Virtual reality and artificial intelligence products took center stage at this year's International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the platform where the world's trends in scientific and technological innovations are put on display, with companies from China, which accounted for one third of the leading exhibitors at the event, visibly demonstrating their newfound stature. Suning also hosted the "China Innovation North America Summit Forum", giving 3C (computers, communications and consumer electronics) home appliance makers around the world a presentation on how to fast track their products into the Chinese market. The organizer of the exhibition was extremely complimentary in his comments about Suning. In a chat with Suning's exhibition team, Consumer Technology Association president and CEO Gary Shapiro said CES is a platform that connects all the participants in the world of high tech, while Suning is an important sales platform for innovative technological products and services, and, as a result of the role that Suning plays, he looks forward to seeing further cooperation between the two parties. Executive vice president of IT at Suning Commerce Joshua Xiang explained: "With the success of its transition to e-commerce, Suning plans to introduce intelligence into the retail industry as a new driving force for the further development of online retail".

HYDERABAD: To use artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of eyecare, Microsoft India, in collaboration with L V Prasad Eye Institute launched Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare (MINE), on Monday. This is a consortium of different institutions with similar goals who have joined hands to apply artificial intelligence to help eliminate avoidable blindness and scale delivery of eyecare services across the globe. The partner organizations, which include Bascom Palmer from University of Miami, Flaum Eye Institute from University of Rochester, Federal University of Sao Paulo and Brien Holden Vision Institute, will collectively work on diverse datasets of patients across geographies to come up with machine learning predictive models for vision impairment and eye disease. Microsoft will deploy its cloud platform technology Cortana Intelligence Suite for advanced analytics and to build intelligence models on eyecare. "MINE, a global collaboration, reinforces Microsoft's belief in the combined power of data, cloud and advanced analytics to drive public good," said Anil Bhansali, managing director of Microsoft India (R&D).

JAKARTA – The waste from discarded electronic gadgets and electrical appliances has reached severe levels in East Asia, posing a growing threat to health and the environment unless safe disposal becomes the norm. China was the biggest culprit with its electronic waste more than doubling, according to a new study by the United Nations University. But nearly every country in the region had massive increases between 2010 and 2015, including those least equipped to deal with the growing mountain of discarded smartphones, computers, TVs, air conditioners and other goods. On average, electronic waste in the 12 countries in the study had increased by nearly two thirds in the five years, totaling 12.3 million tons in 2015 alone. Rising incomes in Asia, burgeoning populations of young adults, rapid obsolescence of products due to technological innovation and changes in fashion, on top of illegal global trade in waste, are among factors driving the increases.

He is a German computer scientist and artist known for his work on machine learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), artificial neural networks, digital physics, and low-complexity art. "We need to be super careful with artificial intelligence. It is potentially more dangerous than nukes." That was Elon Musk two years ago, on Twitter. What does it mean for a technology, when it faces serious doubts from a man who is passionate about creating a better world through innovation? Since its beginnings in the 1950s, artificial intelligence has been a favourite subject of science fiction. But now AI has entered the realm of fact: several studies predict that intelligent machines will have a big impact on how we work, how we move and even how wars are fought. Innovators and scientists around the world believe that now is the time to ensure that AI is beneficial above all for humans. And even if there are plausible reasons to be anxious about machines that could one day be more intelligent than we are, many scientists are ready to take up the challenge. Some people fret that artificial intelligence will end civilization as we know it. Others believe it can solve every problem.

This performance by Trevor Paglen explores the way machines see and interpret the experience of watching a musical performance. Kronos Quartet will perform works ranging from Baroque composer J. S. Bach to contemporary minimalist composers Terry Riley and Steve Reich, and American blues to African folk music. A live video feed of the performance will be processed in real time through surveillance AI algorithms, and the resultant machine vision data images will be projected on a screen above the performers. Sight Machine is organized by the Cantor Arts Center. We gratefully acknowledge support from the Palmer Gross Ducommon Fund and from our partners: Meyer Sound, Obscura Digital, Orton Development, and Plant Construction.

