A Palestinian man uses a biometric gate as he crosses into Israel at the Qalandia crossing in Jerusalem in July. Israel's military has invested tens of millions of dollars to upgrade West Bank crossings and ease entry for Palestinian workers. But critics slam the military's use of facial recognition technology as problematic. A Palestinian man uses a biometric gate as he crosses into Israel at the Qalandia crossing in Jerusalem in July. Israel's military has invested tens of millions of dollars to upgrade West Bank crossings and ease entry for Palestinian workers.

Science has always hinged on the idea that researchers must be able to prove and reproduce the results of their research. Simply put, that is what makes science...science. Yet in recent years, as computing power has increased, the cloud has taken shape, and data sets have grown, a problem has appeared: it has becoming increasingly difficult to generate the same results consistently--even when researchers include the same dataset. "One basic requirement of scientific results is reproducibility: shake an apple tree, and apples will fall downwards each and every time," observes Kai Zhang, an associate professor in the department of statistics and operations research at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "The problem today is that in many cases, researchers cannot replicate existing findings in the literature and they cannot produce the same conclusions. This is undermining the credibility of scientists and science. It is producing a crisis."

The two biggest barriers to the use of machine learning (both classical machine learning and deep learning) are skills and computing resources. You can solve the second problem by throwing money at it, either for the purchase of accelerated hardware (such as computers with high-end GPUs) or for the rental of compute resources in the cloud (such as instances with attached GPUs, TPUs, and FPGAs). On the other hand, solving the skills problem is harder. Data scientists often command hefty salaries and may still be hard to recruit. Google was able to train many of its employees on its own TensorFlow framework, but most companies barely have people skilled enough to build machine learning and deep learning models themselves, much less teach others how.

NAGOYA – The approval rate for visa applications by nationals of countries such as Myanmar and Bangladesh to study at Japanese-language schools from April is sharply down from the same month last year, school operators in Japan said Wednesday. The plunge in the percentage of visas that were approved appears to reflect efforts to crack down on foreign nationals who enter the nation to work under the guise of being students. A survey by the Japanese Language School Association in Tokyo showed that student visas were granted to just 15 percent of applicants from Myanmar, down sharply from the 76 percent approval rate seen last year, and to 21 percent of Bangladeshi applicants, down from 61 percent. The success rate for Sri Lankan applicants was 21 percent, down from 50 percent. The survey drew responses from 327 of the 708 Japanese-language schools throughout the country and collected figures regarding applications for student resident status from April, when such applications peak with the start of the new academic year.

The company hopes doing so will let any developer deliver captions for long-form conversations. The source code is available now on GitHub. Google released Live Transcribe in February. The tool uses machine learning algorithms to turn audio into real-time captions. Unlike Android's upcoming Live Caption feature, Live Transcribe is a full-screen experience, uses your smartphone's microphone (or an external microphone), and relies on the Google Cloud Speech API.

Privacy campaigners have warned of an "epidemic" of facial recognition use in shopping centres, museums, conference centres and other private spaces around the UK. An investigation by Big Brother Watch (BBW), which tracks the use of surveillance, has found that private companies are spearheading a rollout of the controversial technology. The group published its findings a day after the information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, announced she was opening an investigation into the use of facial recognition in a major new shopping development in central London. Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has already raised questions about the legality of the use of facial recognition at the 27-hectare (67-acre) Granary Square site in King's Cross after its owners admitted using the technology "in the interests of public safety". BBW said it had uncovered that sites across the country were using facial recognition, often without warning visitors.

Japan has told the United States it is ready to provide its robot technology for use in dismantling nuclear and uranium enrichment facilities in North Korea as Washington and Pyongyang pursue further denuclearization talks, government sources said Friday. As Japan turns to the remotely controlled robots it has developed to decommission reactors crippled by the triple core meltdown in 2011 at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, it believes the same technology can be used in North Korea, according to the sources. The offer is part of Japan's efforts to make its own contribution to the denuclearization talks amid concern that Tokyo could be left out of the loop as the United States and North Korea step up diplomacy. Tokyo has already told Washington it would shoulder part of the costs of any International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of North Korean facilities and dispatch its own nuclear experts to help. The scrapping of nuclear facilities, such as the Yongbyon complex, which has a graphite-moderated reactor, will come into focus in forthcoming working-level talks between Washington and Pyongyang.

Martin Spano is the author of Artificial Intelligence in a Nutshell, a book that explores the mystified subject of artificial intelligence (AI) with simple, non-technical language. Spano's passion for AI began after he watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, but he insists this ever-changing technology is not just the subject for sci-fi novels and movies; artificial intelligence is present in our everyday lives. Alex Krizhevsky was born in Ukraine but lived most of his life in Canada. After finishing his undergraduate studies, he continued as a postgraduate under the supervision of Geoffrey Hinton, legendary computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, one of the foremost advocates of using artificial neural networks for artificial intelligence. Krizhevsky stumbled upon an algorithm by Hinton that used graphics cards instead of processors for its execution.

The UK's privacy watchdog has opened an investigation into the use of facial recognition cameras in a busy part of central London. The information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, announced she would look into the technology being used in Granary Square, close to King's Cross station. Two days ago the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, wrote to the development's owner demanding to know whether the company believed its use of facial recognition software in its CCTV systems was legal. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said it was "deeply concerned about the growing use of facial recognition technology in public spaces" and was seeking detailed information about how it is used. "Scanning people's faces as they lawfully go about their daily lives in order to identify them is a potential threat to privacy that should concern us all," Denham said.

A team of researchers at Japan's Keio university have built a robotic tail. Dubbed'Arque', the grey one-metre device mimics tails such as those of cheetahs and monkeys, used to keep balance while running and climbing