UC Berkley researchers, lead by Richard Zhang, have developed an innovative app that uses artificial intelligence to colorize black and white photos near instantly. It begins by automatically colorizing the image, and then offers "suggested colors" to let users manually fix any mistakes, while the computer analyzes the markers in real-time to create the final product. Click here to view the first image in this week's funny Facebook status updates gallery.

The rise of a technology has Bill Gates issuing warnings of an apocalypse. It's Artificial Intelligence or AI, an idea whose time has come--it is incubating in science labs and being deployed by start-ups and industrial units alike. Why are Gates and Co. worried? Specifically, it's over machine learning, an early form of AI that has in recent years become mainstream, causing both delight and nervousness among AI experts and technology companies. AI involves building computers capable of taking smart decisions by themselves, the way humans do. Machine learning and various other sub-fields such as deep learning are the means to achieve AI. Google announced this week that it is rethinking all its products to base them on AI; it has created a new unit called Google.ai to facilitate this shift. The revival of interest in machine learning has been driven by a confluence of factors, such as the massive increase in computing power, emergence of neural networks (connected transistors that replicate the structure of neurons in the human brain) and the easy availability of vast amounts of data, thanks to the Internet. Compared to AI leaders in the Silicon Valley and China, India is a laggard but even here, nearly 300 start-ups are using some form of AI, according to Tracxn, a start-up tracker. Among dedicated AI-only Indian start-ups, 23% are working on providing solutions to multiple industries, 15% are in e-commerce, 12% in healthcare, 11% in education, 10% in financial services, and the rest in fields such as retail and logistics, according to a 2017 report by Kalaari Capital, a venture capital firm. Internet companies tap machine learning techniques for a range of uses--to recommend products for you, for instance, or to predict where cabs should be placed so that when you open your cab-hailing app, there's one a couple of minutes' drive away. Healthcare start-ups use AI to help hospitals make speedy and accurate blood reports and medical diagnoses, saving lives. Others get fashion brands and retailers to buy the right quantities of stock.

Message from the world's best StarCraft players to the world's most advanced AI: bring it on. The space-war computer game is widely regarded as the ultimate challenge for AI programs due to its complexity and rapid pace. Expectations for a match-up between a professional StarCraft player and sophisticated AI ratcheted up last year after an AI program beat a highly ranked human player at Go, one of the world's most difficult board games. At the time, a number of AI experts pointed to StarCraft as the next target for an AI-versus-man showdown. Among them: Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of DeepMind, the AI-focused division of Alphabet that created the triumphant Go-playing AI program, AlphaGo.

SAP has relaunched its Leonardo platform as a "digital innovation system", as it seeks to allow customers to take advantage of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, advanced analytics and blockchain on top of their business data. SAP Leonardo was originally released in January as an IoT platform, giving customers a place to track sensor data from connected assets and start to gain insight quickly. Now SAP wants to give customers a simple way to embrace all of these emerging technologies to solve specific business problems, before packaging them up for non-early adopters to procure later on. So instead of just helping customers embrace IoT with a cloud system and a set of templates, SAP has expanded Leonardo to the whole spectrum of enterprise problems. As Mike Flannagan, senior vice president of analytics at SAP put it: "Leonardo is about accelerating time to value by finding generalised, common business problems across an industry. "It's about taking a business problem, which is specific to one customer, find the elements of that problem which are common across the industry, then defining the elements of a methodology, the technologies used to solve that problem and package those up and make them available as an accelerator for the next customers" It can be tricky to find a working definition of SAP Leonardo at this point because it is an umbrella term for a number of SAP technologies, all built on top of its open platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering called SAP Cloud Platform. Speaking during SAP's annual Sapphire event in Orlando, Florida this week, cofounder and chairman of the SAP supervisory board Dr Hasso Plattner called Leonardo a "bounding box" which sits around "a set of objects.

An appeals court on Friday struck down a Federal Aviation Administration rule that required owners of drones used for recreation to register their craft. The ruling was a victory for hobbyists and a setback for the FAA, which cited safety concerns as it tried to tighten regulation of the fast-growing army of drone operators. Some pilots of commercial airliners have reported close calls with drones flying near airports. About 760,000 hobbyists have registered more than 1.6 million drones since 2015, and sales have skyrocketed. The FAA estimates that hobbyists will buy 2.3 million drones this year and 13 million by the end of 2020.

