Developed by Angelo Semeraro, Coralie Gourguechon, and Monica Lanaro of the Italian communication research center Fabrica, in partnership with a team of AI specialists at the French company Jolibrain, Recognition is only the latest project to explore how artificial intelligence can change the way humans look at images. So far, the value of robots' contributions to human understanding of art doesn't often go beyond novelty -- take Microsoft's emotion-detecting app, which deemed the Mona Lisa 43% happy, for example. But with Recognition, a robot inadvertently creates subjective meaning with its pairings, and starts to seem like a shrewd commentator. A recent Reuters photograph of a Singapore airport's control tower alongside a bustling construction site paired with "Industrial Landscape" (1955) by L.S. Lowry, for instance, seems like a comment on the relentlessness of industrial development.

Chanda Kochhar, managing director & chief executive officer, ICICI Bank, said by the end of FY17, the bank would more than double the number of transactions cleared by the bots. "Currently, about 10 per cent of our internal transactions are being carried out via the software robots and by the end of this year, we believe, this will go up to 20 per cent of our transactions. This has helped us in improving productivity and efficiency and will help us in handling larger volumes as we continue to grow." The lender started experimenting with software bots at the beginning of this financial year. Now, over a million banking transactions across 200 business processes are carried out by the technology on a daily basis.

On a summer day in 1968, professor Julian Stanley met a brilliant but bored 12-year-old named Joseph Bates. The Baltimore student was so far ahead of his classmates in mathematics that his parents had arranged for him to take a computer-science course at Johns Hopkins University, where Stanley taught. Having leapfrogged ahead of the adults in the class, the child kept himself busy by teaching the FORTRAN programming language to graduate students. Unsure of what to do with Bates, his computer instructor introduced him to Stanley, a researcher well known for his work in psychometrics -- the study of cognitive performance. To discover more about the young prodigy's talent, Stanley gave Bates a battery of tests that included the SAT college-admissions exam, normally taken by university-bound 16- to 18-year-olds in the United States. Bates's score was well above the threshold for admission to Johns Hopkins, and prompted Stanley to search for a local high school that would let the child take advanced mathematics and science classes.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today revealed a series of new servers designed to help propel cognitive workloads and to drive greater data center efficiency. Featuring a new chip, the Linux-based lineup incorporates innovations from the OpenPOWER community that deliver higher levels of performance and greater computing efficiency than available on any x86-based server. Collaboratively developed with some of the world's leading technology companies, the new Power Systems are uniquely designed to propel artificial intelligence, deep learning, high performance data analytics and other compute-heavy workloads, which can help businesses and cloud service providers save money on data center costs. The three new systems are an expansion of IBM's Linux server portfolio comprised of IBM's specialized line of servers co-developed with fellow members of the OpenPOWER Foundation. The new servers join the Power Systems LC lineup that is designed to outperform x86-based servers on a variety of data-intensive workloads.

Those are some of the fanciful new roles that could be created by the global design industry in the next few years. How will they favor over the next 15 years? Will every company by 2030 have a chief design officer, or will they all go extinct? Should a generation of creatives who grew up worshipping Apple's Jonathan Ive put all their eggs in the industrial design basket? We talked to a dozen design leaders and thinkers from companies such as Frog, Artefact, and Ideo to find out which design jobs could die out in the next 15 years, and which could grow.

Spectral methods are popular in detecting global structures in the given data that can be represented as a matrix. However when the data matrix is sparse or noisy, classic spectral methods usually fail to work, due to localization of eigenvectors (or singular vectors) induced by the sparsity or noise. In this work, we propose a general method to solve the localization problem by learning a regularization matrix from the localized eigenvectors. Using matrix perturbation analysis, we demonstrate that the learned regularizations suppress down the eigenvalues associated with localized eigenvectors and enable us to recover the informative eigenvectors representing the global structure. We show applications of our method in several inference problems: community detection in networks, clustering from pairwise similarities, rank estimation and matrix completion problems. Using extensive experiments, we illustrate that our method solves the localization problem and works down to the theoretical detectability limits in different kinds of synthetic data. This is in contrast with existing spectral algorithms based on data matrix, non-backtracking matrix, Laplacians and those with rank-one regularizations, which perform poorly in the sparse case with noise.

A recent newcomer at one of the home-education groups my family attends explained that one of the frustrations that led her to take her son out of the school system was that he wasn't being allowed to write stories. It's something he loves to do, and it seems strange that a school should obstruct that enthusiasm. But the teachers declared he wasn't ready because he can't yet write in cursive. To me this symbolizes all that is wrong with the strange obsession shared in many countries about how children learn to write. Often we teach them how to form letters based on the ones they see in their earliest reading books. And then we tell them that they must learn this hard-won skill all over again, using "joined-up" script. Yet there is no evidence that cursive has any benefits over other handwriting styles, such as manuscript, where the letters aren't joined, for the majority of children with normal development.

Transport ministers from the Group of Seven countries are expected to agree at their meeting in central Japan to set up a working panel tasked with creating global safety regulations for commercializing and promoting self-driving cars, a draft declaration of their summit showed Thursday. The envisaged accord at their three-day meeting in Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, from Sept. 23, comes amid intense competition among automakers and information technology companies worldwide over self-driving cars. In the draft declaration, the G-7 ministers pledge to cooperate and exercise their leadership, reflecting the advanced economies' hope that regulations set by the governments would give clear guidelines for manufacturers on how to ensure safety for self-driving cars. Autonomous driving, which frees drivers from controlling a vehicle, involves artificial intelligence technology in grasping the surrounding traffic situation. The draft says commercializing self-driving will help prevent traffic accidents, ease traffic jams and reduce the burden on drivers.

Reuters – The new Apple iPhone has something missing: the small socket millions of us have used for years to plug in headphones. While some fans opposed the widely anticipated move – one online petition urging Apple to keep the headphone jack drew more than 300,000 signatures – equipment suppliers and experts heralded a change in how users will interact with their devices. Axing the jack, they say, paves the way for discreet, bean-sized earbuds that can simultaneously translate, filter out unwanted noise or let us control other devices by voice – and drive up the value of the so-called'hearables' market to 16 billion within five years. It's the vision of the futuristic 2013 movie "Her", where a human has a love affair with a disembodied voice in his ear. But some who follow the industry say it's closer than many think, noting improvements in wireless technologies, materials, artificial intelligence and battery life.

The first international beauty contest judged by "machines" was supposed to use objective factors such as facial symmetry and wrinkles to identify the most attractive contestants. After Beauty.AI launched this year, roughly 6,000 people from more than 100 countries submitted photos in the hopes that artificial intelligence, supported by complex algorithms, would determine that their faces most closely resembled "human beauty". But when the results came in, the creators were dismayed to see that there was a glaring factor linking the winners: the robots did not like people with dark skin. Out of 44 winners, nearly all were white, a handful were Asian, and only one had dark skin. That's despite the fact that, although the majority of contestants were white, many people of color submitted photos, including large groups from India and Africa.