Long lines and lengthy waits for round after round of security checks are di rigueur at major events in China such as the annual meetings of its legislature. That may change in the near future with the use of facial recognition to red-flag people for further screening while allowing others to proceed, speeding up the process of letting thousands of delegates, journalists and staff into the Great Hall of the People, according to Baidu CEO Robin Li Yanhong, whose company is testing such a system at airports. "The measures to verify identification, such as the tight security checks during the Two Sessions, have brought inconvenience to people's lives," said Li, who is a delegate to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. "Most of the time, people's identification is done manually, which I think will be completely unnecessary in the future," he told mainland Chinese media ahead of the event. Li's comments highlight the growing use of facial recognition in security applications in China, part of the nation's wider push to lead the world in artificial intelligence and a desire by the central government to improve public safety through surveillance of citizens.

We present the first framework for Gaussian-process-modulated Poisson processes when the temporal data appear in the form of panel counts. Panel count data frequently arise when experimental subjects are observed only at discrete time points and only the numbers of occurrences of the events between subsequent observation times are available. The exact occurrence timestamps of the events are unknown. The method of conducting the efficient variational inference is presented, based on the assumption of a Gaussian-process-modulated intensity function. We derive a tractable lower bound to alleviate the problems of the intractable evidence lower bound inherent in the variational inference framework. Our algorithm outperforms classical methods on both synthetic and three real panel count sets.

Humans must prioritise the colonisation of Mars so the species can be conserved in the event of a third world war, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk said on Sunday. "It's important to get a self-sustaining base on Mars because it's far enough away from earth that [in the event of a war] it's more likely to survive than a moon base," Musk said on stage at SXSW – just days after Donald Trump announced plans to meet the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, in an attempt to defuse rising nuclear tension. "If there's a third world war we want to make sure there's enough of a seed of human civilisation somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages," Musk said, responding to questions from his friend Jonah Nolan, co-creator of TV show Westworld. SpaceX is working on a vehicle that will take humans to Mars, a 100-metre ship codenamed the BFR (Big Fucking Rocket). But building a colony would require "tremendous entrepreneurial resources", Musk said. He also countered the suggestion that Mars might be "some escape hatch for rich people" by highlighting the risks of the mission: "It will be like Shackleton's ad for Antarctic explorers: 'Difficult, dangerous, a good chance you'll die, excitement for those who survive.' "There's not many people who will want to go in the beginning," he said, adding that over time the Red Planet colony would be hospitable and have "great bars.

I recently spoke at a panel/debate at the World Government Summit in Dubai and also attended the AI Roundtable organized by the AI society at Harvard Kennedy school of government. The topic discussed was "Is a machine-driven world better? I was on the side of the Machines. Not an easy debate – someone referred to us as the'evil team'! After the panel, I shared my thoughts with Gregory Piatetsky Shapiro. Gregory motivated me to also consider the contra perspective i.e. the risks of an AI driven world.

As a social bot, Microsoft's Zo is always available to play or talk on select platforms where people message and chat. Now, Exploding Kittens, the history-making card game that became an award-winning app, is turning to Microsoft's Zo to offer its first single-player version for fans. On Wednesday, Microsoft and the team behind Exploding Kittens announced a new, free version of the popular, award-winning game, which users can play one on one with Zo. Currently, it's being made available exclusively by chatting with Zo through Facebook Messenger (m.me/Zo), kik (kik.me/zo.ai) To play, start a conversation with Zo and ask if she'd like to play Exploding Kittens by texting "play EK".

Ant Financial, the payment services provider owned by Chinese online retail giant Alibaba, has indicated that it will invest approximately $150 million in Indian firm, Zomato. This places the value of Zomato, a food delivery firm, at $1 billion. Zomato offers its services in a total of 24 countries and will allocate the funds to the improvement of products as well as technology. The investment by the Alibaba unit in Zomato comes in the wake of the e-commerce giant partnering with Singapore's Nanyang Technological University to put up its first joint research center located abroad. The center will focus on the development of artificial intelligence aimed at solving modern challenges such as urban transport and ageing societies.

The ice hockey fan only wanted to get a quick ride to the next venue, and now he appears to be taking a trip into the future. The young man from Canada is sitting in one of the five Nexos that Hyundai brought to Pyeongchang to demonstrate the current state of research on automated driving. For two weeks, the unremarkable SUV ferried people between sports venues on a course of about 15 kilometers, traversing roundabouts, mastering pedestrian crossings and bus lanes, stopping at traffic lights and remaining unfazed by fans running across the four-lane road celebrating victories. But even if Ewitt looks at the friendly Hyundai engineer in disbelief as he presses the button usually reserved for cruise control and puts his hands into his lap, the steering wheel turning itself, the journey through the Olympic city is nothing special. Car manufacturers have been demonstrating for years that autopilot systems can master complex situations in city traffic. Take their impressive test route through Las Vegas at the 2017 CES, for example.

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The world is full of connected devices–and more are coming. In 2017, there were an estimated 8.4 billion internet-enabled thermostats, cameras, streetlights and other electronics. By 2020 that number could exceed 20 billion, and by 2030 there could be 500 billion or more. Because they'll all be online all the time, each of those devices–whether a voice-recognition personal assistant or a pay-by-phone parking meter or a temperature sensor deep in an industrial robot–will be vulnerable to a cyberattack and could even be part of one.

SAN FRANCISCO: There's a dirty little secret about artificial intelligence: It's powered by hundreds of thousands of real people. From makeup artists in Venezuela to women in conservative parts of India, people around the world are doing the digital equivalent of needlework _drawing boxes around cars in street photos, tagging images, and transcribing snatches of speech that computers can't quite make out. Such data feeds directly into machine learning'' algorithms that help self-driving cars wind through traffic and let Alexa figure out that you want the lights on. These repetitive tasks pay pennies apiece. But in bulk, this work can offer a decent wage in many parts of the world _ even in the U.S.

Dubai Police and Dubai Customs held the first forum discussing ways of preventing drug smuggling into the UAE through land, air and sea ports using cutting edge technology. According to the Khaleej Times, Brigadier Abdullah Ali al-Ghaithi, Director of the General Department of Organizations Protective Security and Emergency (OPSE) of the Dubai Police, said that they are considering using artificial intelligence to secure airports, shipping ports and road borders from smuggling illegal goods. Officials from both entities said they are using high-tech means to detect hiding places that smugglers use for drugs that include teddy bears, their bodies and even almonds. The newspaper reported them saying that one of their latest security programs is the'Alarm Clock'. Effective at airports across the UAE, the program can quickly detect contents in luggage.