Facebook's Connectivity Lab today released its high-resolution population maps for Malawi, South Africa, Ghana, Haiti and Sri Lanka, with the promise to make more datasets available over the coming months. The population maps are a joint effort between the Facebook Connectivity Lab, Columbia University and the World Bank, though Facebook is interested in the project as part of its effort to launch wireless communication services in rural regions around the globe. Facebook and friends used software to identify buildings in commercially available satellite images, and then estimated population using census data and a few other surveys and programs. Convolutional neural networks powered a model capable of identifying individual buildings in images from across the world. "There has been a lot of work recently on neural networks that can recognize individual buildings with very high accuracy, but these models are finely tuned on the local characteristics of the region where they are trained," the Connectivity Lab's Tobias Tiecke writes. "We found that these models do not perform well at a global scale with realistic amounts of training data.

UNITED NATIONS – U.N. member states on Tuesday condemned widespread human rights violations in North Korea and expressed concerns that funds needed to ease the dire humanitarian crisis are spent on Pyongyang's missile and nuclear arms programs. A resolution drafted by Japan and the European Union was adopted by a consensus vote in the General Assembly's committee on humanitarian affairs. Following the vote, diplomats from China, Pyongyang's ally, Russia, Syria, Iran and Cuba took the floor to state they were disassociating themselves from the outcome. The full General Assembly is expected to vote on the measure next month. North Korea has conducted two nuclear tests this year and test-fired a series of missiles, even as 18 million North Koreans out of a total population of 25 million are facing food shortages, Japan's ambassador said. "The authorities of the DPRK (North Korea), without regard to the plight of their own citizens, divert their limited resources to develop weapons of mass destruction," said Ambassador Koro Bessho.

President-elect Donald Trump will be able to employ deadly drone strikes largely at his discretion if current guidelines remain in place. And President Barack Obama has no plans to change those rules before he leaves office, the Guardian reported Tuesday. The next president will inherit the so-called drones "playbook" created by the Obama administration in 2013 that dictated policy on drone strikes, the president's main way of striking against terrorism. Since drone usage began under the administration of President George W. Bush, thousands of people have been killed through the targeted strikes from unmanned aircraft and many nations across the globe consider the standards the U.S. applies for drone strikes to be too secretive. "Maybe on the left no one would believe that Trump has a steady hand, but Obama has normalized the idea that presidents get to have secret large-scale killing programs at their disposal," Naureen Shah of Amnesty International USA told the Guardian.

Spending on cognitive systems and artificial intelligence (AI) across a broad range of industries will drive worldwide revenues from nearly $8.0 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020. In its Worldwide Semiannual Cognitive/Artificial Intelligence Systems Spending Guide IDC said the market for cognitive/AI solutions will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 55.1 per cent over the 2016-2020 forecast period. According to David Schubmehl, research director, Cognitive Systems and Content Analytics at IDC, "Software developers and end user organizations have already begun the process of embedding and deploying cognitive/artificial intelligence into almost every kind of enterprise application or process" "Recent announcements by several large technology vendors and the booming venture capital market for AI startups illustrate the need for organizations to be planning and undertaking strategies that incorporate these wide-ranging technologies," he said. Schubmehl said identifying, understanding, and acting on the use cases, technologies, and growth opportunities for cognitive/AI systems will be a differentiating factor for most enterprises and the digital disruption caused by these technologies will be significant. The ability to recognize and respond to data flows using algorithms and rule-based logic enables cognitive/AI systems to automate a broad range of functions across many industries.

Once the preserve of science-fiction movies, artificial intelligence is one of the hottest areas of research right now. While the idea behind AI is to make our lives easier, there is concern that as the technology becomes more advanced, we may be heading for disaster. How can we be sure, for instance, that artificially intelligent robots will make ethical choices? There are plenty of instances of artificial intelligence gone wrong. The case of the rude and racist chatbot** Chatbot Tay, Microsoft's AI millennial chatbot, was meant to be a friendly chatbot that would sound like a teenage girl and engage in light conversation with her followers on Twitter.

Anthony Foxx waits for the countdown, then hits the plunger. The catapult releases its bungee cord, slinging the drone from to a standstill to 50 mph in half a second. The drone spins up its twin propellers and flies a few hundred feet up, circling overhead. "That's amazing," Foxx says, as the UAV drops its package within a few feet of the practice delivery zone, then belly flops onto a brown landing pad that resembles the base of a jumping castle. During the closing months of his four-year run as US Secretary of Transportation, Foxx has come to California on a fact finding mission.

Behavioural change is a very tricky thing. We humans are so fickle. We see a bright shiny wearable device that can track our every move and we think it's our "silver bullet", a "ticket" to achieving our health and fitness dreams. Only for guilt to set in, as after a short time, the wearable device winds up in our top drawer. We knew the fitness data was great, but we really didn't know what to do with it. The truth is, behaviour change requires much more than data. Many programs have realized the magnitude of the problem and created incentive programs to reward people for being active, so they get a small pay-off on the road to achieving fitness. But in spite of these rewards, the drop-out rate remains problematic.

Investors believe it is'inevitable' that artificial intelligence will destroy millions of jobs and that governments are unprepared for such an impact, according to a new survey. Artificial intelligence (AI), or the process by which computers or robots take on tasks that need human intelligence, is one of the key themes of this week's Web Summit in Lisbon. The poll among 224 venture capitalists attending the conference showed 53 percent believed AI would destroy millions of jobs and 93 percent saw governments as unprepared for this. The poll among 224 venture capitalists attending the Web summit in Lisbon found 53 percent believed AI would destroy millions of jobs and 93 percent saw governments as unprepared for this. The survey also found that 83 percent of the investors canvassed expect Britain's exit from the European Union to damage Europe's economy and 77 percent believe it will damage British startups.

At the recent Spark & Machine Learning Meetup in Brussels, Koen Dejonghe of Eurocontrol delivered a lightning talk titled "Simulation and processing of data streams in telecommunications." Specifically, Koen discussed the development of a prototype for processing of data coming from cell towers, executed for a telco operator in the Middle East--with the added difficulty that the customer could not provide real data. In the end, Koen developed a data generator in Scala/Akka, a data processor with Spark Streaming, and a visualization front-end with Node.js.

A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occurs involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.[1] The content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood, though they have been a topic of scientific speculation, as well as a subject of philosophical and religious interest, throughout recorded history. The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology.[2] Dreams mainly occur in the rapid-eye movement (REM) stage of sleep--when brain activity is high and resembles that of being awake. REM sleep is revealed by continuous movements of the eyes during sleep. At times, dreams may occur during other stages of sleep. However, these dreams tend to be much less vivid or memorable.[3] The length of a dream can vary; they may last for a few seconds, or approximately 20–30 minutes.[3] People are more likely to remember the dream if they are awakened during the REM phase. The average person has three to five dreams per night, and some may have up to seven;[4] however, most dreams are immediately or quickly forgotten.[5] Dreams tend to last longer as the night progresses. During a full eight-hour night sleep, most dreams occur in the typical two hours of REM.[6] In modern times, dreams have been seen as a connection to the unconscious mind. They range from normal and ordinary to overly surreal and bizarre. Dreams can have varying natures, such as being frightening, exciting, magical, melancholic, adventurous, or sexual. The events in dreams are generally outside the control of the dreamer, with the exception of lucid dreaming, where the dreamer is self-aware.[7]