ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Video Games Are So Realistic That They Can Teach AI What the World Looks Like Jordan Pearson Motherboard "Games these days are so realistic, in fact, that artificial intelligence researchers are using them to teach computers how to recognize objects in real life. Not only that, but commercial video games could kick artificial intelligence research into high gear by dramatically lessening the time and money required to train AI." GENETICS: This New Gene Technology Could Wipe out Entire Species--to Save Others Chelsea Harvey The Washington Post "Scientists from around the world are currently gathered in Hawaii for an international conservation congress... One topic on the table is a form of genetic editing called'gene drive' technology, which can be used to alter--or even wipe out--entire species... Gene drives are a naturally occurring phenomenon--they're found in all kinds of species in nature. But it wasn't until recently, with the advent of new genetic engineering tools, that scientists realized they could be harnessed by humans." FUTURE OF LEARNING: Teaching Me Softly Alan S. Brown Nautilus "Vapnik is one of a growing body of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers discovering something that teachers have long known--or at least, believed--to be true: There is a special, valuable communication that occurs between teacher and student, which goes beyond what can be found in any textbook or raw data stream. By bringing the tools of computation and machine intuition to the table, AI researchers are giving us a more complete picture of how we learn."

Jane Schreibman got a telephone call about 10 p.m. Saturday asking whether she was all right. Until then, the photographer hadn't realized that a bomb had exploded on 23rd Street, just four blocks from her apartment, so she bolted downstairs to take a look at what was going on. That's when she saw a strange object a few paces from her building's front door. "I thought it was a child's science experiment,'' said Schreibman, 66, in a telephone interview. It was a shiny metal pressure cooker with wires coming out and a rectangular object attached that was wrapped in duct tape. There was a white plastic bag next to it, but she couldn't tell whether it was just garbage that had blown nearby. "It was a funny-looking object.

I got to talk to Jane Jacobs once, toward the end of her life, an interview that is mentioned, in its properly Lilliputian proportion, in Robert Kanigel's new biography, "Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs" (Knopf). She was one of three people I have met in a lifetime of meeting people who had an aura of sainthood about them, the others being Iona Opie, the British folklorist who collected children's rhymes, and I. F. Stone, the independent American journalist. What they had in common was a sort of radiant self-reliance. They could say an obvious thing--that children are citizens of another country, that all governments lie--with the conviction that comes from having really found it out. They spoke for many, because they thought for themselves. Iona Opie made hanging around schoolyards to find small variants in jumping-rope rhymes seem essential to understanding humanity, and Izzy Stone made you feel unpatriotic for not printing your own biweekly page of political commentary. The ability to radiate certainty without condescension, to be both very sure and very simple, is a potent one, and witnessing it in life explains a lot in history that might otherwise be inexplicable--for instance, how a sixteen-year-old girl could lead the French Army to victory. Jane Jacobs's aura was so powerful that it made her, precisely, the St. Joan of the small scale. Her name still summons an entire city vision--the much watched corner, the mixed-use neighborhood--and her holy tale is all the stronger for including a nemesis of equal stature: Robert Moses, the Sauron of the street corner. The New York planning dictator wanted to drive an expressway through lower Manhattan, and was defeated, the legend runs, by this ordinary mom.

Latest technologies in artificial intelligence, chip, virtual reality and smart communities were the highlights of the Shanghai International Popular Science Products Expo, which closes today. A Shanghai-based startup has developed a chip system with an artificial intelligence feature that works in a high performance and energy efficiency manner. Developed by Shanghai Westwell, it can be used both in the home and by industrial sectors, such as ports requiring artificial intelligence to recognize product category. During an on-site demo at the expo, Westwell's chip system recognized and classified 1,000 pictures within one second with an accuracy rate of almost 100 percent, compared with traditional methods with an accuracy rate of 86 percent. Smart Rider, a car-sized virtual reality experience device, attracted long queues during the expo.

Xinhua News Media Holdings Ltd. said Monday it is seeking to raise up to 42.9 million Hong Kong dollars via a share placement and will use the net proceeds for general working capital. Macau Legend Development Ltd., which operates casino and hotels, said Monday Laurence Yuen resigned as executive vice president and chief financial officer effective immediately. Salesforce.com Inc. said it would embed artificial intelligence technology into its software for salespeople, making it the latest in a gaggle of companies racing to enhance workplace tools with human-like abilities. The company will demonstrate the new software at its annual user conference next month in San Francisco. Newcrest Mining Ltd. said it has agreed to sell its 50% stake in a Papua New Guinea gold operation to partner Harmony Gold Mining Co. Ltd. .

President Vladimir Putin's ruling party easily outdistanced its rivals in parliamentary elections Sunday, but it was a lackluster victory that suggested the Russian leader's brand may be growing stale. United Russia, the pro-Kremlin behemoth an opposition leader once dubbed the "party of crooks and thieves," won less than 45% of the vote for 450 seats in the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, according to preliminary results announced by the Central Election Committee on Sunday night. No other party came close. The nationalist LDPR party and the Communists competed for the second spot with 18% and 17% of the vote, respectively. Still, it was United Russia's lowest result in 15 years – and came in an election with turnout of less than 40% of eligible voters.

Hideo Kojima is building up the hype over its upcoming game, "Death Stranding." At the Tokyo Game Show, the Japanese video game designer, director and producer dropped details about the game and also shared them via Twitter to the delight of interested fans. Among the things the director of Kojima Productions teased was the heroine of the game. He did not really give specific details on what the heroine would be like, or if casting for the role is ongoing, as per Dual Shockers. What he confirmed, however, is that a heroine will be present alongside Norman Reedus' character, who is seen naked and mourning in the first teaser trailer for the game.

We establish general conditions under which Markov chains produced by the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo method will and will not be geometrically ergodic. We consider implementations with both position-independent and position-dependent integration times. In the former case we find that the conditions for geometric ergodicity are essentially a non-vanishing gradient of the log-density which asymptotically points towards the centre of the space and does not grow faster than linearly. In an idealised scenario in which the integration time is allowed to change in different regions of the space, we show that geometric ergodicity can be recovered for a much broader class of tail behaviours, leading to some guidelines for the choice of this free parameter in practice.

After months of physician-failed diagnosis, a super computer steps in and saves the life of a female patient from Japan, suffering from leukemia. IBM Watson Health has committed to developing a partnership between humanity and technology with the goal of transforming global health. With the ability to read 40 million documents in 15 seconds, IBM's Watson –super computer powered with artificial intelligence- studied the patient's medical records for ten minutes and was able to compare her type of cancer against 20 million oncological records, according to International Business Times. Physicians in Japan decided to try out IBM's Watson on patients after all other treatment options had failed. The Watson revealed that the patient's condition was another form of leukemia and required a different treatment from the one originally prescribed.

As industry embraces AI, computers aren't the only ones that have to learn new tricks. Jen-Hsun Huang: 2015 was a big year. Artificial intelligence is moving into the commercial world. AI has been worked on for many years, largely in research. Various aspects of commercial use of AI, otherwise known as machine learning, is used for advertising and web searches and things like that. It wasn't until the last few years that AI could do things that people can't do. Several milestones were achieved in 2015 in particular that made it possible for us to use it in all kinds of areas. Yes, in an area of AI called "deep learning." The system basically learns by itself using a lot of data and computation.