We've got our full verdict on Apple's iPhone 8. You'll have to wait to see how the iPhone X fares, but now Google is the latest company angling for our new smartphone-buying dollars. And, oops, the phones have leaked (again) ahead of anything official. We also have a portable(ish) fire pit, because the outdoors needs gadgets, too. Hopefully you weren't set on waiting until October 4th to find out about Google's new hardware, because some pricing and specs have already leaked. Droid-Life found details on the Pixel phones, which will have familiar prices and storage setups, as well as the Daydream View VR headset, which is getting a $20 price hike.

DALIAN: Several Indian and Chinese IT companies on Wednesday got together in China's port city of Dalian for cooperation in the field of artificial intelligence. On the first India-China Dalian IoT (Internet of Things) Conference, the government officials and company representatives from both sides agreed that a lot can be done if India's excellence in software technology and China's expertise in hardware are brought together. The event is being attended by 30 delegates representing the Indian government and companies, while 50 delegates from the Chinese industry are participating in the event. Representatives of Indian companies like Wipro, HCL, Infosys, Cognizant and CBSI Technologies were present. "Chinese hardware needs to be given soul that can come from India's software technology," said Sudhanshu Pandey, Joint Secretary, Department of Commerce (India).

MUMBAI: American technology company IBM has said that more than 1,000 Indian companies, including startups, are using the Watson Internet of Things, its data analytics and cognitive artificial-intelligence (AI) platform, to draw insights from enormous amount of data collected through sensors placed on machines and devices. IBM counts Tata Steel, Reliance Group, Tech Mahindra, Maruti-Suzuki, Mahindra & Mahindra, KPIT, Arrow Electronics, Kone, Acculi Labs, Avanijal Agri Automation and Schneider Electric India among its customers and partners. It is also working with several Indian states and government bodies on water management, precision agriculture and asset optimisation projects. "India has exceeded our expectations in numbers. The speed to market in Indian environment is fantastic. We are working with big brands, medium-sized companies and a phenomenal number of startups, particularly in agriculture and healthcare," said Harriet Green, general manager, Watson Internet of Things, customer engagement and education at IBM.

Military drone pilots fighting so-called Islamic State could be awarded medals, the defence secretary has said. Sir Michael Fallon confirmed there would be a review of how servicemen and women were recognised for their contribution to UK operations. Medals are currently awarded on the basis of rigour and risk, and being physically exposed to danger. Sir Michael said a rethink may be needed as the UK increasingly deploys unmanned aircraft on operations. Speaking on a visit to British troops in Iraq, he said: "The changing character of warfare provides new challenges; not just about how we fight but also how we recognise and support those who serve. "As fighting has evolved we have adapted, ensuring our troops have cutting-edge equipment including unmanned systems operated from outside the battle space.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: The work of B. Zieliński was supported by the National Science Centre (Poland) under grant agreement no 2015/19/D/ST6/01215; 2016-2019. The work of P. Spurek was supported by the National Science Centre (Poland) under grant agreement no. The work of K. Misztal was supported by the National Science Centre (Poland) under grant agreement no. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

This paper considers a discrete-time opinion dynamics model in which each individual's susceptibility to being influenced by others is dependent on her current opinion. We assume that the social network has time-varying topology and that the opinions are scalars on a continuous interval. We first propose a general opinion dynamics model based on the DeGroot model, with a general function to describe the functional dependence of each individual's susceptibility on her own opinion, and show that this general model is analogous to the Friedkin-Johnsen model, which assumes a constant susceptibility for each individual. We then consider two specific functions in which the individual's susceptibility depends on the \emph{polarity} of her opinion, and provide motivating social examples. First, we consider stubborn positives, who have reduced susceptibility if their opinions are at one end of the interval and increased susceptibility if their opinions are at the opposite end. A court jury is used as a motivating example. Second, we consider stubborn neutrals, who have reduced susceptibility when their opinions are in the middle of the spectrum, and our motivating examples are social networks discussing established social norms or institutionalized behavior. For each specific susceptibility model, we establish the initial and graph topology conditions in which consensus is reached, and develop necessary and sufficient conditions on the initial conditions for the final consensus value to be at either extreme of the opinion interval. Simulations are provided to show the effects of the susceptibility function when compared to the DeGroot model.

In this paper, we propose a novel recurrent neural network architecture for speech separation. This architecture is constructed by unfolding the iterations of a sequential iterative soft-thresholding algorithm (ISTA) that solves the optimization problem for sparse nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) of spectrograms. We name this network architecture deep recurrent NMF (DR-NMF). The proposed DR-NMF network has three distinct advantages. First, DR-NMF provides better interpretability than other deep architectures, since the weights correspond to NMF model parameters, even after training. This interpretability also provides principled initializations that enable faster training and convergence to better solutions compared to conventional random initialization. Second, like many deep networks, DR-NMF is an order of magnitude faster at test time than NMF, since computation of the network output only requires evaluating a few layers at each time step. Third, when a limited amount of training data is available, DR-NMF exhibits stronger generalization and separation performance compared to sparse NMF and state-of-the-art long-short term memory (LSTM) networks. When a large amount of training data is available, DR-NMF achieves lower yet competitive separation performance compared to LSTM networks.

If you put a child, teenager or adult on a swing and they'd never used one before, how long do you think it would take for them to be able to swing at will and without assistance? When I've asked this of executives across the Asia Pacific region the responses range from "a day" through to "several months". If you've got kids, you'd know that it can take a long time before they are swinging back and forth, giving you a heartache every time they go that little bit too high. The next question I ask, is how long do you think it might take a machine learning robot to do the same? The video below gives you one answer, and it's likely this is much quicker than what humans can do.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Enroute Lab will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place on Oct 31 - Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Enroute Lab is an industrial design, research and development company of unmanned robotic vehicle system. For more information, please visit http://elab.co.jp/. JETRO and prefectures of Japan (Nagano, Shizuoka, Okayama, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, Oita) will present more than twenty cutting-edge technology companies for partnership opportunity with U.S. businesses. Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes.

The Kangbashi district of Ordos, China, looks like a cosmopolitan city of the future. It's just 14 years old but already has all the trappings of a mature municipality. It has a large public library designed to mimic the shape of books on shelves. Elsewhere are a contemporary and cavernous airport, a spectacular-looking stadium, clusters of towering apartment buildings, spacious plazas and parks, a five-story food court with 400 vendors, an intricate opera house, and perfectly paved streets designed to connect more than 300,000 residents to the places they live, work, and play. Although Kangbashi has the appearance of a modern metropolis, the truth is apparent in the one thing it lacks: people. Kangbashi is one of hundreds of "ghost cities" rumored to dot the Chinese countryside. Erected at the height of China's real estate boom, they're pet projects of wealthy local governments that built them to be the center of a virtuous circle: Spending their economic windfalls on megacities, governments believed, would attract inhabitants from outlying agrarian communities, creating new urban centers with which to generate even more wealth.