PointGrab has announced a new white paper that explores the impact of deep learning-based smart sensor technology on building automation management. The white paper was developed to help building automation industry stakeholders, from device manufacturers to building managers, better understand the long-term benefits of deep learning-based technology. The paper, "Smarter Sensors: How Deep Learning is Transforming Building Automation," addresses the challenges and opportunities presented by Internet of Things (IoT) device proliferation and data collection and analytics throughout the smart building ecosystem. In this data-rich environment, sensors can be much smarter by sourcing and analyzing richer levels of data and enabling the execution of more sophisticated tasks that go beyond traditional energy consumption management.

Endowing robots and prosthetics with a human-like sense of touch could dramatically advance these technologies. Toward this goal, scientists have come up with various smart skins to layer onto devices. But boosting their sensitivity has involved increasing the numbers of electrodes, depending on the size of the skin. This leads to a rise in costs. Other systems require external batteries and wires to operate, which adds to their bulk. Haixia Zhang and colleagues wanted to find a more practical solution.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, no longer simply exists in science fiction movies and books. Scientists warn AI has and will continue to change almost every aspect of how people conduct business and live. Researchers say artificial intelligence can be a threat, as well as helpful, to humans. From the iPhone personal assistant Siri, to doing searches on the Internet, to the autopilot function, simple artificial intelligence has been around for some time, but is quickly getting more complex and more intelligent. "If we are going to make systems that are going to be more intelligent than us, it's absolutely essential for us to understand how to absolutely guarantee that they only do things that we are happy with," said Stuart Russell, computer science professor at the University of California Berkeley.

Researchers from Stanford University have created a humanoid robot or robot mermaid to explore sunken treasures and relics. Tagged as OceanOne, the robo-mermaid uses artificial intelligence and virtual reality technology to allow human beings to operate it remotely, as per Stanford News. The robot mermaid looks like a human with hands that are installed with sensors to enable OceanOne to discern if an item is fragile or not. It also has two cameras as its eyes and an artificial human brain for navigating the deep sea and analyzing data. According to CNN, OceanOne's first journey to the deep water was to retrieve a vase from the ruins of Louis XIV's ship La Lune.

Researchers have shown that an informatics-based adaptive strategy, when used with experiments, can propel the discovery of new materials with targeted properties, states a paper recently published in the journal Nature Communications. Turab Lookman, lead researcher and a physicist and materials scientist with the Physics of Condensed matter and Complex Systems group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, says that, "What we've done is show that, starting with a relatively small data set of well-controlled experiments, it is possible to iteratively guide subsequent experiments toward finding the material with the desired target." "Finding new materials has traditionally been guided by intuition and trial and error," Lookman adds."But with increasing chemical complexity, the combination possibilities become too large for trial-and-error approaches to be practical." To achieve this goal, Lookman and fellow scientists at Los Alamos and the State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials in China made use of machine learning to make the process faster. The team designed and developed a framework that employs uncertainties to guide the next experiments towards looking for a shape-memory alloy with very low thermal dissipation.

WIRE)--Cylance, the American company that is revolutionizing cybersecurity through the use of artificial intelligence to proactively prevent advanced persistent threats and malware, announced that it has signed an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with MOTEX to integrate MOTEX LanScope, a leading endpoint systems management solution, and CylancePROTECT, Cylance's innovative artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning based endpoint malware prevention product. Cylance has produced the world's most advanced malware detection and attack prevention technology, which is protecting hundreds of global organizations and millions of computers today. Draper Nexus Ventures, a leading US-Japan cross border investment firm, is helping Cylance accelerate its entry into the Japanese market. "It's a global phenomenon that traditional security cannot protect endpoints from advanced threats. The Japanese market is not an exception and we have identified a great opportunity there," said Hiro Rio Maeda, managing director for Draper Nexus.

Translate for iOS now includes offline support, giving you a way to communicate in other languages when you don't have data service (say, on vacation). And if you regularly visit China, you'll be glad to know that camera-based Word Lens translation on both Android and iOS now supports simplified and traditional Chinese. If you've ever struggled to make sense of a Beijing restaurant menu or a Shanghai street sign, you can rest easy.

South Korean mobile giant Samsung now has an entire division working day in, day out on chips for self-driving cars, in an effort to push aside competitors and become the go-to supplier in this booming market. The team is mainly researchers from Samsung's semiconductor and sensor division, according to The Korea Herald, which cites a local newspaper. One of the three CEOs, vice chairman Kwon Oh-hyun, is overseeing the task force. Not much is known about Samsung's progress in building chips and sensors for self-driving vehicles. The market is currently dominated by one Japanese company, which sells 50 percent of all self-driving sensors.

A SpaceX capsule is headed back to Earth with precious science samples from NASA's one-year space station resident. The Dragon left the International Space Station in the morning, bound for an afternoon splashdown in the Pacific, a few hundred miles off the Southern California coast. The station's big robot arm set the Dragon free over Australia. The commercial cargo craft has been packed with about 3,700 pounds of cargo, spacewalk gear and biological samples for analysis on Earth. They include blood and urine samples from astronaut Scott Kelly's one-year mission. Kelly returned to Earth in March and has since retired from NASA.

That represents a strategic error. The U.S. can and should sell more drones as a way of complementing its foreign policy objectives. After all, some of the top threats to U.S. national security are the very nonstate actors that countries in the Middle East and Africa are buying drones in order to fight. The question is a quasi-legal one. In accordance with the Missile Technology Control Regime, a voluntary arrangement established in the late 1980s and now followed by 34 countries, the United States subjects the sale of military drones and other Category 1 items to "a strong presumption of denial" when determining whether to export to a particular country.