Traveling from point A to point B in a flying car may sound like it would break the bank, but Airbus has revealed a trip in its airborne vehicle will cost'the equivalent of a normal taxi'. The France-based firm is set to unleash its electric aircraft, called Project Vahana, in 2020, which aims to reduce traffic jams around the world - people will summon the flying taxi with a push of a button. Zach Lovering, the project leader at Airbus, told Business Insider that passengers should expect to pay $1.50 to $2.50 per mile – the low cost is possible because the craft does not need the same maintenance as ground cabs. Traveling from point A to point B in a flying car may sound like it would break the bank, but Airbus has revealed a trip in its airborne vehicle will cost'the equivalent of a normal taxi Project Vahana began earlier this year and is one of the first projects at A³, the advanced projects and partnerships outpost of Airbus Group in Silicon Valley. The first conceptual renders have been revealed showing a sleek self-flying aircraft with room for one passenger who sits under a canopy that retracts similar to a motorcycle helmet visor.

This paper proposes three different distributed event-triggered control algorithms to achieve leader-follower consensus for a network of Euler-Lagrange agents. We firstly propose two model-independent algorithms for a subclass of Euler-Lagrange agents without the vector of gravitational potential forces. By model-independent, we mean that each agent can execute its algorithm with no knowledge of the agent self-dynamics. A variable-gain algorithm is employed when the sensing graph is undirected; algorithm parameters are selected in a fully distributed manner with much greater flexibility compared to all previous work concerning event-triggered consensus problems. When the sensing graph is directed, a constant-gain algorithm is employed. The control gains must be centrally designed to exceed several lower bounding inequalities which require limited knowledge of bounds on the matrices describing the agent dynamics, bounds on network topology information and bounds on the initial conditions. When the Euler-Lagrange agents have dynamics which include the vector of gravitational potential forces, an adaptive algorithm is proposed which requires more information about the agent dynamics but can estimate uncertain agent parameters. For each algorithm, a trigger function is proposed to govern the event update times. At each event, the controller is updated, which ensures that the control input is piecewise constant and saves energy resources. We analyse each controllers and trigger function and exclude Zeno behaviour. Extensive simulations show 1) the advantages of our proposed trigger function as compared to those in existing literature, and 2) the effectiveness of our proposed controllers.

Computer scientists at the University of Alberta are gearing up to watch a modern-age version of David versus Goliath, where man will battle machine in complex strategy board game, Go. "You could study Go for a lifetime," said professor Martin Mueller, who is travelling to China on Saturday to watch a three-game match between professional Go player Ke Jie and the computer program AlphaGo. Developed at Google DeepMind by a team of scientists -- including U of A alumni David Silver and Aja Huang -- AlphaGo was the first artificial intelligence to defeat professional Go players. In March 2016, the program beat one of the world's best players, Lee Sedol, in Seoul, South Korea, in a historic series that saw AlphaGo win four out of five games. Go is an ancient Chinese game that involves placing pieces, named stones, on an empty board to form territories and surround the other player. The tournament at the upcoming Future of Go Summit, from May 23 to 27, has the makings of an epic contest.

Forty-five years have passed since humans last set foot on an extraterrestrial body. Now, the moon is back at the center of efforts not only to explore space, but to create a permanent, independent space-faring society. Planning expeditions to Earth's nearest celestial neighbor is no longer just a NASA effort, though the U.S. space agency has plans for a moon-orbiting space station that would serve as a staging ground for Mars missions in the early 2030s. The United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, is planning a lunar fueling station for spacecraft, capable of supporting 1,000 people living in space within 30 years. Billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Robert Bigelow all have companies aiming to deliver people or goods to the moon.

Beyond membership in the Pantheon of Famous Brits, Winston Churchill and George Orwell would seem to have little in the way of common ground. Orwell was a journalist and novelist. Churchill had money and pedigree; the young Orwell lived on the street and raised his own vegetables during World War II. Churchill's political leanings were conservative; Orwell flirted with communism until he witnessed the betrayal of his Republican comrades by Soviet agents in the Spanish Civil War. In "Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom," Thomas E. Ricks gets beyond these differences and finds the iron core of both men.