In order to make the task, description of planning domains and problems, more comprehensive for non-experts in planning, the visual representation has been used in planning domain modeling in recent years. However, current knowledge engineering tools with visual modeling, like itSIMPLE (Vaquero et al. 2012) and VIZ (Vodr\'a\v{z}ka and Chrpa 2010), are less efficient than the traditional method of hand-coding by a PDDL expert using a text editor, and rarely involved in finetuning planning domains depending on the plan validation. Aim at this, we present an integrated development environment KAVI for planning domain modeling inspired by itSIMPLE and VIZ. KAVI using an abstract domain knowledge base to improve the efficiency of planning domain visual modeling. By integrating planners and a plan validator, KAVI proposes a method to fine-tune planning domains based on the plan validation.

Gaps in maps are a problem, particularly for systems being developed for self-driving cars. To address the issue, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have created RoadTracer, an automated method to build road maps that's 45 percent more accurate than existing approaches. Using data from aerial images, the team says that RoadTracer is not just more accurate, but more cost-effective than current approaches. MIT professor Mohammad Alizadeh says that this work will be useful both for tech giants like Google and for smaller organizations without the resources to curate and correct large amounts of errors in maps. "RoadTracer is well-suited to map areas of the world where maps are frequently out of date, which includes both places with lower population and areas where there's frequent construction," says Alizadeh, one of the co-authors of a new paper about the system.

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos tours the facility at the grand opening of the Amazon Spheres in Seattle on Jan. 29, 2018. Amazon's Jeff Bezos said it counts more than 100 million paying members for Amazon Prime, the delivery and content business that's at the heart of its sales growth. The CEO and founder, in his annual letter to shareholders, said last year more members joined Prime than in any previous year. Prime subscribers spend a lot more on Amazon -- $1,300 per year on average -- compared to about $700 for non-Prime members, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. "One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up," said Bezos. We didn't ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday's'wow' quickly becomes today's'ordinary'. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before – in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something's in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well.

Spotify is beginning to roll out a re-design of its mobile app to select users of its free-tier service. The changes, which include more control over playlists, will allow Spotify to make its free version behave more like a Premium account in a bid to boost user numbers. The update is currently in testing and has only been rolled out to a small amount of users. The search page has had a slight overhaul, with colourful tabs indicating different genres and a glimpse at what artists are contained in each playlist. The revamped bottom bar is a new'Premium' button to allow users to easily upgrade to the premium version of the app Rumours of the mobile update were unveiled last week by Bloomberg.

A shocking video of Barack Obama has been making the rounds on the internet showing the former president calling Donald Trump a'total and complete dips***'. If you didn't know any better, you might think the video is real. In actuality, what appears to be Obama's voice is actually words spoken by'Get Out' director and writer Jordan Peele. Peele's voice and mouth were digitally inserted into the video using a sophisticated, but increasingly commonplace, technology that's powered by artificial intelligence, called'deepfakes'. The video appears to be of former president Barack Obama giving an address.

It is the cause of countless marital rows over mislaid allen keys and baffling instructions. But while trying to build Ikea furniture can ruin a weekend for many couples, the robots at least have got it sussed. Robots can build an Ikea chair in under nine minutes, mechanical engineers have discovered, after being programmed to fit the parts together perfectly. People, according to Ikea, take 10 to 15 minutes on average to build the same item of furniture. Robots can build an Ikea chair in under nine minutes, mechanical engineers have discovered, after being programmed to fit the parts together perfectly.

Apparently, one of the standards by which we should be measuring the progress of useful robotic manipulation is through the assembly of Ikea furniture. With its minimalistic and affordable Baltoscandian design coupled with questionably creditable promises of effortless assembly, Ikea has managed to convince generations of inexperienced and desperate young adults (myself included) that we can pretend to be grownups by buying and putting together our own furniture. It's never as easy as that infuritatingly calm little Ikea manual dude makes it look, though, and in terms of things we wish robots would solve, Ikea furniture assembly has ended up way higher on the priority list than maybe it should be. We've seen a variety of robotic systems tackle Ikea in the past, but today in Science Robotics is (perhaps for the first time) a mostly off-the-shelf system of a few arms and basic sensors that can put together the frame of a Stefan chair kit autonomously(ish) and from scratch. This research comes from the Control Robotics Intelligence (CRI) group at NTU in Singapore, and they've been working on the whole Ikea chair assembly thing for a while.

A representative 2D semiconductor is graphene, which consists of a honeycomb lattice of carbon atoms that is just one atom thick. The development of van der Waals heterostructures has been restricted by the complicated and time-consuming manual operations required to produce them. That is, the 2D crystals typically obtained by exfoliation of a bulk material need to be manually identified, collected, and then stacked by a researcher to form a van der Waals heterostructure. Now, a Japanese research team led by the Institute of Industrial Science at The University of Tokyo has solved this issue by developing an automated robot that greatly speeds up the collection of 2D crystals and their assembly to form van der Waals heterostructures. The robot consists of an automated high-speed optical microscope that detects crystals, the positions and parameters of which are then recorded in a computer database.

Putting together flat-pack furniture can be arduous and frustrating. So why not let robots do it instead? A pair of robot arms can now assemble an IKEA chair in just a few minutes, and without arguing too. The setup consists of two industrial robot arms with grippers and force sensors, all watched over by a 3D camera. To start things off, parts of an IKEA STEFAN chair are jumbled up and dumped in front of the arms.

And just like that, humanity draws one step closer to the singularity, the moment when the machines grow so advanced that humans become obsolete: A robot has learned to autonomously assemble an Ikea chair without throwing anything or cursing the family dog. Researchers report today in Science Robotics that they've used entirely off-the-shelf parts--two industrial robot arms with force sensors and a 3-D camera--to piece together one of those Stefan Ikea chairs we all had in college before it collapsed after two months of use. From planning to execution, it only took 20 minutes, compared to the human average of a lifetime of misery. It may all seem trivial, but this is in fact a big deal for robots, which struggle mightily to manipulate objects in a world built for human hands. To start, the researchers give the pair of robot arms some basic instructions--like those cartoony illustrations, but in code.