The GTCI measures how countries grow, attract and retain talent, providing a resource for decision makers to develop strategies for boosting their talent competitiveness. The theme of this fourth edition of the GTCI is Talent and Technology: Shaping the Future of Work. The 2017 report explores the effects of technological change on talent competitiveness, arguing that while jobs at all levels continue to be replaced by machines, technology is also creating new opportunities. However, people and organisations will need to adapt to a working environment in which technology know-how, people skills, flexibility and collaboration are key to success, and in which horizontal networks are replacing hierarchies as the new leadership norm. Governments and business players need to work together to build educational systems and labour market policies that are fit for purpose.

Best-first search algorithms such as A* need to apply tie-breaking strategies in order to decide which node to expand when multiple search nodes have the same evaluation score. We investigate and improve tie-breaking strategies for cost-optimal search using A*. We first experimentally analyze the performance of common tie-breaking strategies that break ties according to the heuristic value of the nodes. We find that the tie-breaking strategy has a significant impact on search algorithm performance when there are 0-cost operators that induce large plateau regions in the search space. Based on this, we develop two new classes of tie-breaking strategies. We first propose a depth diversification strategy which breaks ties according to the distance from the entrance to the plateau, and then show that this new strategy significantly outperforms standard strategies on domains with 0-cost actions. Next, we propose a new framework for interpreting A* search as a series of satisficing searches within plateaus consisting of nodes with the same f-cost. Based on this framework, we investigate a second, new class of tie-breaking strategy, a multi-heuristic tie-breaking strategy which embeds inadmissible, distance-to-go variations of various heuristics within an admissible search. This is shown to further improve the performance in combination with the depth metric.

Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is a multivariate statistical technique for finding the linear relationship between two sets of variables. The kernel generalization of CCA named kernel CCA has been proposed to find nonlinear relations between datasets. Despite their wide usage, they have one common limitation that is the lack of sparsity in their solution. In this paper, we consider sparse kernel CCA and propose a novel sparse kernel CCA algorithm (SKCCA). Our algorithm is based on a relationship between kernel CCA and least squares. Sparsity of the dual transformations is introduced by penalizing the $\ell_{1}$-norm of dual vectors. Experiments demonstrate that our algorithm not only performs well in computing sparse dual transformations but also can alleviate the over-fitting problem of kernel CCA.

Abstract: One-Class Classification (OCC) has been prime concern for researchers and effectively employed in various disciplines. But, traditional methods based one-class classifiers are very time consuming due to its iterative process and various parameters tuning. In this paper, we present six OCC methods and their thirteen variants based on extreme learning machine (ELM) and Online Sequential ELM (OSELM). Our proposed classifiers mainly lie in two categories: reconstruction based and boundary based, where three proposed classifiers belong to reconstruction based and three belong to boundary based. We are presenting both types of learning viz., online and offline learning for OCC. Out of six methods, four are offline and remaining two are online methods. Out of four offline methods, two methods perform random feature mapping and two methods perform kernel feature mapping. We present a comprehensive discussion on these methods and their comparison to each other. Kernel feature mapping based approaches have been tested with RBF kernel and online version of one-class classifiers are tested with both types of nodes viz., additive and RBF. It is well known fact that threshold decision is a crucial factor in case of OCC, so, three different threshold deciding criteria have been employed so far and analyses the effectiveness of one threshold deciding criteria over another. Further, these methods are tested on two artificial datasets to check there boundary construction capability and on eight benchmark datasets from different discipline to evaluate the performance of the classifiers. Our proposed classifiers exhibit better performance compared to ten traditional one-class classifiers and ELM based two one-class classifiers. Through proposed one-class classifiers, we intend to expand the functionality of the most used toolbox for OCC i.e.

Emotions tend to run high in hospitals, and patients or patients' loved ones can be rude to medical professionals when they perceive inadequate care. But berating your child's doctor could have harmful -- even deadly -- consequences, according to new research. The findings by University of Florida management professor Amir Erez and doctoral student Trevor Foulk reinforce their prior research that rudeness has "devastating effects on medical performance," Erez said. A Johns Hopkins study estimated that more than 250,000 deaths are attributed to medical errors in the U.S. annually--which would rank as the third-leading cause of death in the U.S., according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some errors could be explained by a doctor's poor judgment due to a chronic lack of sleep.