Arizona is welcoming a new wave of settlers. Techies, mostly from California--Silicon Valley, to be precise--coming to the desert to fulfill their quest to flood the roads with self-driving cars. Mobileye is the latest arrival. The firm announced Wednesday that it will build a fleet of 100 autonomous vehicles, and test the first of them on the public roads of the Copper State. The Israeli firm that Intel recently bought for $15 billion joins Uber and Google spinoff Waymo, both of which have put more than 100 robocars on the roads of Tempe and Phoenix, respectively.

Lab41 just finished Pelops, a vehicle re-identification project using data from fixed video cameras. Last time I talked about "chipping", that is extracting an image of a vehicle from a frame of video automatically. We found that background subtraction worked OK based on the small amount of labeled data we had. In this post I'll go over the rest of the pipeline: feature extraction and vehicle matching. Machine learning algorithms operate on a vector of numbers.

Dogan news agency said Thursday that a Russian national was detained in the southern Turkish city of Adana over suspicions that he planned to crash an American aircraft at the base using a drone. According to Dogan, the man is affiliated with IS.

When Jason Matheny joined the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) as a program manager in 2009, he made a habit of chatting to the organization's research analysts. "What do you need?" he would ask, and the answer was always the same: a way to make more accurate predictions. "What if we made you an artificially intelligent computer model that forecasts real-world events such as political instability, weapons tests and disease outbreaks?" The analysts' response was enthusiastic, except for one crucial caveat. "It came down to whether they could explain the model to a decision maker--like the secretary of Defense," says Matheny, who is now IARPA's director.

China has taken down two online robots that appeared to go rogue, with one responding to users' questions by saying its dream was to travel to the US and the other admitting it was not a fan of the Chinese Communist Party. The "chatbots", BabyQ and XiaoBing, are designed to use machine learning artificial intelligence to carry out online with humans. Both had been installed on popular messaging service QQ. The outbursts are similar to ones suffered by Facebook and Twitter but underlines the pitfalls for AI in China, where censors strictly control online content. According to posts circulating online, BabyQ, one of the chatbots developed by Chinese firm Turing Robot, responded to questions on QQ with a "no" when asked whether it loved the Communist Party. In other images of a text conversation online, one user declares: "Long live the Communist Party!"

As an artificial intelligence researcher, I often come across the idea that many people are afraid of what AI might bring. It's perhaps unsurprising, given both history and the entertainment industry, that we might be afraid of a cybernetic takeover that forces us to live locked away, Matrix-like, as some sort of human battery. And yet it is hard for me to look up from the evolutionary computer models I use to develop AI, to think about how the innocent virtual creatures on my screen might become the monsters of the future. Might I become "the destroyer of worlds," as Oppenheimer lamented after spearheading the construction of the first nuclear bomb? I would take the fame, I suppose, but perhaps the critics are right.

If there's anything to be said for working at a Silicon Valley tech company, it's the perks. Fridges stuffed with Red Bull. And for select employees at Cruise, General Motors' autonomous driving outfit in San Francisco, rides anywhere in the city, for free, in a self-driving car. Cruise Anywhere, which launched Tuesday, works just like Uber or Lyft: Open the app, type in your location and destination, and wait for your car. It's available to 10 percent of Cruise's 250 employees, between 7 am and 11 pm, and uses the company's fleet of 63 Chevrolet Bolt EVs.

Scale of data and scale of computation infrastructures together enable the current deep learning renaissance. However, training large-scale deep architectures demands both algorithmic improvement and careful system configuration. In this paper, we focus on employing the system approach to speed up large-scale training. Via lessons learned from our routine benchmarking effort, we first identify bottlenecks and overheads that hinter data parallelism. We then devise guidelines that help practitioners to configure an effective system and fine-tune parameters to achieve desired speedup. Specifically, we develop a procedure for setting minibatch size and choosing computation algorithms. We also derive lemmas for determining the quantity of key components such as the number of GPUs and parameter servers. Experiments and examples show that these guidelines help effectively speed up large-scale deep learning training.

AMD wants to ensure you always have something unique to play with new graphics card. The new AMD4U program is a partnership with publisher Square Enix exclusively featuring games from the publisher's "Collective" initiative for indie developers. Folks who buy and register their GPU are eligible for up to three free games (PDF) including Tokyo Dark (above) and Black the Fall. The benefits here are twofold: you get free, unique games with your graphics card and smaller developers get their wares in front of a new audience. Now, indie games don't tend to put graphics cards to the test the way that typical pack-in games do, but they do offer experiences you aren't going to have with the typical high-budget AAA fare.

Silicon Valley giant Intel on Wednesday announced plans for a fleet of self-driving cars following its completion of the purchase of Israeli autonomous technology firm Mobileye. A day after closing the $15 billion deal to buy Mobileye, which specializes in driver-assistance systems, Intel said it will begin rolling out fully autonomous vehicles later this year for testing in Europe, Israel, and the US. The fleet will eventually have more than 100 vehicles, according to Intel. Silicon Valley giant Intel on Wednesday announced plans for a fleet of self-driving cars following its completion of the purchase of Israeli autonomous technology firm Mobileye. Mobileye's software, which reads inputs from cameras, radar, and laser sensors and makes decisions on what an autonomous car should do.