Jason Les is a seasoned professional poker player, though even he would say there's not much he can do to prepare for his next match. Usually, Les would scrutinize videos of upcoming opponent to learn their playing style and analyse their previous poker hands. "You have the opportunity to get an understanding of your future opponent's strategy and develop a counter-strategy," Les told Motherboard. But Les' next match, a heads-up no-limit Texas Hold'em match that will be played alongside three other professional poker players over the course of 20 days, isn't a typical one. Accompanied by poker stars Dong Kim, Jimmy Chou, and Daniel McAuley, Les will be pitted against an artificial intelligence program developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

Google's secretive X R&D lab, a division of Google's parent company Alphabet, has pulled the plug on its drone project that would bring internet access to millions of people – Project Titan. It has been confirmed by Alphabet that engineers were told to look for other positions within the Alphabet/Google community. Although the project has been killed, the mission is still alive – the firm will continue to use Project Loon as a way to connect rural and remote areas of the world. X, a division of Google's parent company Alphabet, has pulled the plug on its project that would bring internet access to millions of people – Titan. The news was first reported by 9To5Mac, which received a statement from an X spokesperson.

Rising inequality and social polarisation are set to shape world developments for the next decade after contributing to Britain's decision to leave the European Union and the ballot-box success of US president-elect Donald Trump, the World Economic Forum says. Climate change was underlined as the third major global trend in the WEF's annual assessment of global risks, published on Wednesday at an event at Bloomberg's European headquarters in London. It said world leaders must work together to avoid "further hardship and volatility in the coming decade". If everything goes to plan, we should see Australian growth around 2.8% in 2017, but there are a number of risks in both directions. Bellamy's CEO Laura McBain has been widely credited for transforming the family-run local company to a global brand.

WASHINGTON – Islamic State jihadis are using small commercial drones to attack Iraqi security forces in the battle for Mosul, a U.S. commander said Wednesday. Col. Brett Sylvia, who commands an "advise and assist" U.S. unit in Iraq, said IS fighters are attaching small munitions to quadcopters in an attempt to kill local forces as they retake Mosul, the last major IS bastion in Iraq. "They are small drones with small munitions that they've been dropping," Sylvia said. While the munitions were no larger than "a small little grenade," he said, that was enough to do what "Daesh does, and that's just, you know, indiscriminate killing," he said, using an Arabic acronym for IS. The group's use of small drones is not new, Sylvia said, though initially they were mainly used for reconnaissance.

The official unveiling of the Nintendo Switch is almost upon us after months of waiting, hand-wringing and speculation. Here's a brief guide to help you prepare for the announcement. The Nintendo Switch is about to be officially revealed. What Is It? Nintendo unveils its latest console, the Switch, which it partially unveiled already late last year. The new video game console blends the portable with the stationary, streamlining Nintendo's two biggest segments into one machine that can be played at home or on the go.

We propose a modified expectation-maximization algorithm by introducing the concept of quantum annealing, which we call the deterministic quantum annealing expectation-maximization (DQAEM) algorithm. The expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is an established algorithm to compute maximum likelihood estimates and applied to many practical applications. However, it is known that EM heavily depends on initial values and its estimates are sometimes trapped by local optima. To solve such a problem, quantum annealing (QA) was proposed as a novel optimization approach motivated by quantum mechanics. By employing QA, we then formulate DQAEM and present a theorem that supports its stability. Finally, we demonstrate numerical simulations to confirm its efficiency.

Discrete-time hidden Markov models are a broadly useful class of latent-variable models with applications in areas such as speech recognition, bioinformatics, and climate data analysis. It is common in practice to introduce temporal non-homogeneity into such models by making the transition probabilities dependent on time-varying exogenous input variables via a multinomial logistic parametrization. We extend such models to introduce additional non-homogeneity into the emission distribution using a generalized linear model (GLM), with data augmentation for sampling-based inference. However, the presence of the logistic function in the state transition model significantly complicates parameter inference for the overall model, particularly in a Bayesian context. To address this we extend the recently-proposed Polya-Gamma data augmentation approach to handle non-homogeneous hidden Markov models (NHMMs), allowing the development of an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling scheme. We apply our model and inference scheme to 30 years of daily rainfall in India, leading to a number of insights into rainfall-related phenomena in the region. Our proposed approach allows for fully Bayesian analysis of relatively complex NHMMs on a scale that was not possible with previous methods. Software implementing the methods described in the paper is available via the R package NHMM.

The focus in this paper is Bayesian system identification based on noisy incomplete modal data where we can impose spatially-sparse stiffness changes when updating a structural model. To this end, based on a similar hierarchical sparse Bayesian learning model from our previous work, we propose two Gibbs sampling algorithms. The algorithms differ in their strategies to deal with the posterior uncertainty of the equation-error precision parameter, but both sample from the conditional posterior probability density functions (PDFs) for the structural stiffness parameters and system modal parameters. The effective dimension for the Gibbs sampling is low because iterative sampling is done from only three conditional posterior PDFs that correspond to three parameter groups, along with sampling of the equation-error precision parameter from another conditional posterior PDF in one of the algorithms where it is not integrated out as a "nuisance" parameter. A nice feature from a computational perspective is that it is not necessary to solve a nonlinear eigenvalue problem of a structural model. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithms are illustrated by applying them to the IASE-ASCE Phase II simulated and experimental benchmark studies. The goal is to use incomplete modal data identified before and after possible damage to detect and assess spatially-sparse stiffness reductions induced by any damage. Our past and current focus on meeting challenges arising from Bayesian inference of structural stiffness serve to strengthen the capability of vibration-based structural system identification but our methods also have much broader applicability for inverse problems in science and technology where system matrices are to be inferred from noisy partial information about their eigenquantities.

Rising income inequality and the polarisation of societies pose a risk to the global economy in 2017 and could result in the rolling back of globalisation unless urgent action is taken, according to the World Economic Forum. Before its annual meeting in Davos next week, the WEF said the gap between rich and poor had been behind the UK's Brexit vote and Donald Trump's election victory in the US. And it warned that there were new threats to social cohesion from the robotics and artificial intelligence revolution. The organisation said fundamental reform of capitalism may be needed to tackle public anger. The WEF's annual global risks report – culled from 700 experts – found that rising income and wealth disparity, and increasing polarisation of sectors of society, were ranked first and third among the underlying trends that will determine the shape of the world in the next decade.

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, the pace of change in the world is so fast that if someone from medieval times would come back, he will want to die again because he will not be able to adjust in this new world which is trying to turn science fiction into reality. Driverless cars, drone deliveries; every year is bringing something new for us. Here are those five technologies or ideas which will change the world in the years to come. In the modern post-industrial economy, investment on higher education gives more dividends than even capital. It has helped many to get out of the vicious circle of poverty across all continents. Attaining education from the world's top universities has been a dream for many people but few are able to achieve due to many constraints.