In the battle for the 21st century workplace, computers are winning. A January 2017 report from the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that roughly half of today's work activities could be automated by 2055, give or take 20 years. Bottom line is robots want our jobs. And no one is going to build a wall around them or tariff them out of existence. In a way this is nothing new.

Convex clustering, a convex relaxation of k-means clustering and hierarchical clustering, has drawn recent attentions since it nicely addresses the instability issue of traditional nonconvex clustering methods. Although its computational and statistical properties have been recently studied, the performance of convex clustering has not yet been investigated in the high-dimensional clustering scenario, where the data contains a large number of features and many of them carry no information about the clustering structure. In this paper, we demonstrate that the performance of convex clustering could be distorted when the uninformative features are included in the clustering. To overcome it, we introduce a new clustering method, referred to as Sparse Convex Clustering, to simultaneously cluster observations and conduct feature selection. The key idea is to formulate convex clustering in a form of regularization, with an adaptive group-lasso penalty term on cluster centers. In order to optimally balance the tradeoff between the cluster fitting and sparsity, a tuning criterion based on clustering stability is developed. In theory, we provide an unbiased estimator for the degrees of freedom of the proposed sparse convex clustering method. Finally, the effectiveness of the sparse convex clustering is examined through a variety of numerical experiments and a real data application.

This week Intel's CEO used a meeting with Donald Trump to announce it would invest $7bn in building a factory in Arizona, creating about 3,000 jobs. It seemed like a coup for Trump, who has pledged to bring manufacturing back to the US. In a media-attended Oval Office meeting, Intel's Brian Krzanich stood next to Trump and declared, with all the conviction of a hostage making a false confession, that the investment was a response to Trump's business-friendly policies. Thank you Brian Krzanich, CEO of @Intel. "It's in support of the tax and regulatory policies that we see the administration pushing forward that really make it advantageous to do manufacturing in the US," he said.

February 9, 2017 --Three-quarters of the world's food crops require pollination, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, but more than 40 percent of the species that perform this vital service are under threat. Researchers across disciplines have been searching for solutions. Some focus on ways to protect the bees and other crucial pollinators. But others are looking outside of the natural world for ways to protect crops like fruits, vegetables, nuts, berries, and even chocolate and coffee. Perhaps an army of robotic pollinators could keep humans well-supplied in these foods, some engineers have thought.

This year, the world saw a long-theorized weapon in action: a commercial drone, like a person might find at Best Buy, dropping a bomb on a target in Iraq. These drone bombers, used by the ultra-violent quasi-state ISIS in Iraq and Syria, are the flashiest combination of modern technologies with the modern battlefield. Cheap, camera-carrying robots, put to nefarious ends by a group that could never otherwise dream of fielding an air force. Dropping grenades isn't the deadliest thing an insurgent group can do with a small flying robot, but it leads to a very important question: What, exactly, is the answer to such a drone? There is--and this is rare for the defense world--no clear answer yet. The answer to a tank is a guided missile, fired by shoulder-launcher, helicopter, or low-flying attack plane.

Digital health startups looking to solve the pharma industry's problems will be heartened to hear that German life sciences company Bayer is bringing its Grants4Apps accelerator program to San Francisco. That announcement came from Dirk Schapeler, head of Bayer's Lifescience iHub, who was speaking at the Wearable Tech Digital Health Neurotech Silicon Valley conference at Stanford University, Tuesday. Bayer's Lifescience iHub is based in Mountain View, California, and is aimed at infusing the digital component in all of Bayer's businesses including pharmaceuticals through collaboration with tech companies. As such the company is interested in sensors, AI, machine learning and digital apps. Grant4Apps is Bayer's accelerator for digital health startups worldwide.

Connected hospitals with intelligent messaging In today's hospitals, pacemakers, defibrillators and oximeters are all connected to the internet and share vitals immediately with doctors, in turn speeding response times. Hospitals have technicians, nurses, staff, billing departments, insurance providers, patients and patients' families as stakeholders, each with different requirements of information about the care given to patient. Unified Inbox offers an AI-based unified cloud IoT messaging platform for internet of things devices to connect various stakeholders, giving them the freedom to receive different messages at different frequency, with different senses of urgency in different mediums of their choice. Unified Inbox launched this at Nanyang Polytechnic in Singapore as "CUBE," the IoT-secured messaging gateway for healthcare. The artificial intelligence makes the hospitals connected, giving peace of mind to patients and their loved ones while improving efficiency in the overall hospital management and interaction with all stakeholders.

They must be doing something." Amos and Danny didn't have much doubt that a lot of people would get the questions they had dreamed up wrong--because Danny and Amos had gotten them, or versions of them, wrong. If they both committed the same mental errors, or were tempted to commit them, they assumed--rightly, as it turned out--that most other people would commit them, too. The questions they had spent the year cooking up were not so much experiments as they were little dramas: Here, look, this is what the uncertain human mind actually does. Their first paper had shown that people faced with a problem that had a statistically correct answer did not think like statisticians.

One day, gardeners might not just hear the buzz of bees among their flowers, but the whirr of robots, too. Scientists in Japan say they've managed to turn an unassuming drone into a remote-controlled pollinator by attaching horsehairs coated with a special, sticky gel to its underbelly. The system, described in the journal Chem, is nowhere near ready to be sent to agricultural fields, but it could help pave the way to developing automated pollination techniques at a time when bee colonies are suffering precipitous declines. In flowering plants, sex often involves a threesome. Flowers looking to get the pollen from their male parts into another bloom's female parts need an envoy to carry it from one to the other.

The recent political earthquakes have found us intellectually and emotionally underprepared, even helpless. None of our usual categories (left, right, liberal, conservative, progressive, reactionary) and perspectives (class, race, gender) seem able to explain how a compulsive liar and serial groper became the world's most powerful man. Turning away from this unintelligible disaster, many seek enlightenment in literary and philosophical texts from the past, such as Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism," George Orwell's "1984," and Sinclair Lewis's "It Can't Happen Here." It may be more rewarding, however, to turn to Václav Havel: a writer and thinker who intimately experienced totalitarianism of the Orwellian kind, who believed that it had already happened in America, and who also offered a way to resist it. Born in 1936, Havel came of age in Czechoslovakia, whose Communist rulers repeatedly imprisoned and continuously surveilled him while suppressing many of his writings.