Fruit flies: Summer pests or scientific marvel?

Fly-swatting season is here. No sooner will you place your fresh strawberries on the kitchen counter than will the first fruit fly arrive. It won't take long for a platoon of Drosophila buddies to be hovering about the spoils.

Teaching computers to see—by learning to see like computers

Object-recognition systems—software that tries to identify objects in digital images—typically rely on machine learning. They comb through databases of previously labeled images and look for combinations of visual features ...

Context is ev ... well, something, anyway

Today, computers can't reliably identify the objects in digital images. But if they could, they could comb through hours of video for the two or three minutes that a viewer might be interested in, or perform web searches ...