On the second floor of a small office building in the middle of Tel Aviv, the bustling heart of Israel's booming tech industry, sits the world headquarters for Cortica, an AI company with the ambitious goal of getting machines to see the world as well as we do. They are one of hundreds of AI startups that have sprouted up all over the world in the last few years. The global AI market has now exceeded a billion dollars and the tech giants are racing to acquire them as they are re-positioning themselves as AI companies first. But it's a convoluted space with a high knowledge barrier of entry. Most of these companies use buzz words like'machine learning', 'deep learning' or'neural networks' knowing that most consumers and investors have no idea what they really mean. For someone without a background in the field it can be hard to distinguish substance from snake oil.

All the above made important contributions to productivity in both manufacturing and the incremental improvement in the average land speed (and comfort) of transportation within the United States. However, none matched, or came close, to the first burst of productivity that the automobile brought to the general economy in terms of freeing people (and business) from geographical constraints caused by horse power (slow ground speed), rail (limited connections), and inland water transportation (physical limitations). In addition, there were secondary productivity effects from the first innovation. For example, in 1900 there were between 100,000 to 200,000 horses in New York City, causing a horse manure crisis.[5] An estimated 20,000 New Yorkers died each year from illnesses related to the pileup of manure and dead horses in the streets.

The historic transformation of the automobile industry will generate billions to trillions of dollars for companies and investors. But for traditional automakers, the road ahead will be bumpy, risky and expensive. That's the assessment of consulting firm AlixPartners, which released an extensive report Wednesday that uses market research and consumer surveys to lay out some of the major challenges facing automakers -- with some interesting findings about Tesla. The report includes a near-term industry outlook with a darker forecast for U.S. auto sales than most other prognosticators have put forth. Record-high vehicle sales in 2016 will dive 13% from 2017 through 2019, the firm predicted -- to 15.2 million vehicles from 17.5 million -- in what it calls a cyclical but ill-timed downturn made worse by a "used car time bomb" as hundreds of thousands of vehicles come off lease all at once.

The cost of cybersecurity is proportional to the square of the number of products required for adequate defense. This Cyber Law (you read it here first) means that the proliferation of types of cyberattacks and attackers leads to the proliferation of innovative security solutions, each focused on one narrow aspect of cyber defense. The result is increased cost and complexity of cybersecurity management, including increased number of false alerts and increased investment in the resources required to orchestrate the multitude of products and to train security personnel in the specific language and rules of each security solution. "Enterprises invest in so many security tools because there is not one product that can protect them from all types of attacks," says Avi Chesla, founder and CEO of cybersecurity startup Empow. "What is needed is an ecosystem that will treat these siloed tools as one defensive system, from detection and identification to investigation of the attack and then mitigation and remediation."

Robots are now helping passengers get through security faster. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport announced this week it is testing a robot to speed up the security process for passengers. The robot gives travelers tips for getting through security faster, like reminding them to remove objects such as scarves, light jackets, belts and to empty their pockets before going through screening. "The robot pilot program is an example of how Sea-Tac airport embraces technology, science and operational innovations," the airport said in a release. Sea-Tac officials will track the number of times travelers set off the body scanner alert during and after the robot test to see if it is actually helping speed up the process.

This is the first of a multi-part series explaining the fundamentals of deep learning by long-time tech journalist Michael Copeland. Artificial intelligence is the future. Artificial intelligence is science fiction. Artificial intelligence is already part of our everyday lives. All those statements are true, it just depends on what flavor of AI you are referring to.

This paper presents an approach for automation of interpretable feature selection for Internet Of Things Analytics (IoTA) using machine learning (ML) techniques. Authors have conducted a survey over different people involved in different IoTA based application development tasks. The survey reveals that feature selection is the most time consuming and niche skill demanding part of the entire workflow. This paper shows how feature selection is successfully automated without sacrificing the decision making accuracy and thereby reducing the project completion time and cost of hiring expensive resources. Several pattern recognition principles and state of art (SoA) ML techniques are followed to design the overall approach for the proposed automation. Three data sets are considered to establish the proof-of-concept. Experimental results show that the proposed automation is able to reduce the time for feature selection to $2$ days instead of $4-6$ months which would have been required in absence of the automation. This reduction in time is achieved without any sacrifice in the accuracy of the decision making process. Proposed method is also compared against Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) model as most of the state of the art works on IoTA uses MLP based Deep Learning. Moreover the feature selection method is compared against SoA feature reduction technique namely Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and its variants. The results obtained show that the proposed method is effective.

The civilians crowd together in a narrow alleyway, stranded near house-to-house fighting and surrounded by the stark devastation of western Mosul, where the battle against the Islamic State was supposed to be over. Video taken from a drone on Monday quickly confirmed that the battle to seize Mosul from the Islamic State continues, and that at least 100 civilians were still trapped by the fighting. For days since the government officially declared victory in the city, Times journalists and other witnesses in Mosul had confirmed that the sounds of intense fighting could still be heard from pockets within Western Mosul. Now, these drone images have provided the clearest account yet of a grinding battle that continues against the Islamic State's holdout force. And in one section of the city, a large number of civilians can be seen in a tight and enclosed section of alleyway, confirming fears that many Mosul residents have been unable to escape.

With the advent of artificial general intelligence and self-designed intelligent programs, new and more intelligent AI will appear, rapidly creating ever smarter machines that will, eventually, surpass us. When we reach this so-called AI singularity, our minds and bodies will be obsolete. Humans may merge with machines and continue to evolve as cyborgs. Is this really what we have to look forward to? AI, a scientific discipline rooted in computer science, mathematics, psychology, and neuroscience, aims to create machines that mimic human cognitive functions such as learning and problem-solving.

Six major airports in the United States are participating in pilot programs that require Americans traveling abroad to submit to facial-recognition scans when leaving the country, the Associated Press reported. Airports in Boston, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, New York City and Washington, D.C. have all started to implement the biometric scanning procedures, with plans to expand the program to a number of other high-volume international airports across the country by the start of next year. News of the biometric scans being active at airports and used to scan American citizens prior to boarding their flights is the latest development in the increased effort by the Donald Trump administration to implement strong vetting procedures for those coming and going from the country. U.S. Customs and Border Protection's (CBP) Larry Panetta spoke about adoption of facial recognition technology earlier this year at the Border Security Expo, where he suggested there was already enough information in the government's systems that facial recognition technology could already identify many travelers. "We currently have everyone's photo, so we don't need to do any sort of enrollment," Panetta said at the event.