The next generation of spy cameras are set to catch speeding drivers and hit them with fines - without even needing to check their number plates first. These roadside cameras could catch unruly drivers just by looking at scratches on their car or irregularities in the paintwork. The'repression network' uses artificial intelligence to differentiate between cars by spotting tiny differences between them. Researchers say their software is so sophisticated it could someday also be used for'face and persona retrieval'. This graphic shows how the system can identify cars based on their features, rather than a number plate.

As many in the United States and abroad are watching as tensions grow with North Korea, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk issued a warning about artificial intelligence. "If you're not concerned about AI safety, you should be. The tweet also included a photo that reads, "In the end the machines will win." Musk also warned that artificial intelligence should be regulated the same way anything that could pose a danger to the public is. This is not the first time Musk has warned people about AI.

The Bios Urn mixes cremains with soil and seedlings. It automatically waters and cares for the memorial sapling, sending updates to a smartphone app. The Bios Urn mixes cremains with soil and seedlings. It automatically waters and cares for the memorial sapling, sending updates to a smartphone app. Earlier this summer, a modest little startup in Barcelona, Spain, unveiled its newest product -- a biodegradable, Internet-connected funeral urn that turns the ashes of departed loved ones into an indoor tree.

Twitter trolls run by the Kremlin's Internet Research Agency. Denial of service attacks and ransomware deployed across Ukraine. Spies hidden in the heart of Wall Street. And a century-old fabricated staple of anti-Semitic hate literature. At first glance these disparate phenomena might seem only vaguely connected. Sure, they can all be traced back to Russia. But is there any method to their badness? The definitive answer, according to Russia experts inside and outside the US government, is most certainly yes. In fact, they are part of an increasingly digital intelligence playbook known as "active measures," a wide-ranging set of techniques and strategies that Russian military and intelligence services deploy to influence the affairs of nations across the globe. As the investigation into Russia's influence on the 2016 election--and the Trump campaign's potential participation in that effort--has intensified this summer, the Putin regime's systematic effort to undermine and destabilize democracies has become the subject of urgent focus in the West. According to interviews with more than a dozen US and European intelligence officials and diplomats, Russian active measures represent perhaps the biggest challenge to the Western order since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The consensus: Vladimir Putin, playing a poor hand economically and demographically at home, is seeking to destabilize the multilateral institutions, partnerships, and Western democracies that have kept the peace during the past seven decades.

Industry leaders in the self-driving car race have teamed up to create an'ecosystem' to push the technology further. Intel and Toyota, among others, announced this week that they have joined forces to create the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium. The companies plan to share data to boost the creation of maps and improved driver assistance technology. Toyota's AI-enabled Concept-i prototype, which was unveiled at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Several firms just joined forces to create the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium. This includes Intel, DENSO, Ericsson, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), NTT DOCOMO and both the Toyota InfoTechnology Center Co. and Toyota Motor Corp.

In his 2014 book, No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald wrote that a contributing factor to Edward Snowden's decision to leak classified information from the NSA was his consumption of video games: "The moral narrative at the heart of video games was part of his pre-adolescence and formed part of his moral understanding of the world and one's obligation as an individual." Whether or not you agree with Snowden's actions, the idea that playing video games could affect a person's ethical position or even encourage any kind of philosophical thought is probably surprising. Yet we're used to the notion that a person's thinking could be influenced by the characters and conundrums in books, film and television; why not games? In fact, games have one big advantage that makes them especially useful for exploring philosophical ideas: they're interactive. As any student of philosophy will tell you, one of the primary ways of engaging with abstract questions is through thought experiments.

Back in December, I wrote that one of the best sectors to invest in this year is artificial intelligence (AI). And that has proven to be the case so far. You don't even have to look at the stock market to see the rising importance of this emerging technology. Every dinner party I go to... every barbecue I attend... every birthday party or chat over coffee, the subject ultimately turns to AI. We're even inundated now with TV commercials about AI. You've probably seen an ad for IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Watson or Intel's (Nasdaq: INTC) "The Future of Artificial Intelligence" with The Big Bang Theory's Jim Parsons.

Waring against the misuse of artificial intelligence (AI) Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said that people should be more concerned with it than the risk posed by escalating tensions with North Korea, the media reported. "If you're not concerned about AI safety, you should be. If you're not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Musk's comments were in reference to his non-profit start-up, OpenAI, defeating several of the world's best players at a video game, reports The Hill magazine. OpenAI first ever to defeat world's best players in competitive eSports.

The Essential phone, designed to take on the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy, has gone into full production, according to its creator. Android inventor Andy Rubin took to Twitter to make the announcement, fuelling speculation about when it might be ready for release. New pictures appear to show the assembly lines, where the titanium body of the handset is being milled. An announcement on where and when fans can buy the firm's first model, the PH-1, is expected next week. A new handset designed to take on the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy has gone into full production, according to its creator. Startup firm Essential says it has raised raised over $300 million (£231 million) in new funding and signed up retailers to sell its first device.

A fundamental question in data analysis, machine learning and signal processing is how to compare between data points. The choice of the distance metric is specifically challenging for high-dimensional data sets, where the problem of meaningfulness is more prominent (e.g. the Euclidean distance between images). In this paper, we propose to exploit a property of high-dimensional data that is usually ignored - which is the structure stemming from the relationships between the coordinates. Specifically we show that organizing similar coordinates in clusters can be exploited for the construction of the Mahalanobis distance between samples. When the observable samples are generated by a nonlinear transformation of hidden variables, the Mahalanobis distance allows the recovery of the Euclidean distances in the hidden space.We illustrate the advantage of our approach on a synthetic example where the discovery of clusters of correlated coordinates improves the estimation of the principal directions of the samples. Our method was applied to real data of gene expression for lung adenocarcinomas (lung cancer). By using the proposed metric we found a partition of subjects to risk groups with a good separation between their Kaplan-Meier survival plot.