the futuristic from the dystopian in the minds of the general public can be a challenge, particularly when trying to conceptualize a diverse technology such as AI recognition. In today’s markets, a tangible example can be seen in consumer products such as the iPhone XS, with its Face ID facial-recognition unlocking. By and large,…