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The Weekender: Brazilian dance, 'Jungle Book,' and robot wars - The Boston Globe

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It's that time of year: The most prepared of you are carboloading after weeks of training for Marathon Monday, while the least prepared are scrambling to finish your taxes. Either way, surely you'll need some breaks in the pasta and accounting. Should you take your kids to Disney's live-action/CGI remake of its beloved 1967 film "The Jungle Book"? Absolutely, says Ty Burr, who gives three stars to this movie placing "talking animals of almost tactile musculature and movement" in a lush jungle landscape; it holds up right until its overly frenetic final scenes. The jungle beasts are voiced by the likes of Ben Kingsley, Lupita Nyong'o, Bill Murray, Idris Elba, and Scarlett Johanssen, and newcomer Neel Sethi is charming as Mowgli.


Samsung's Artik 10 module gains a key feature: Eyesight's Singlecue gesture control

PCWorld

Can't reach your smartphone to adjust the lighting in your home theater? Eyesight announced at the Samsung Developers Conference Wednesday that it will embed its computer-vision and deep-learning technology into Samsung's Artik 10 Internet of Things module. The companies say this will enable manufacturers to embed gesture-recognition capabilities directly into products such as smart light bulbs. It will also eliminate the need to grab your smartphone to control a device, and it will significantly reduce response time because the processing power will be on the device itself instead of a server in the cloud. Eyesight said it would demonstrate its technology at the conference by using subtle finger movements to control a set of Phillips Hue LED light bulbs.


Bay Labs Launches to Bring Artificial Intelligence to Ultrasounds

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Bay Labs Inc. launched out of stealth mode today to use deep learning to help medical professionals in developing countries interpret ultrasounds so they can better treat heart disease. The company also announced a seed round of 2.5 million led by Khosla Ventures. Deep learning experts Yann LeCun, who serves as the director of AI Research at Facebook, and Nicolas Pinto and Jack Culpepper also invested. Bay Labs founder Charles Cadieu said ultrasound imaging presented the perfect problem to be solved with deep learning because it takes years of training to learn how to read ultrasound imaging. As ultrasound devices become cheaper and cheaper, they are increasingly available but especially in developing or rural areas, there may not be people trained to properly use the device or read the images.


Why fuss over pure math?

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When British mathematician Sir Andrew J. Wiles was awarded the Abel Prize Laureate in math on 15 March for cracking a centuries-old hypothesis, a friend asked me, "Why did he get the prize, and will this solve any real-world problem?" Quoting from the statement that the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters gave to the press, I told him that 63-year-old Wiles had been given the annual award "for his stunning proof of (French mathematician Pierre de) Fermat's last theorem by way of the modularity conjecture for semi-stable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory". So let me try to simplify it a bit. Number theory--also sometimes referred to as the "queen of mathematics" or "higher arithmetic"--is a branch of pure math, devoted primarily to the study of the properties of whole numbers. Fermat--a prominent mathematician of the 17th century--contributed significantly to number theory, probability theory, analytic geometry and the early development of infinitesimal calculus. Fermat's last theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an bn cn for any integer value of n that is greater than two.


ACM's 2016 General Election

Communications of the ACM

The ACM constitution provides that our Association hold a general election in the even-numbered years for the positions of President, Vice President, Secretary/Treasurer, and Members-at-Large. Biographical information and statements of the candidates appear on the following pages (candidates' names appear in random order). In addition to the election of ACM's officers--President, Vice President, Secretary/Treasurer--five Members-at-Large will be elected to serve on ACM Council. Please refer to the instructions posted at https://www.esc-vote.com/acm2016. To access the secure voting site, you will need to enter your email address (the email address associated with your ACM member record) and your unique PIN provided by Election Services Co. Please return your ballot in the enclosed envelope, which must be signed by you on the outside in the space provided. The signed ballot envelope may be inserted into a separate envelope for mailing if you prefer this method. All ballots must be received by no later than 16:00 UTC on 24 May 2016. Validation by the Tellers Committee will take place at 14:00 UTC on 26 May 2016. Vicki Hanson is a Distinguished Professor of Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology, U.S. (since 2013), Professor and Chair of Inclusive Technologies, Computing, University of Dundee, U.K. (since 2009), and an IBM Research Staff Member Emeritus (since 2009). Previously, she was Research Staff Member and Manager, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (1986โ€“2008), Research Associate, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT (1980โ€“86), and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1978โ€“80). Vicki is the ACM Vice President. She also currently serves as a member of the ACM Executive Committee and Council, on the ACM-W Europe Executive Committee, and on the ACM Fellows Awards Committee (Chair, 2015). She is Vice President at Large of ACM SIGCHI and an ACM Distinguished Speaker. She has served on the SIG Governing Board Executive Committee (2005โ€“14; SGB Chair 2010โ€“12), and as Chair of SIGACCESS, where she revitalized the SIG and established a successful annual conference (ASSETS). She co-founded the field's premier archival journal (ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing) and served as Associate Editor of ACM TWEB. She was on the organizing committee for several SIGPLAN OOPSLA conferences, chaired the recent ACM CEO Search Committee, and currently serves on the Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellows committee (since 2013; Convener 2015). She is an ACM Fellow, a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Senior Member of IEEE.


