Crowdsourcing platforms emerged as popular venues for purchasing human intelligence at low cost for large volumes of tasks. As many low-paid workers are prone to give noisy answers, one of the fundamental questions is how to identify more reliable workers and exploit this heterogeneity to infer the true answers accurately. Despite significant research efforts for classification tasks with discrete answers, little attention has been paid to regression tasks with continuous answers. The popular Dawid-Skene model for discrete answers has the algorithmic and mathematical simplicity in relation to low-rank structures. But it does not generalize for continuous valued answers. To this end, we introduce a new probabilistic model for crowdsourced regression capturing the heterogeneity of the workers, generalizing the Dawid-Skene model to the continuous domain. We design a message-passing algorithm for Bayesian inference inspired by the popular belief propagation algorithm. We showcase its performance first by proving that it achieves a near optimal mean squared error by comparing it to an oracle estimator. Asymptotically, we can provide a tighter analysis showing that the proposed algorithm achieves the exact optimal performance. We next show synthetic experiments confirming our theoretical predictions. As a practical application, we further emulate a crowdsourcing system reproducing PASCAL visual object classes datasets and show that de-noising the crowdsourced data from the proposed scheme can significantly improve the performance for the vision task.

From teleportation tubes to flying cars, getting from A to B looks like it will be more fun in the future, if science fiction films are to be believed. And some of these futuristic visions are expected to become reality within our lifetimes. To shed light on how we might get around in the year 2050, electronics firm RS Components has created an interactive module that showcases some of the most exciting predictions. Users can input their current age to see in how many years they might be able to travel in a next-generation airliner with panoramic windows, or even take a high speed monorail to work – if all the jobs have not been taken by robots. By 2050, when self-driving cars will seem part of normal life, air travel is set to become more exciting.

Ford is replacing CEO Mark Fields as it struggles to keep its traditional auto-manufacturing business running smoothly while remaking itself as a nimble, high-tech provider of new mobility services. The 114-year-old automaker said Fields is retiring at age 56 after 28 years at the company. Fields will be replaced by Jim Hackett, who joined Ford's board in 2013. Hackett has led Ford's mobility unit since March of last year. In three years as CEO, Fields began Ford's transition from a traditional automaker into a "mobility" company, laying out plans to build autonomous vehicles and explore new services such as ride-hailing and car-sharing.

BEIJING – China's biggest online retailer, JD.com Inc., announced plans Monday to develop drone aircraft capable of carrying a ton or more for long-distance deliveries. The company said it will test the drones on a network it is developing to cover the northern Chinese province of Shaanxi. It said they will carry consumer goods to remote areas and farm produce to cities. JD.com, headquartered in Beijing, says it made its first deliveries to customers using smaller drones in November. Other e-commerce brands including Amazon.com Inc. also are experimenting with drones for delivery. "We envision a network that will be able to efficiently transport goods between cities, and even between provinces, in the future," the chief executive of JD's logistics business group, Wang Zhenhui, said in a statement.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Loom Systems will exhibit at SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Founded in 2015, Loom Systems delivers an advanced AI solution to predict and prevent problems in the digital business. Loom stands alone in the industry as an AI analysis platform requiring no prior math knowledge from operators, leveraging the existing staff to succeed in the digital era. With offices in San Francisco and Tel Aviv, Loom Systems works with customers across industries around the world. The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in enterprise IT.

FILE - In this April 12, 2017 file photo, Ford Motor Co. President and CEO Mark Fields speaks during a media preview of the 2018 Lincoln Navigator at the New York International Auto Show in New York. Ford is replacing its CEO amid questions about its current performance and future strategy, a person familiar with the situation has said. Fields will be replaced by Jim Hackett, who joined Ford's board in 2013. FILE - In this April 12, 2017 file photo, Ford Motor Co. President and CEO Mark Fields speaks during a media preview of the 2018 Lincoln Navigator at the New York International Auto Show in New York. Ford is replacing its CEO amid questions about its current performance and future strategy, a person familiar with the situation has said.

The world's first robocop has been unveiled in Dubai and will be patrolling streets from tomorrow onward. The 5 ft 5in tall robot can read facial expressions and will be used by members of the public to report crime and pay traffic fines. Multi-lingual crime-fighting robots will make up a quarter of the city's police force by 2030, according to officials. Real-life RoboCops will be patrolling the streets of Dubai alongside police. The android, which is equipped with face recognition technology, will be used by members of the public to report crime and pay traffic fines.

Amazon appears to be preparing to brings its unusual Go stores to the UK. The company has filed several Go-related trademark applications with the UK Intellectual Property Office, which have now been approved, suggesting a launch announcement could be imminent. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

When Masayoshi Son was a boy growing up in Kyushu, he kept a notebook to scribble down inventions he hoped to create one day. Today, the SoftBank founder has almost $100 billion to invest in making the next big thing a reality. Son's SoftBank Group Corp. closed the first round of a planned $100 billion investment fund, with money raised from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, as well as Apple Inc. and Qualcomm Inc. The Vision Fund gives the 59-year-old access to a pool of capital unparalleled in the worlds of private equity or venture capital -- the equivalent of four Silver Lakes or 15 Sequoia Capitals. He has said, without irony, that he has a 300-year plan for SoftBank and aims to build the world's most valuable company.

Drone delivery in China and other countries faces hurdles including airspace restrictions and the need to avoid collisions with birds and other obstacles. In the United States, regulators allow commercial drone flights only on an experimental basis.