Jeanette Harris would have never put two teaspoons of cardamom in a recipe for a dozen cookies. The spice is strong, polarising and typically associated with India and Asian cooking, not gluten-free chocolate chip cookies. "Humans have internal biases about these sorts things, especially cooks and bakers, we have these ideas that these are the tried and true ways," Harris said while she combined ingredients for her cookies during a cooking demo Monday at her bakery in Garfield. Two teaspoons of cardamom is not one of those tried and true ways. But when an artificial intelligence designed to optimise parts for airplanes and spaceships told her two teaspoons of cardamom was the right amount, she listened.

When I look up, I can see wispy clouds passing overhead. Large photos hang on the gallery walls. They're pictures of a landscape devastated by war and portraits of men fighting in those wars. I hear footsteps behind me. I turn around and watch two figures enter the room and take up stations in front of the portraits.

With the strong demand for iPhone X, a Taiwanese supplier is predicting that the Cupertino giant's rivals will also adopt the 3D sensing technology Apple used on the 10th anniversary iPhone to their flagship handsets. The supplier is even predicting a rise in the demand for 3D sensing modules in the next 5 to 8 years. On Tuesday, DigiTimes reported that the chairman and CEO of digital camera and imaging solution supplier Altek, Alex Hsia, is expecting strong demand for 3D sensing modules in the following years now that Apple has introduced Face ID with its iPhone X flagship phone. "The structure-light 3D sensing technology adopted by Apple's iPhone X features high accuracy at short distances, and other first-tier smartphone vendors are expected to follow suit by launching 3D sensing-enabled devices," Hsia said. The CEO predicts that consumers will see more smartphones with 3D sensing technology starting next year.

Carmaker Nissan plans to test self-driving taxis on Japanese roads from March next year. The company is partnering with Japanese software company DeNA, which operates online services for the gaming, healthcare and automotive industries. It will adapt a Nissan Leaf electric car, which passengers will summon using an app. Nissan joins a growing band of carmakers trialling self-drive cars, including General Motors and Volvo. The free trials will be held over a two-week period in March in Yokohama.

Ubtech, a Shenzhen-based humanoid robots maker startup, raised $400 million in a Series C round led by Tencent Holdings (which invested $40 million in the round). Ubtech (Union Brothers Technology) builds and sells toy robots. Their most recent is a $300 Star Wars Stormtrooper robot which will ship just before the movie debuts mid-December. TuSimple, a Chinese startup providing autonomous driving technology for the trucking industry, raised $55 million in a Series C round led by Fuhe Capital with Zhiping Capital and SINA Corp. Note that TuSimple raised $20 million in August in a Series B round.

RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) play crucial roles in many biological processes, e.g. gene regulation. Computational identification of RBP binding sites on RNAs are urgently needed. In particular, RBPs bind to RNAs by recognizing sequence motifs. Thus, fast locating those motifs on RNA sequences is crucial and time-efficient for determining whether the RNAs interact with the RBPs or not. In this study, we present an attention based convolutional neural network, iDeepA, to predict RNA-protein binding sites from raw RNA sequences. We first encode RNA sequences into one-hot encoding. Next, we design a deep learning model with a convolutional neural network (CNN) and an attention mechanism, which automatically search for important positions, e.g. binding motifs, to learn discriminant high-level features for predicting RBP binding sites. We evaluate iDeepA on publicly gold-standard RBP binding sites derived from CLIP-seq data. The results demonstrate iDeepA achieves comparable performance with other state-of-the-art methods.

Nissan wants to have its fully-automated ride service on the road in Japan by the early 2020s. The plan is to start with a "public field test" for the Easy Ride service in Yokohama. Nissan has partnered with technology company DeNa for the venture, and the hope is to have everything from pick-up to payment and drop-off handled via mobile app. If you'd rather take the scenic route to your destination, options will be available for that as well. With the Tokyo Olympics looming in 2020, Nissan likely wants to have the kinks worked out by then.

In announcing plans to hire many more human moderators to flag disturbing and extremist content this week, YouTube has become the latest Silicon Valley giant to acknowledge that software alone won't solve the many of the problems plaguing the industry. YouTube, which is owned by Google, said Monday night it would significantly increase the number of people monitoring such content across the company next year. By 2018, Google will employ roughly 10,000 content moderators and other professionals tasked with addressing violations of its content policies. The search giant would not disclose the number of employees currently performing such jobs, but a person familiar with the company's operations said the hiring represents a 25 percent increase from where Google is now. The move follows a series of reports last month in which YouTube videos surfaced showing children in disturbing and potentially exploitative situations, including being duct-taped to walls, mock-abducted, and forced into washing machines, according to a BuzzFeed report. Google said it removed 150,000 violent extremist videos since June.

A ROBOTIC fish may be an unlikely ally in the fight against antibiotic resistance. Swimming through streams and lakes, it will monitor the levels of antibiotics in the water, among other pollutants. The prototype will soon be sent below the surface of the lakes near Michigan, which are under threat from industrial pollution and contaminants from farming. "The water is getting increasingly contaminated with multiple pollutants," says Alicia Douglas at the Water Rising Institute. Antibiotics are among them, she says, and are becoming a growing risk because we know so little about how they spread.

In Winston's Genesis Group, which is part of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Winston and squadrons of his students have painstakingly built technology that can analyze roughly 100-line texts written for computers on subjects such as Shakespeare, international cyber conflict, and fairy tales. Genesis compares stories; detects concepts such as love or revenge, even when they are not named; concludes whether a short-term gain leads to a long-term loss; and explains acts based on personality traits. The system can even analyze a text through a filter of cultural bias, thus interpreting an event like the cyber attack on Estonia by Russia in 2007 from the point of view of people in one or the other country.