Alien invasion is a constant theme of Hollywood science fiction, from War of the Worlds to Independence Day. But Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, author of the new book Enlightenment Now, argues that highly developed civilizations tend toward peace and tolerance, and that advanced aliens are much more likely to be friendly. "I think it's not inconceivable that wars between countries will go the way of slave auctions and dueling, just be seen as too ridiculous for any reasonable country to engage in," Pinker says in Episode 296 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. But wouldn't alien brains be so different from ours that it would make mutual understanding impossible? On the contrary, since aliens would have been subject to the same evolutionary pressures as us, they would probably possess an appreciation of science--and maybe even beauty--similar to ours. "It's conceivable that other intelligences have a sense of beauty that is not wildly different from ours," Pinker says, "because they too might be expected to be attuned to counter-entropic forces and patterns in nature."

This article was originally published on ETFTrends.com. First Trust Advisors has come out with its own artificial intelligence and robotics-related exchange traded fund to help investors gain exposure to the growth of innovative cutting-edge technology. First Trust recently launched the First Trust Nasdaq Artificial Intelligence and Robotics ETF (NasdaqGM: ROBT), which has a 0.65% expense ratio and is also the cheapest A.I. and Robotics ETF on the market. The lower expense ratio may be a way for the fund provider to better compete against other options in the space as the company comes late into the robotics and A.I. theme. First Trust Nasdaq Artificial Intelligence and Robotics ETF will try to reflect the performance of the Nasdaq CTA Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Index, which is comprised of companies engaged in the artificial intelligence and robotics segments of the technology, industrial and other economic sectors, according to a prospectus sheet.

We've been hearing for years about the digital transformation of multiple business sectors. And the technology sector is hardly alone in this regard: For the past decade, legacy industries have been making the transition, too,and the result has been massive opportunities for entrepreneurs.

This post was originally published on 26-November-2014 on Linkedin (click here). The evolution of financial payment systems has been a long but interesting journey characterised by sudden changes in underlying technology. Financial payments and banking started in a very inefficient and traditional way which was slow. Though it was still acceptable to the customers due to the stage in the information age. Initially, almost all the fun and joy in terms one double zero percent in shape of activities in the financial services (Except Non-Banking Services) space was attributable to banks with all the revenue being collected by the same entities.

US military says drone strike in Somalia kills 4 al-Shabab extremists; 5th strike this year.

This undated handout photo issued by Counter Terrorism Policing North East shows Sudanese asylum seeker Munir Mohammed. A man and woman who met on a Muslim dating website have been handed prison sentences for plotting an Islamic State-inspired bomb attack in Britain. Prosecutors say Munir Mohammed, an asylum-seeker from Sudan, and London pharmacist Rowaida El-Hassan met on SingleMuslim.com On Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018, judge Michael Topolski sentenced 37-year-old Mohammed to life with no chance of parole for 14 years. El-Hassan, who is 32, was jailed for 12 years, plus five years on probation.

MOGADISHU, Somalia – The United States military for the second straight day is announcing a drone strike that killed al-Shabab extremists in Somalia. The U.S. Africa Command says the strike on Wednesday killed four "terrorists" near Jamaame in Lower Juba region in the south. The statement says the U.S. assesses no civilians were killed. The U.S. on Wednesday said a drone strike killed three al-Shabab extremists near Jilib town in Middle Juba region earlier this week. This latest U.S. drone strike is the fifth this year in Somalia.

LONDON – A man and woman who met on a Muslim dating website have been handed prison sentences for plotting an Islamic State-inspired bomb attack in Britain. Prosecutors say Munir Mohammed, an asylum-seeker from Sudan, and London pharmacist Rowaida El-Hassan met on SingleMuslim.com Last month, a jury at London's Central Criminal Court found them guilty of preparing terrorist acts. On Thursday, judge Michael Topolski sentenced 37-year-old Mohammed to life with no chance of parole for 14 years. El-Hassan, who is 32, was jailed for 12 years, plus five years on probation.

Deep learning is a sub-field of machine learning which uses several learning algorithms to solve real-world tasks as image recognition, facial detection, signal processing, on supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning of feature representation at successively higher, more abstract layers. Those algorithms are artificial models such as Convolution Neural Networks (CNN), Deep Belief Networks (DBNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Auto-encoders (AE). Even with the growth and success on many application of deep learning, some issues still remain unsolved in general. One of these issues is the catastrophic forgetting problem [1]. This issue can be seen as an handicap to develop truly intelligent systems. Catastrophic forgetting arises when a neural network is not capable of preserving the past learned task when learning new task. There are some approaches that benefit from previously learned information to improve performance of learning new information, for example fine-tuning [2] where the parameters of the old task are adjusted for adapting to a new task. Other approach well known is feature extraction [3] where the parameters of the old network are unchanged and the parameters of the outputs of one or more layers are used to extract feature for the new task.