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DEAL FOR DELETING? Justice Department reportedly granted Clinton email scrubber immunity

FOX News

The Department of Justice reportedly gave immunity to a computer expert who deleted Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's emails during its investigation into her private email server despite being ordered by Congress to keep them. The New York Times reported Thursday that the Justice Department's immunity deal with Paul Combetta likely means that Republican lawmakers' calls for federal authorities to investigate his deletions will go unheard. The top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, had asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Clinton, her lawyers or Combetta obstructed justice when the emails were deleted in March 2015. The FBI said when Clinton's team called Platte River Networks – the Denver-based IT company where Combetta worked – in March 2015, Combetta said he realized he didn't follow a December 2014 directive from Clinton's lawyers to have the emails deleted. He then used BleachBit to delete the messages in the days after the meeting with her lawyers.


Is AI RACIST? Robot-judged beauty contest picks mostly white winners out of 6,000 contestants

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Just months after Microsoft's Tay artificial intelligence sent racist messages on Twitter, another AI seems to have followed suit. More than 6,000 selfies of individuals who live all over the world and range in ages of 18 to 69 were judged by a robot in a beauty contest last week. But when the results came in, there was something missing - it turned out the robots did not like people with dark skin. The Beauty.AI beauty contest put together of robot judges to determine the winners. Beauty.AI used five algorithms to act as judges in a beauty contest.


Explore the ocean depths with this cute-looking AI robot

#artificialintelligence

This robot dives to depths humans dare not attempt - and it can bring people along for the ride without them getting wet. The Stanford-built OceanOne is filled with compressible oil to offset the crushing pressures experienced when 100 metres underwater, and AI-assisted navigation steers it clear of obstacles. Its operators remain on land, observing on screen everything the robot captures, using joysticks to drive it and guiding its hands through a feedback mechanism that relays tactile sensations. "It's impossible to let a robot act alone in such an environment: it will fail," says Professor Oussama Khatib, OceanOne's creator. "The only way you can guarantee success is connecting a worker through a haptic device to the robot.


How to raise a genius: lessons from a 45-year study of super-smart children

#artificialintelligence

On a summer day in 1968, professor Julian Stanley met a brilliant but bored 12-year-old named Joseph Bates. The Baltimore student was so far ahead of his classmates in mathematics that his parents had arranged for him to take a computer-science course at Johns Hopkins University, where Stanley taught. Having leapfrogged ahead of the adults in the class, the child kept himself busy by teaching the FORTRAN programming language to graduate students. Unsure of what to do with Bates, his computer instructor introduced him to Stanley, a researcher well known for his work in psychometrics -- the study of cognitive performance. To discover more about the young prodigy's talent, Stanley gave Bates a battery of tests that included the SAT college-admissions exam, normally taken by university-bound 16- to 18-year-olds in the United States. Bates's score was well above the threshold for admission to Johns Hopkins, and prompted Stanley to search for a local high school that would let the child take advanced mathematics and science classes.


A beauty contest was judged by AI and the robots didn't like dark skin

#artificialintelligence

The first international beauty contest judged by "machines" was supposed to use objective factors such as facial symmetry and wrinkles to identify the most attractive contestants. After Beauty.AI launched this year, roughly 6,000 people from more than 100 countries submitted photos in the hopes that artificial intelligence, supported by complex algorithms, would determine that their faces most closely resembled "human beauty". But when the results came in, the creators were dismayed to see that there was a glaring factor linking the winners: the robots did not like people with dark skin. Out of 44 winners, nearly all were white, a handful were Asian, and only one had dark skin. That's despite the fact that, although the majority of contestants were white, many people of color submitted photos, including large groups from India and Africa.


Machine learning just got more human with Google's RankBrain

#artificialintelligence

One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction. Ex Machina, a Hollywood blockbuster made on a 15 million budget, tells the story of a programmer who is invited by his employer, the eccentric billionaire Nathan Bateman who built a fictional search engine called Blue Book, to administer the Turing test to an android with artificial intelligence, which essentially determines whether a computer can trick a human into believing she is having a conversation with another human. Everything in our online life is indexed. Every idle tweet, status update, or curious search query feeds the Google database.


Machine learning just got more human with Google's RankBrain

#artificialintelligence

One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction. Ex Machina, a Hollywood blockbuster made on a 15 million budget, tells the story of a programmer who is invited by his employer, the eccentric billionaire Nathan Bateman who built a fictional search engine called Blue Book, to administer the Turing test to an android with artificial intelligence, which essentially determines whether a computer can trick a human into believing she is having a conversation with another human. Everything in our online life is indexed. Every idle tweet, status update, or curious search query feeds the Google database.


Using Deep Learning to Track Poverty with Satellites

#artificialintelligence

Researchers at Stanford University are utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to identify areas of poverty in hard-to-reach places. Publishing their research in Science Magazine, the team consisting of Neal Jean, Marshall Burke, Michael Xie, Matthew Davis, David Lobell, and Stefano Ermon used deep learning algorithms to sort through millions of satellite images to identify economic conditions in five African countries. This research supports a forecast Tractica made over a year ago in our Artificial Intelligence for Enterprise Applications report, that spending on AI software by philanthropy organizations will grow dramatically over the next 10 years. Traditionally, philanthropy organizations have conducted door-to-door surveys to identify people living in poverty, but these surveys are imprecise, time-consuming, and expensive. Many international aid organizations including the World Bank have been trying to use satellite surveys to gather data remotely on developing countries, but the expense of gathering and analyzing this data using conventional methods has proven prohibitive.


Systematic Trading Based on Big Data: Returns Up to 6.85% in 7 Days

#artificialintelligence

Package Name: International Stocks Forecast Length: 7 Days (08/28/2016 – 09/04/2016) I Know First Average: 6.85% The highest returning stock for the 7 days period was. The package's overall average return was 6.85%, providing investors with a 6.35% premium, over the SP500's return of 0.50%, during the same period. Mechel Sp ADR (MTL) engages in mining and steel businesses in Asia,the Russian Federation, the Commonwealth of Independent States, Europe, the Middle East, the United States, and internationally. Mechel PAO works in three different sectors,Mining, Steel, and Power.


Was SpaceX rocket hit by a drone?

Daily Mail - Science & tech

A grainy video uploaded to YouTube appears to show a small object flying over the SpaceX rocket moments before it exploded. SpaceX said an'anomaly' had occurred while the rocket was being loaded with fuel. No was injured in the blast. The rocket's payload, an Israeli-built communications satellite for Facebook due to launch on Saturday, was also destroyed. A video of the blast, posted to the site by Steve Svensson, appears to show a silver spherical object flying close to rocket when the blast happened.