WASHINGTON, Nov 28 (Reuters) - A research arm of the U.S. intelligence community just wrapped up a competition to see who could develop the best facial recognition technology. The challenge: identify as many passengers as possible walking on an aircraft boarding ramp. Of all the entries, it was a Chinese start-up company called Yitu Tech that walked away with the $25,000 prize this month, the highest of three cash awards. The competition was one of many examples cited in a report by a U.S.-based think tank about how China's military might leverage its country's rapid advances in artificial intelligence to modernize its armed forces and, potentially, seek advantages against the United States. "China is no longer in a position of technological inferiority relative to the United States but rather has become a true peer (competitor) that may have the capability to overtake the United States in AI," said the report, written by Elsa Kania at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and due to be released on Tuesday.

"China is no longer in a position of technological inferiority relative to the United States but rather has become a true peer (competitor) that may have the capability to overtake the United States in AI," said the report, written by Elsa Kania at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and due to be released on Tuesday.

Samsung has just acquired Korean artificial intelligence startup Fluenty, and the acquisition has already sparked rumors that the tech giant could be planning an upgrade for its AI assistant Bixby. The acquisition comes in the wake of the announcement that the company has named a new chief to lead its software development department. Samsung revealed this week that it has acquired Fluenty, a startup that has developed a machine learning-based chatbot. The startup is also known for being founded by researchers from top tech firms in South Korea including Naver, LG Electronics and Kakao, according to The Investor. The acquisition comes a little more than a year since Fluenty joined Samsung's startup accelerating program that provided funding worth 100 million won or US$18,000.

Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent (AGD), an instance of the general family of "momentum methods", provably achieves faster convergence rate than gradient descent (GD) in the convex setting. However, whether these methods are superior to GD in the nonconvex setting remains open. This paper studies a simple variant of AGD, and shows that it escapes saddle points and finds a second-order stationary point in $\tilde{O}(1/\epsilon^{7/4})$ iterations, faster than the $\tilde{O}(1/\epsilon^{2})$ iterations required by GD. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Hessian-free algorithm to find a second-order stationary point faster than GD, and also the first single-loop algorithm with a faster rate than GD even in the setting of finding a first-order stationary point. Our analysis is based on two key ideas: (1) the use of a simple Hamiltonian function, inspired by a continuous-time perspective, which AGD monotonically decreases per step even for nonconvex functions, and (2) a novel framework called improve or localize, which is useful for tracking the long-term behavior of gradient-based optimization algorithms. We believe that these techniques may deepen our understanding of both acceleration algorithms and nonconvex optimization.

HE number of diseases that can be treated by surgical operation has increased in recent years because of the development of medical technology. However, the complexity of treatment plans means that surgical navigation under treatment is a potentially valuable development. In surgical navigation, computer simulation of treatment plans is constructed before a surgery, and a virtual internal organ deformed following surgical treatment is presented to the surgeon during the surgery. It helps surgeons to operate as planned and provides an alert to prevent accidents, for example, they hurt important blood vessels. In surgical operations, laparoscopic surgery is considered less trauma for patients than laparotomy, and leads to faster recovery [1]. However, laparoscopic surgery is more difficult for doctors than laparotomy surgery, because it involves restricted vision and limited freedom of surgical instruments, making it difficult to move the instruments in the operating field [2].

Did you know Python is the most popular language in the Data Science and Machine Learning Market? Easy and versatile, Python is a first step in many new age technologies like Machine Learning, Data Science, Deep Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. Our newly-launched Python Foundation Nanodegree would prepare with everything you need to become a Python expert.

Relatives of two people killed in the strike sued the United States, claiming it was the actions of the U.S. that killed their family members, who were innocent civilians. Faisal bin Ali Jaber filed a wrongful death lawsuit against then-President Barack Obama in 2015. His nephew Waleed, 26, and brother-in-law Salem, a father of seven, were killed in the attack along with three others, Al Jazeera reported.

Women's rights group Gabriela recently introduced the first chatbot in the Philippines to help make the reporting of sexual harassment easier. Gabriela said Gabbie is a Facebook messenger chatbot which can be searched as "Gabbiegabriela" on the social media site. "The human truth here is that women hesitate to report. Sexual harassment is a sensitive issue, after all. So we wanted to make that easier for them--through a tool that they use every day," Gabriela's Secretary General Joms Salvador said in a statement.

A nightmarish new image shows a'zombie' head after it was infected with a deadly parasitic fungus. The photo, taken in a forest in Singapore, shows fungal stalks bursting from the long-dead fly, which is missing both of its eyes. The photographer believes an infamous parasite named Cordyceps, which takes over its victims' bodies like a horror movie zombie virus, infected the fly before it died. A nightmarish new image shows a fly's'zombie' head after it was infected with a deadly parasitic fungus. Separate species of Cordyceps prefer different hosts, but generally the fungus takes over the bodies of insects and forces them to walk to the top of plants.

In its quest to become a global artificial intelligence (AI) powerhouse, computer giant Lenovo Group has stepped up use of the technology to drive operational efficiency, improve customer service and advance the company's ambitious business development initiatives. "The great thing about AI is that it's a general-purpose technology, so we can use it everywhere," Arthur Hu, the chief information officer at Lenovo, told the South China Morning Post on the sidelines of the INSEAD Alumni Forum in Hong Kong. That strategy further reinforced the commitment made by Lenovo in July to invest at least US$1.2 billion in research and development, and other related initiatives over the next three to four years, as it moves to catch up with the AI efforts of Chinese internet titans Baidu, Tencent Holdings and Post owner Alibaba Group Holding. It also reflected how key Chinese technology companies are aggressively moving in the same direction to push forward the central government's plan to establish a world-leading AI market, which it forecast to be worth about US$150 billion by 2030. Hu said Lenovo, which operates in more than 160 countries, started its internal AI roll-out in its call-centre operation, which now has a robot answering about 35 per cent of all inquiries.