Researchers are now using AI, game theory and big data to protect wildlife and forests around the world, as technology finally catches up with poachers. The fight against poaching has proven very difficult in the past century, that's despite the advances in technology that have littered conservationism in that time. However, that could all be about to change thanks to a bit of clever thinking, with game theory and big data combining to arm park rangers with the necessary tools to fight back. The problem for park rangers is often scale, far too much land is monitored, on foot, by far too few. This means poachers have a relatively free reign, knowing the odds of the park ranger being at the right place, at the right time, is slim.

If you have a box of beloved video games that you haven't played for years stashed beneath your bed, now could be the time to cash them in. Retro gaming titles from Ice Climber to Pokemon are fetching hundreds as nostalgia trumps common sense - and now there's a calculator that lets you guess how much your favourites could be worth. The rise in demand for old pixelated titles flies in the face of hi-tech advances in gaming, with PlayStation launching a VR headset for more realistic experiences soon. Click on the module below to guess the value of retro games. Mobile users who can't see the game can visit MrGamez's website Retro gaming titles from Ice Climber to Pokemon are fetching hundreds of pounds as nostalgia trumps common sense - and now there's a calculator that lets you guess how much your favourites could be worth. Favourite platform games, beat'em ups and fantasy installments have appreciated rapidly in recent years, with ice Climber, first sold in 1985 for Nintendo's NES, for a price of 29.99 ( 43) selling on one occasion for a whopping 1,818 ( 2,617) This was for a factory-sealed copy, but if you own one still in its box, it could fetch almost 90 ( 130).

I believe almost all readers of this blog already know well about Deep Learning and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)... so here I just show you a brief overview. CNN is a variant of Deep Learning and it has been well known for its excellent performance of image recognition. In particular, after CNN won ILSVRC 2012, CNN has gotten more and more popular in image recognition. The most recent success of CNN would be AlphaGo, I believe. Indeed, we already have a lot of implementation of CNN as libraries / packages.

A monk at Longquan temple has built a robot monk, with the help of a technology company and artificial intelligence experts. Unveiled in October, Xian'er has been a hit not just at the temple but on social media as well.

As the world celebrated Earth Day on Friday, a team led by an Indian-origin researcher has found a way to use artificial intelligence (AI) to protect the Earth's endangered animals and forests by outwitting poachers with technology. With support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Army Research Office, researchers are using AI and game theory to solve poaching, illegal logging and other problems worldwide, in collaboration with researchers and conservationists in the US, Singapore, the Netherlands and Malaysia. "This research is a step in demonstrating that AI can have a really significant positive impact on society and allow us to assist humanity in solving some of the major challenges we face," said Milind Tambe, professor of computer science and industrial and systems engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). "In most parks, ranger patrols are poorly planned, reactive rather than pro-active and habitual," said Fei Fang, PhD candidate from the University of Southern California (USC). Fang is part of an NSF-funded team at USC led by Tambe who is also director of the Teamcore Research Group on Agents and Multiagent Systems.

Following last week's predictions by Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai showed that the search giant has a vision about artificial intelligence too. Quizzed on parent Alphabet's Q1 2016 investor call about areas where Google is pushing forward innovation, Pichai said search, particularly on mobile devices, has the opportunity to become closer to a personal assistant for users and, to fulfill that vision, must deploy machine learning and AI. "And overall, I do think in the long run, I think we will evolve in computing from a mobile first to an AI first world. And I do think we are at the forefront of development," he said, polishing the search giant's credentials just a week after founder Mark Zuckerberg made a similar claim for Facebook at the F8 developer event. AI-based chatbots, for instance for Facebook Messenger, was a big theme at the social giant's event. Pichai also referenced the "great strides" made by AlphaGo, developed by Google subsidiary DeepMind, which shocked audiences when it beat a professional South Korean Go player in Seoul last month.

Wearing black headsets with tentacle-like sensors stretched over their foreheads, the competitors stare at cubes floating on computer screens as their small white drones prepare for takeoff. Some struggle to move even a few feet, while others zip confidently across the finish line. The competition -- billed as the world's first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface -- involved 16 pilots who used their willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida this past weekend. The Associated Press was there to record the event, which was sponsored with research funding from Intel Corp. Organizers want to make it an annual inter-collegiate spectacle, involving ever-more dynamic moves and challenges, and a trophy that puts the brain on a pedestal. "With events like this, we're popularizing the use of BCI instead of it being stuck in the research lab," said Chris Crawford, a Florida PhD student in human-centered computing. "BCI was a technology that was geared specifically for medical purposes, and in order to expand this to the general public, we actually have to embrace these consumer brand devices and push them to the limit."

Wearing black headsets with tentacle-like sensors stretched over their foreheads, the competitors stare at cubes floating on computer screens as their small white drones prepare for takeoff. Some struggle to move even a few feet, while others zip confidently across the finish line. The competition -- billed as the world's first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface -- involved 16 pilots who used their willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida this past weekend. The Associated Press was there to record the event, which was sponsored with research funding from Intel Corp. Organizers want to make it an annual inter-collegiate spectacle, involving ever-more dynamic moves and challenges, and a trophy that puts the brain on a pedestal. "With events like this, we're popularizing the use of BCI instead of it being stuck in the research lab," said Chris Crawford, a Florida PhD student in human-centered computing.

IBM Watson project manager Leanne LeBlanc views analytics of healthcare data. Each person generates more than 1,100 terabytes of health-related data across his or her lifetime, the equivalent of more than 300 million books. What alarms Dr. Craig Thompson, president and CEO at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, is that 20% of cancer patients in the U.S. are misdiagnosed. Thompson made those remarks during an IBM investor briefing in February as he discussed the cancer hospital's partnership with IBM Watson. Three years ago, Memorial Sloan-Kettering and IBM Watson formed a partnership to develop Watson for Oncology, a cognitive computing system that can analyze large volumes of data including medical literature, patient health records, and clinical trials, to offer personalized, evidence-based treatment recommendations for cancer patients.

Earlier today, SMRT Services has just announced that it is partnering with 2 Getthere Holding to bring in automated vehicle systems into Singapore. This could happen as early as end of the year. According to the press release, what we might be seeing end of the year are Group Rapid Transit (GRT) vehicles being tested on the roads. "The new Singapore-based JV, called 2getthere Asia Pte Ltd will market, install, operate and maintain the Automated Vehicle systems for customers in Singapore and the Asia-Pacific. The JV aims to showcase 2getthere's 3rd Generation Group Rapid Transit (GRT) vehicle capabilities in Singapore by the end of the year."