An array of ethnic filters on the photo-editing app, FaceApp, has stirred backlash as users decry the options for facial manipulation as racist. The selfie-editing app, FaceApp, was updated earlier this month with four new filters: Asian, Black, Caucasian and Indian. The filters immediately drew criticism on Twitter by users who made comparisons to blackface and yellowface racial stereotypes. In addition to these blatantly racial face filters – which change everything from hair color to skin tone to eye color – other FaceApp users noted earlier this year that the "hot" filter consistently lightens people's skin color. "#FaceApp has a new feature where you can see yourself #CaucasianLiving. Look how privileged I look!" one of the app's users commented on Twitter.

Like many of the other terms that crop up in conversations about artificial intelligence, neural network, which refers code designed to work like a brain, can be conceptually intimidating. Janelle Shane, however, makes the kind of neural networks that go viral. Her quirky creations autonomously stumble and grumble as they attempt to come up with names of Star Wars character, pick-up lines, and even recipes. Shane rightly warns that you should try the output of that last algorithm "at your own risk," though there's little danger that any human would attempt to: The network's recipe for Beothurtreed Tuna Pie, for example, includes such bafflingly unappetizing ingredients as "1 hard cooked apple mayonnaise" and "5 cup lumps; thinly sliced."

The advent of social media presents a promising new opportunity for early detection and intervention in psychiatric disorders. Predictive screening methods have successfully analyzed online media to detect a number of harmful health conditions [1–11]. All of these studies relied on text analysis, however, and none have yet harnessed the wealth of psychological data encoded in visual social media, such as photographs posted to Instagram. In this report, we introduce a methodology for analyzing photographic data from Instagram to predictively screen for depression. There is good reason to prioritize research into Instagram analysis for health screening.

Andrew Ng is a soft-spoken AI researcher whose online postings talk loudly. A March blog post in which the Stanford professor announced he was leaving Chinese search engine Baidu temporarily wiped more than a billion dollars off the company's value. A June tweet about a new Ng website, Deeplearning.ai, Today that speculation is over. Deeplearning.ai is home to a series of online courses Ng says will help spread the benefits of recent advances in machine learning far beyond big tech companies such as Google and Baidu.

The airline industry could save an estimated $35 Billion with pilotless planes, but the public does not like the idea. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. The airline industry could save an estimated $35 Billion with pilotless planes, but the public does not like the idea.

The Pentagon has sent new guidance to the armed services that lays out the military's authority to disable or shoot down any drone that violates airspace restrictions over a U.S. base and is deemed a security risk. The Pentagon has sent new guidance to the armed services that lays out the military's authority to disable or shoot down any drone that violates airspace restrictions over a U.S. base and is deemed a security risk. Jeff Davis told Pentagon reporters Monday that a classified policy was approved in July. On Friday, additional public information was sent to military bases around the country so officials can alert their communities about the restrictions and the actions the military can take. He said the new policy provides details about the actions the military can take to stop any threat, including destroying or seizing any unmanned aircraft -- including the smaller ones that the general public can easily buy -- that is flown over a base.

When Yoichi Masuda set out to design a new legged robot, he found inspiration in the Martian Tripods from the classic sci-fi novel "The War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells. A three-legged configuration seems to offer some advantages when it comes to walking and balancing, and Masuda became curious about the absence of three-legged animals in nature. Are there evolutionary factors that explain why we haven't seen any? And if three-legged creatures existed, could there be a universal principle of walking locomotion, common for bipeds, tripeds, and quadrupeds? To explore those questions, Masuda and his colleagues at Osaka University built a three-legged robot named Martian.

Genes carry the information that make you you. So it's fitting that, when sequenced and stored in a computer, your genome takes up gobs of memory--up to 150 gigabytes. Multiply that across all the people who have gotten sequenced, and you're looking at some serious storage issues. If that's not enough, mining those genomes for useful insight means comparing them all to each other, to medical histories, and to the millions of scientific papers about genetics. Sorting all that out is a perfect task for artificial intelligence.

Every industry is inching towards automation and the insurance industry is no exception. According to a white paper titled "2017 Future of Claims Study" published by the legal research firm Lexis Nexis, insurance claims are being increasingly processed using drones, artificial intelligence and app-based interfaces as opposed to sending field agents to examine such claims. The study was conducted using a sample size of 24 insurance executives and their opinions on automation in insurance. The push towards automation is largely driven by customers' need for faster and more convenient processing of claims. " While there hasn't yet been a complete shift to Virtual Claims handling, carriers who want to remain competitive will need to make the move to virtual and consider touchless processing if customer preferences are any indication," the study says.

August is supposed to be a slow news month. People plan summer beach vacations on this presumption. Hackers, though, apparently hate sun and sand because this past week has been incredibly active on the security news front. WIRED broke the scoop of leaked audio from Jared Kushner's welcome conversation with west wing interns, which revealed he has a less than nuanced grasp of the details of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict–a global problem he's been taxed with fixing. Making the nightmares of Amazon Echo owners everywhere come true, hackers turned one of those devices into a wiretap.