Delivery drones could get further by taking the bus. By landing on public transport, the little flying vehicles could travel four-and-a-half times as far, making them more useful for carrying packages over longer distances. Drones are agile, fast and energy-efficient, but their measly battery life means they can't fly for long – considerably less than an hour for most consumer drones. That's a problem if you want to deliver packages across a large city so researchers at Stanford University devised a computer program that plans deliveries by getting drones to piggyback on public …

Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail says portraying Elliot (Rami Malek) in a hooded sweatshirt was a deliberate choice: "That hoodie made us closer to who Elliot was." Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail says portraying Elliot (Rami Malek) in a hooded sweatshirt was a deliberate choice: "That hoodie made us closer to who Elliot was." Editor's note: This interview contains a racial slur. Sam Esmail, the creator, lead writer and director of the TV series Mr. Robot, has always identified with computer programming and hacker culture -- in part because of his experiences with social anxiety. In college, he shied away from parties and instead took refuge in the computer lab. It felt safer to talk to people online than in person, Esmail says.

DeepMind says it has created the first artificial intelligence to reach the top league of one of the most popular esport video games. It says Starcraft 2 had posed a tougher AI challenge than chess and other board games, in part because opponents' pieces were often hidden from view. Publication in the peer-reviewed journal Nature allows the London-based lab to claim a new milestone. But some pro-gamers have mixed feelings about it claiming Grandmaster status. DeepMind - which is owned by Google's parent company Alphabet - said the development of AlphaStar would help it develop other AI tools which should ultimately benefit humanity.

Apple customers can now opt out of having their conversations with Siri listened to by human "graders" and delete any clips that have already been uploaded, three months after the Guardian revealed the practice based on a whistleblower report. In the latest software updates for Apple's products, including iOS 13.2 and macOS 10.15.1, users have the option to disable the grading feature while still using Siri as normal. The preferences are not particularly prominent. To opt out of future grading on iOS, in the settings app, under the heading privacy, users can tap on "Analytics & Improvements" then disable the preference to "improve Siri dictation". To delete their uploaded clips, they go to Siri & Search in the settings app, tap on Siri & Dictation History, and then hit a red button marked "Delete Siri & Dictation History".

University of Bristol researchrs developed a handheld robot that predicts a user's plans, then frustrates the user by rebelling against those plans. Researchers at the University of Bristol in the U.K. have developed a handheld robot that predicts a user's plans, and then frustrates the user by rebelling against those plans, demonstrating an understanding of human intention. The robots hold knowledge about the task at hand, and can help the user through guidance, fine-tuned motion, and decisions about task sequences. While the technology helps fulfill tasks quicker and with higher accuracy, users can get irritated when the robot's decisions are not in line with their own plans. The team used a prototype that can track the user's eye gaze, along with machine learning, to derive short-term predictions about intended actions.

Clearly alarmed by shifting public perceptions about facial recognition technology and the potential for state and local governments to impose an outright ban on the use of such technology, tech vendors and other businesses offering facial recognition technology solutions are now mobilizing their forces. They are reaching out to U.S. congressional leadership, urging the House and Senate to re-think any initiatives to impose a "blanket moratorium" on the use of facial recognition technology. And, at the same time, they are rushing to the legal defense of big Silicon Valley tech firms such as Facebook, which is facing a major class action lawsuit in the state of Illinois over the wrongful use of biometric facial data. In one highly public move, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote an open letter on facial recognition technology, which was addressed to the top political leaders in both the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. The letter on facial recognition technology urges political leaders to consider all the positive uses of the technology.

Facial recognition systems are all the rage among government agencies around the world, as they seek to automate services and keep tabs on their citizens. If there's a picture of you somewhere, you could potentially be identified in photos and videos from public camera feeds. Now, Facebook has devised a way to thwart this technology. Its face de-identification tech, developed by three AI researchers who work with the company, modifies your face slightly in video content, so that facial recognition systems can't match what they see in the footage with images of you in their databases. You can see this in action in this video (screenshot above), in which certain details are tweaked, such as the shape of a person's mouth, or the size of their eyes.

Google has its own perfume--or at least one team of the company's researchers does. Crafted under the guidance of expert French perfumers, the mixture has notes of vanilla, jasmine, melon, and strawberries. "It wasn't half bad," says Alex Wiltschko, who keeps a vial of the perfume in his kitchen. Google's not marketing that scent anytime soon, but it is sticking its nose into yet another aspect of our lives: smell. On Thursday, researchers at Google Brain released a paper on the preprint site Arxiv showing how they trained a set of machine-learning algorithms to predict molecules' smell based on their structures.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 24, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MICRON INSIGHT -- Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU), today announced a powerful new set of high-performance hardware and software tools for deep learning applications with the acquisition of FWDNXT, a software and hardware startup. When combined with advanced Micron memory, FWDNXT's (pronounced "forward next") artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and software technology enables Micron to explore deep learning solutions required for data analytics, particularly in IoT and edge computing. With this acquisition, Micron is integrating compute, memory, tools and software into a comprehensive AI development platform. This platform in turn provides the key building blocks required to explore innovative memory optimized for AI workloads. "FWDNXT is an architecture designed to create fast-time-to-market edge AI solutions through an extremely easy to use software framework with broad modeling support and flexibility," said Micron Executive Vice President and Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana.

In April 2019, following the Easter Sunday bomb attacks, the Government of Sri Lanka had to shut down Facebook and YouTube for nine days to stop the spreading of hate speech and false news, posted mainly in the local languages Sinhala and Tamil. This came about simply because these social media platforms did not have the capability to detect and warn about the provocative content. India's Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) wants lectures on Swayama and NPTELb--the online teaching platforms--to be translated into all Indian languages. Approximately 2.5 million students use the Swayam lectures on computer science alone. The lectures are in English, which students find difficult to understand.