Tech company Continental is to acquire a minority stake in EasyMile SAS, a French autonomous driving company developing driverless electric shuttles. These shuttles will play a key role in the addressing the'first/last-mile' challenge in the future of mobility. In addition to Continental's equity investment in EasyMile, the companies plan to cooperate closely in the fields of environmental sensors, braking systems and driving safety technologies. This opens the door for Continental to numerous possible applications within EasyMile shuttles worldwide, while incorporating tried and tested large-scale production techniques from the automotive field. The first example is that the EasyMile EZ10 fleet will be running on Continental EcoContact tires with optimized tread geometry, ensuring low rolling resistance and rolling noise.

The future of work looks full of promise. Combining human brainpower with artificial intelligence, virtual reality and automatization will revolutionize how we work. "The future of work looks full of promise." Already, robotic enhancement is helping humans exceed their natural capabilities. AI is opening the door to real-time, personalized intelligent services, cutting waste and maximizing results.

WASHINGTON – A robotics team of six girls from Afghanistan is attending an international competition in Washington, after clearing visa obstacles that prompted intervention from President Donald Trump. The team was the first to be introduced at an opening ceremony Sunday for the three-day high school competition. They will compete against entrants from more than 150 countries in the FIRST Global Challenge. It's the first annual robotics competition designed to encourage youths to pursue careers in math and science. The girls are entering a robot they made that can recognize blue and orange and sort balls into correct locations.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - An undersea earthquake with a magnitude of 6.1 struck off the South Pacific island nation of Tonga on Monday, the U.S. Geological Survey said. The quake, at a depth of 97 km (60 miles), was located 180 km (112 miles) south-southwest of Neita in Tonga. No tsunami warning was issued and there were no immediate reports of damage or casualties from the quake. Not all U.S. presidents are missed once they leave the White House. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO urged governors to regulate artificial intelligence before it's too late.

The era of big data has witnessed a paradigm shift into analytics. Today, it's no longer sufficient to simply gather data from social media, IoT, and wearable devices, and be unable to manage or filter it. It is more about delivering the right data to the right person, at the right time. This trend is growing crucial as data is multiplying every day and pouring in from various devices and smart machines including wearables, electronic gadgets, and other devices. Such factors call for the treatment of vast pools of structured and unstructured data with care and precision. This is precisely where invisible analytics come in.

We present a parallel AND/OR Branch-and-Bound scheme that uses the power of a computational grid to push the boundaries of feasibility for combinatorial optimization. Two variants of the scheme are described, one of which aims to use machine learning techniques for parallel load balancing. In-depth analysis identifies two inherent sources of parallel search space redundancies that, together with general parallel execution overhead, can impede parallelization and render the problem far from embarrassingly parallel. We conduct extensive empirical evaluation on hundreds of CPUs, the first of its kind, with overall positive results. In a significant number of cases parallel speedup is close to the theoretical maximum and we are able to solve many very complex problem instances orders of magnitude faster than before; yet analysis of certain results also serves to demonstrate the inherent limitations of the approach due to the aforementioned redundancies.

One of the basic motivations for solving DCOPs is maintaining agents' privacy. Thus, researchers have evaluated the privacy loss of DCOP algorithms and defined corresponding notions of privacy preservation for secured DCOP algorithms. However, no secured protocol was proposed for Max-Sum, which is among the most studied DCOP algorithms. As part of the ongoing effort of designing secure DCOP algorithms, we propose P-Max-Sum, the first private algorithm that is based on Max-Sum. The proposed algorithm has multiple agents preforming the role of each node in the factor graph, on which the Max-Sum algorithm operates. P-Max-Sum preserves three types of privacy: topology privacy, constraint privacy, and assignment/decision privacy. By allowing a single call to a trusted coordinator, P-Max-Sum also preserves agent privacy. The two main cryptographic means that enable this privacy preservation are secret sharing and homomorphic encryption. In addition, we design privacy-preserving implementations of four variants of Max-Sum. We conclude by analyzing the price of privacy in terns of runtime overhead, both theoretically and by extensive experimentation.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia's military will be more readily deployed to respond to "terrorist incidents" on home soil under proposed changes to laws announced by the government on Monday. The government said in a statement that state and territory police forces remained the best first response, but the military could offer additional support to enhance their capabilities. Australia has seen a series of "lone wolf" Islamist-inspired attacks, prompting a review of police tactics and the powers of state and federal authorities. "The key thing we need is the most flexible possible arrangements -- the threat's changed very significantly," Justice Minister Michael Keenan told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Monday. Under the proposed law changes, state and territory governments would be able to call for military aid before the ability to respond to an incident exceeds the capabilities of their police forces.

Members of a female robotics team from Afghanistan Robotic House, a private training institute, arrive from Herat province to receive visas from the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan on July 13. At the urging of President Donald Trump, U.S. officials have reversed course and decided to allow into the United States a group of Afghan girls hoping to participate in an international robotics competition next week, senior administration officials told POLITICO on Wednesday. The decision followed a furious public backlash to the news that the six teens had been denied U.S. visas. That criticism swelled as details emerged about the girls' struggle to build their robot and get visas. "The State Department worked incredibly well with the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that this case was reviewed and handled appropriately," Dina Powell, Trump's deputy national security adviser for strategy, said in a statement.

A robotics team comprised of six girls from Afghanistan will enter a robot in an international competition in Washington, after clearing visa obstacles that prompted intervention from President Donald Trump.