He is known as the Dark Prince or Ayatollah Mike, nicknames he earned as the Central Intelligence Agency officer who oversaw the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the American drone strike campaign that killed thousands of Islamist militants and hundreds of civilians. Now the official, Michael D'Andrea, has a new job. He is running the C.I.A.'s Iran operations, according to current and former intelligence officials, an appointment that is the first major sign that the Trump administration is invoking the hard line the president took against Iran during his campaign. Mr. D'Andrea's new role is one of a number of moves inside the spy agency that signal a more muscular approach to espionage and covert operations under the leadership of Mike Pompeo, the conservative Republican and former congressman, the officials said. The agency also recently named a new chief of counterterrorism, who has begun pushing for greater latitude to strike militants.

Sure, I can make the case for how companies like Lockheed and Monsanto will rely on A.I. in the coming years. I already invest in Amazon. I'd want a company AT LEAST AS compelling an investment as Amazon… tough to come across. An analysis of Facebook and Alphabet's Google by research firm Innography shows a surge in AI patent filings that began in 2010. Alphabet currently has more than 3,000 AI patents that are active or pending government approval.

You could soon fold a mountain of clean laundry without lifting a finger. A Japanese firm has combined its $16,500 fully automatic laundry folding robot with a desk lamp that responds to voice controls. Since Lumigent lights up automatically when spoken to, the integration will enable the lamp to command the basic Laundroid operations. Users simply load the machine with clean dry clothes and the robot arm inside will do the rest. Prior to the latest announcement, the machine operated via an app or control buttons on the device.

We believe that there exist classic deep learning papers which are worth reading regardless of their application domain. Rather than providing overwhelming amount of papers, We would like to provide a curated list of the awesome deep learning papers which are considered as must-reads in certain research domains. Background Before this list, there exist other awesome deep learning lists, for example, Deep Vision and Awesome Recurrent Neural Networks. Also, after this list comes out, another awesome list for deep learning beginners, called Deep Learning Papers Reading Roadmap, has been created and loved by many deep learning researchers. Although the Roadmap List includes lots of important deep learning papers, it feels overwhelming for me to read them all.

There's only so much you can do with two arms and hands. But what if you could add extras without the need for ethically shady surgery or trading your apartment for a hovel in the shadow of a nuclear power plant? That's what researchers from Keio University and the University of Tokyo hope to achieve with their "Metalimbs" project. As the name suggests, Metalimbs are a pair of metal, robotic arms that doubles the amount of torso-extremities and worn with a backpack of sorts. And unlike thought-powered prosthetics we've seen recently, these are controlled not with your brain, but your existing limbs.

Alphabet's self-driving car company Waymo is testing autonomous truck technology, according to BuzzFeed. Waymo confirmed to BuzzFeed its move after the outlet learned of the move through a photograph. The company said it was manually driving the vehicle on a public road to collect data. "Self-driving technology can transport people and things much more safely than we do today and reduce the thousands of trucking-related deaths each year," a Waymo spokesperson told BuzzFeed. "We're taking our eight years of experience in building self-driving hardware and software and conducting a technical exploration into how our technology can integrate into a truck."

Earlier this year, NASA launched a tool that would allow everyday citizens to join the search for alien worlds. Now, the space agency has confirmed there's already been a discovery. Observations with NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii have confirmed that an object spotted by four different users just days after the tool became available is, in fact, a'new cold world' just 100 light-years from the sun. The tool allows users to track moving objects in digital'flipbooks,' using observations from NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey (WISE) spacecraft. To search for undiscovered worlds, visit the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 website.

Machine translation systems that convert sign language into text and back again are helping people who are deaf or have difficulty hearing to communicate with those who cannot sign. KinTrans, a start-up based in Dallas, Texas, is trialling its technology in a bank and government offices in the United Arab Emirates, and plans to install it in more places over the next couple of months. SignAll, a company based in Budapest, Hungary, will begin its own trials next year. KinTrans uses a 3D camera to track the movement of a person's hands as they sign words. A sign language user can approach a bank teller and sign to the KinTrans camera that they'd like assistance, for example.

In late 2016, a sports championship event was held in Chicago, drawing 43 million viewers during the series finals. That was 12 million more people than watched the 2016 NBA Finals. Instead, it was the'League of Legends' World Finals, an esports competition. Esports has recently emerged as a spectator activity that can draw thousands of attendees and viewers. A researchers from Indiana University has shared his opinion on the phenomenon of esports.

Nintendo will finally unveil its online service for the Switch next year, it has confirmed. The full launch will happen in 2018. When it does, Switch players will pay $20 per year to get access to a range of new and existing features. Until the service rolls out, Switch owners will be able to play online for free. But they also won't get access to the features that will come at the full launch, which includes proper matchmaking and a phone app.