Artificial neural networks, layers of interconnected artificial neurons, are of great interest for machine learning tasks such as speech recognition and medical diagnosis. Actually, electronic computing hardware are nearing the limit of their capabilities, yet the demand for greater computing power is constantly growing. Researchers turned themselves to photons instead of electrons to carry information at the speed of light. In fact, not only photons can process information much faster than electrons, but they are the basis of the current Internet, where it is important to avoid the so-called electronic bottleneck (conversion of an optical signal into an electronic signal, and vice versa). The proposed optical neural network is capable of recognizing and processing large-scale data and images at ultra-high computing speeds, beyond ten trillion operations per second.

The recent past has not been especially kind to Intel. The chip giant has been hamstrung by manufacturing delays, remonstrated by activist investors, and beset by competition from familiar rivals like AMD as well as from Apple, whose M1 processor is an unabashed powerhouse. There have been bright spots as well, though, including one announced today: Mobileye, the self-driving car company that Intel acquired for $15 billion in 2017, has put lidar on a chip. Mobileye is not alone in its pursuit of shrinking down lidar in both size and cost; companies like Aeva and Voyant Photonics have developed their own systems as well. Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua doesn't expect his lidar system-on-a-chip to be fully baked until 2025.

The Google Home Mini, like the Amazon Echo Dot, really started the smart speaker revolution -- and while the Google Home Mini launched in 2016, it's still humming along with more smarts than ever before. Right now at StackSocial the Google Home Mini is just $19.99 -- nearly 60% off its original $49.95 price tag. The big appeal of the Home Mini is adding the Google Assistant to your room. You can ask for your favorite music, a trivia game show to entertain the children and even questions. The assistant knows how far Earth is from the sun and the weather in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, alike.

The Tin Woodman first appeared in Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz 120 years ago. Now real robot foresters are making their debut, planting trees rather than cutting them down. The robotic foresters are the work of robot makers Milrem in partnership with the University of Tartu, both based in Estonia. Two versions are under development based on the company's range of driverless ground vehicles. One type is a planter, the other a brush cutter, and both are autonomous.

New York (CNN Business)Disinfectant gadgets, next-generation fitness equipment and robots that help you cook dinner. Those are a few of the countless new products expected to be unveiled next week at the Consumer Electronics Show, the annual splashy tech conference that typically sets the tone for the biggest trends of the year. Home automation, health and 5G will once again be buzzy topics, but many companies will also introduce pandemic-specific features to reflect our increased time at home. Each year, reporters, exhibitors and investors typically explore Las Vegas showrooms filled with giant TVs, smart cars and robots fixing martinis, but CES will be online only for the first time in its 54-year history due to Covid-19. The Consumer Electronics Association, the nonprofit behind the four-day event starting Monday, said 1,800 exhibitors from around the world will fill its "digital venue" this year -- a number that's down significantly from 4,000 in-person exhibitors last year.

You will then learn how to implement these in pythonic and concise PyTorch code, that can be extended to include any future deep Q learning algorithms. These algorithms will be used to solve a variety of environments from the Open AI gym's Atari library, including Pong, Breakout, and Bankheist. You will learn the key to making these Deep Q Learning algorithms work, which is how to modify the Open AI Gym's Atari library to meet the specifications of the original Deep Q Learning papers. Also included is a mini course in deep learning using the PyTorch framework. This is geared for students who are familiar with the basic concepts of deep learning, but not the specifics, or those who are comfortable with deep learning in another framework, such as Tensorflow or Keras.

IJCAI-PRICAI2020, the 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 17th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence starts today and will run until 15 January. Find out what's happening during the event. The conference schedule is here and includes tutorials, workshops, invited talks and technical sessions. There are also competitions, early career spotlight talks, panel discussions and social events. There will be eight invited talks on a wide variety of topics.

Officials at Dulles International Airport in Virginia unveil new biometric facial recognition scanners in September 2018.Bill O'Leary/Getty In 2018, the federal government started scanning people's faces as they drove into and out of the country at the Anzalduas International Bridge, which connects the Rio Grande Valley of Texas to Mexico. Customs and Border Protection said collecting these biometric images would enhance security and make identifying travelers more efficient. But less than a year later, a data breach compromised 100,000 facial images and 105,000 license plate images. Nineteen facial images from the breach were posted to the dark web. Now, CBP wants to expand facial surveillance beyond Anzalduas and other sites that were part of a pilot program, even as the program saw potential security vulnerabilities in at least four airports, according to a report from the Department of Homeland Security inspector general.

Machine-learning approaches are being developed to produce accurate simulations of the structure and chemical bonding of disordered solids and liquids, modelling a sufficient number of atoms to enable direct comparison with experimental data. Writing in Nature, Deringer et al.1 report their use of this approach to probe the structure of amorphous silicon under compression, as the element transforms from semiconducting to metallic states. Their work demonstrates that the structural transformations of amorphous forms of materials can take place much more gradually than those between crystalline phases, and can involve the formation of nanostructured domains and localized atomic arrangements that are not found in any of the crystalline states. Silicon is one of a small class of elements whose density increases on melting2. This unusual behaviour is shared with crystalline ice, which floats on top of liquid water.

Security cameras and facial recognition technology are on the rise in China. In 2018, People's Daily, the media mouthpiece of China's ruling Communist Party, claimed on English-language Twitter that the country's facial recognition system was capable of scanning the faces of China's 1.4 billion citizens in just one second. German journalist Kai Strittmatter speaks fluent Mandarin and has studied China for more than 30 years. He says it's not clear whether or not the Chinese government is capable of using facial recognition software in the way it claims. But he adds, on a certain level, the veracity of the claim isn't important.