University of Florida Holds First Drone Race Using Mind Control

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The University of Florida held a fully technology-based sport: The world's first brain-controlled drone race. Using their brainwaves, 16 pilots flew drones through an indoor course ten yards long. Both drone-racing and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are not new, but this is the first combination of the two, and it's an efficient method of introducing BCIs to the mainstream eye. BCI is a system that translates brain signals into commands comprehensible to output devices. Most often, this technology is used to allow individuals who are paralyzed to have control of prosthetic limbs.


How Game Theory and Artificial Intelligence Help Wildlife Conservation by Outwitting Poachers

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Poaching is one of the greatest threats in the conservation of wildlife, and even patrol rangers' extreme efforts are not enough to completely fend off poachers, especially in very large protected areas. "In most parks, ranger patrols are poorly planned, reactive rather than pro-active, and habitual," said Fei Fang, a Ph.D. candidate in the computer science department at the University of Southern California, in a statement. With these in mind, researchers, in collaboration with the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office, have developed a new Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based application employing game theory to efficiently map out patrol routes and areas. According to the press release of National Science Foundation, game theory uses mathematical and computer models of conflict and cooperation between rational decision-makers to predict the behavior of adversaries and plan optimal approaches for containment. The application, dubbed "Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security" or PAWS, uses mathematical models to effectively analyze data from previous patrols and evidence of poaching.


Teaching Robots To Be Moral - The New Yorker

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"Chappie," the highest-grossing movie in America last weekend, is, to put it mildly, not a great film; the critics have given it a twenty-nine on Rotten Tomatoes, and it is nowhere near as original as "District 9," an earlier effort by the director, Neill Blomkamp. "Chappie" does not have the philosophical depth of "The Matrix" or the remade "Battlestar Galactica" series. Nor does it have the visual panache of "Interstellar" or "2001." From its opening scene, the film comes across as little more than a warmed-over "RoboCop" remake, relocated to Johannesburg. There's an evil company man, droids that menace the population, and a whole lot of blood, shooting, and broken glass.


How artificial intelligence could stop poachers in their tracks

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With Earth Day come and gone the initiative to save our planet is fresh in our minds. And that's not limited to global warming and putting a stop to pollution; poaching remains a big problem when it comes to preserving the world around us. Luckily researchers have been testing out how we can use scientists to help the fight against poaching. According to Science Daily, organizations such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Army Research Office have teamed up to look into how artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to stop poaching and illegal logging. Led by scientists at the University of South Carolina (USC), researchers have found ways to use game theory, or the mathematical theory of conflict and cooperation, to protect parks in a more proactive way.


To catch wildlife poachers, computer scientists turn to AI

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A team of computer scientists may have developed a surprising way to curb wildlife poaching. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), a team of computer scientists at the University of Southern California (USC) have developed a model for "green security games" that use game theory to protect wildlife from poachers. Game theory uses mathematical equations "to predict the behavior of adversaries and plan optimal approaches for containment," explains NSF, which would allow park rangers to patrol parks and wildlife sanctuaries more effectively. "In most parks, ranger patrols are poorly planned, reactive rather than pro-active and habitual," Fei Fang, a Ph.D. candidate in the computer science department at USC and a researcher involved with the project, tells NSF. "We need to provide actual patrol routes that can be practically followed."