This image captured by an underwater robot provided by International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning on Saturday, July 22, 2017 shows massive deposits believed to be melted nuclear fuel covering the floor of a damaged reactor at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant in Okuma town, northeastern Japan. The robot found large amounts of solidified lava-like rocks and lumps in layers as thick as 1 meter (3 feet) on the bottom inside of a main structure called the pedestal that sits underneath the core inside the primary containment vessel of Fukushima's Unit 3 reactor, said the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning via AP) The Associated Press

We propose an approach to build a neural machine translation system with no supervised resources (i.e., no parallel corpora) using multimodal embedded representation over texts and images. Based on the assumption that text documents are often likely to be described with other multimedia information (e.g., images) somewhat related to the content, we try to indirectly estimate the relevance between two languages. Using multimedia as the "pivot", we project all modalities into one common hidden space where samples belonging to similar semantic concepts should come close to each other, whatever the observed space of each sample is. This modality-agnostic representation is the key to bridging the gap between different modalities. Putting a decoder on top of it, our network can flexibly draw the outputs from any input modality. Notably, in the testing phase, we need only source language texts as the input for translation. In experiments, we tested our method on two benchmarks to show that it can achieve reasonable translation performance. We compared and investigated several possible implementations and found that an end-to-end model that simultaneously optimized both rank loss in multimodal encoders and cross-entropy loss in decoders performed the best.

While the U.S. relaxes drone regulations, the U.K. government announced Saturday users will have to register their unmanned aircrafts and take safety awareness tests. The U.K. said users need to register their drone to "improve accountability and encourage owners to act responsibly." Those who own drones that weigh 250 grams (about half a pound) or more will need to register details of the gadgets. Owners will be able register their drones online or through apps, the government said. Users will also be required to take a drone safety awareness test to prove they comprehend U.K. safety and privacy rules.

As someone interested in both technological innovation and the financial markets, I find myself bombarded with news regarding developments in artificial intelligence. Simply put, artificial intelligence is everywhere. From virtual personal assistants to online customer support, artificial intelligence is already having a profound impact on society. Artificial intelligence will change the course of history undeniable. That is the reason tech giants such as Amazon, Apple, and Facebook have spent billions trying to better understand and utilize the technology.

A top military official has warned lawmakers not to equip the military with autonomous weapons that could go rogue. The US's second highest-ranking general said he believed humans must always be the ones to pull the trigger when it came to killing people. General Paul Selva advocated keeping the'ethical rules of war' - even if the US's enemies didn't. In June the Pentagon awarded an $11 million (£8.4 million) contract to build a'combined-arms squad' of human and robotic capabilities. The US's second highest-ranking general warned that he does not'think it's reasonable to put robots in charge of whether we take a human life' (stock image) In June the Pentagon awarded an $11 million (£8.4 million) contract to build a'combined-arms squad' of human and robotic capabilities.

Technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) will have a disproportionately larger impact in India where access issues can be solved by decentralisation and automation, says Arpan Shah, Partner at Virtu Propdeal, a Kolkata-based fund focused on real estate and technology investments. "We have invested in a few realestate projects from the early days of our fund. We invested in two ecommerce companies -- CaptainKyso and Postergully, which exited. We are looking at early-stage companies that are keen to raise money at the seed or pre-seed stage," he said. Virtu Propdeal was started in 2012, initially with the idea of investing in real estate projects, especially in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.

A new plan from the top of the Chinese government calls for the country to become a powerhouse in artificial intelligence in just over a decade.

Every moment of your waking life and whenever you dream, you have the distinct inner feeling of being "you." When you see the warm hues of a sunrise, smell the aroma of morning coffee or mull over a new idea, you are having conscious experience. But could an artificial intelligence (AI) ever have experience, like some of the androids depicted in Westworld or the synthetic beings in Blade Runner? The question is not so far-fetched. Robots are currently being developed to work inside nuclear reactors, fight wars and care for the elderly.

Google's AI boutique, DeepMind, known for dispelling human delusions of intellectual superiority by soundly beating the world's top Go players with computer code, has found that instilling its software agents with something like imagination helps them learn better. In two papers published this week – "Imagination-Augmented Agents for Deep Reinforcement Learning" and "Learning model-based planning from scratch" – the AI biz's brain boffins, based in Britain, describe novel techniques for improving deep reinforcement learning through what can generously be described as imaginative planning. Reinforcement learning is a form of machine learning. It involves a software agent that learns by interacting with a specific environment, usually through trial and error. Deep learning is a form of machine that involves algorithms inspired by the human brain, called neural networks.

Much has already been made about how artificial intelligence is going to transform our lives, ranging from visions of the future in which robots make humans obsolete to utopias in which technology solves intractable problems and frees up people to pursue their passions. Consultancy firm PwC ran the numbers, and came up with a relatively rosy scenario with regards to the impact AI will have on the global economy. By 2030, global GDP could increase by 14%, or $15.7 trillion, because of AI, the firm said in a report today (pdf). Almost half of these economic gains will accrue to China, where AI is projected to give the economy a 26% boost over the next 13 years--the equivalent of an extra $7 trillion in GDP. North America can expect a 14.5% increase in GDP, worth $3.7 trillion.