Sophia the robot is a celebrity in its own right. It has been on chat shows, given speeches and was even made a citizen of the UAE. Before I "met" Sophia, I was given a sheet of guidelines by the company behind it, Hanson Robotics. Don't talk to the robot about sex, religion or politics, it said. Ask direct questions and remember it is not a fortune teller - it can't tell you whether you'll be rich or find love.

According to an executive at Ehang UAVs, which provided the swarm, each drone cost $1,500, which is pretty darn cheap considering their capabilities. Take, for instance, the datalink and software used. It lets more than 1,000 flying robots coordinate autonomously and synchronize movements, with a flight deviancy of a mere 2 centimeters horizontally and 1 centimeter vertically. If something goes wrong and a drone can't reach its programmed position, it automatically lands. In the show last month, these machines created striking formations of China, a kapok tree flower, and a ship.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, in a surprise visit to that air base on Dec. 11, declared that combat operations were winding down and that the Russian military would stage a "significant withdrawal." It was at least the second time he had made such an announcement since March 2016. Mr. Putin faces a presidential election this March, and although he is expected to win easily, polls indicate that Russians are increasingly disgruntled about the country's military presence in Syria. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to.

January is a peak time for downloading health and fitness apps and putting those Christmas present fitness trackers to work. But do they actually help you stay motivated? After the Christmas self-indulgence comes the inevitable New Year's resolution to get fit, lose weight, and eat more healthily. But while 65% of us make resolutions, only 12% successfully keep to them, polling firm ComRes finds. When Sarah, 34, a law professor from Australia, wanted to lose weight last year, she took the unusual approach of placing bets that she would achieve her exercise goals.

What can you build in 30 hours straight? As a group of second year college students with a growing portfolio of work, my team and I wanted to find out. So we signed up to a hackathon. It was a Financial Technology (or'Fintech') hackathon organized by DCB Bank in the city of Mumbai. Although we were clueless about Fintech, we wanted to give it a try, in the hope of coming with an idea that solves a general problem.

Data augmentation is a widely used technique in many machine learning tasks, such as image classification, to virtually enlarge the training dataset size and avoid overfitting. Traditional data augmentation techniques for image classification tasks create new samples from the original training data by, for example, flipping, distorting, adding a small amount of noise to, or cropping a patch from an original image. In this paper, we introduce a simple but surprisingly effective data augmentation technique for image classification tasks. With our technique, named SamplePairing, we synthesize a new sample from one image by overlaying another image randomly chosen from the training data (i.e., taking an average of two images for each pixel). By using two images randomly selected from the training set, we can generate $N^2$ new samples from $N$ training samples. This simple data augmentation technique significantly improved classification accuracy for all the tested datasets; for example, the top-1 error rate was reduced from 33.5% to 29.0% for the ILSVRC 2012 dataset with GoogLeNet and from 8.22% to 6.93% in the CIFAR-10 dataset. We also show that our SamplePairing technique largely improved accuracy when the number of samples in the training set was very small. Therefore, our technique is more valuable for tasks with a limited amount of training data, such as medical imaging tasks.

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neural networks are words that are often seen in today's business technology headlines. Are robots taking over the world? Or are they just here to help you find the best hotel for your next holiday? Artificial intelligence may seem like the bane of some futuristic, dystopian society but you've probably already come into contact with it in something as simple as booking a hotel or flight. If you have ever binged watched a series or two on Netflix, you've seen the'what to watch next' recommendations pop up on the screen.

Adam Drake's professional background includes a wide range of technical professional and management roles, including: leading technical business transformations in global and multi-cultural environments, performing in-depth technical due-diligence and funding analysis for investors, and mentoring new technical and operational executives. His passion is to help companies become more productive by improving internal leadership capabilities, and accelerating product development through technology and data architecture guidance. His technical interests include online learning systems, high-frequency/low-latency data processing systems, recommender systems, distributed systems, and functional programming. Adam has a background in Applied Mathematics and has worked in technology roles since the 90s. Some talks I've given, in reverse chronological order: Sharing data for any purposes, including for machine learning, is fraught with problems related to ethics, organizational policy and dynamics, and regulatory restrictions.

China wants to introduce artificial intelligence technology to at least 50 per cent of all its new cars by 2020, Reuters reports. According to the country's top state planner, China intends on becoming a world leader in artificial intelligence by 2025 and believes smart cars will be an important part of this project. In fact, the country also wants to cover 90 per cent of its big cities and highways with a wireless network that can support smart vehicles by 2020 as well. In a statement, the National Development and Reform Commission (NRDC) said it wants to seek public feedback on its artificial intelligence goals. The NRDC also revealed that it wants to build a national team with officials from the State Council to guide smart car innovation, hoping that China will gain a global reputation for producing quality smart cars by 2035.

The Internet of Things (IoT) appeared all over the news throughout 2017, whether that was due to the development of new devices, cyber attacks using unsecured devices or even new IoT divisions from companies like Dell and Rolls-Royce, we have definitely heard a lot about the emerging sector. Of course this comes as no surprise, as the oft-quoted Gartner prediction goes: there will be over 20 billion connected things by 2020. The increase in connected devices over the past year, from toasters to toothbrushes, shows we may be getting even closer to the forecast. As the opportunity within the IoT sector continues to rise, businesses globally have been taking a leap to developing unique devices or searching for a way to get in on the action with emerging software or platform solutions. Here are some IoT trends to watch out for in 2018, according to the experts.