I've written previously about the way AI has become increasingly capable in creative tasks, whether it's playing jazz or cracking jokes. There have even been a couple of projects utilizing AI to help us develop smarter and more engaging video content. A Japanese company are promising to take this to a new level with the development of a robot that will provide creative advice for commercials and other marketing projects. The AI has been developed and deployed by the marketing agency McCann Japan, and will attempt to provide input on the various projects taken on by the agency. It will mine a large database of previous creative projects to suggest possibly new creative directions for an advert. It's a very similar approach to that taken by the robot jazz player mentioned above, which also mined a huge back catalog of past jazz performances to suggest creative new avenues the'player' could go down.

Unless you've been living under a rock (which will likely be affected by climate change soon, by the way), you know that between forest fires, illegal deforestation, poaching, and other crimes, an enormity of environmental issues puts our ecosystems in danger. According to the National Science Foundation, a century ago, more than 60,000 tigers roamed in the wild. Now, there are as few as 3,000 remaining. While human patrols can directly protect endangered animals, many protection agencies lack the resources necessary to cover the appropriate amount of ground, especially in large national parks where many of these illicit activities might occur. In 2011, Eve McDonald-Madden and her colleagues at the University of Queensland in Australia lamented that a lack of money limits the impact that management strategies can have on preventing the extinction of a species.

Uber has announced that it is in the early stages of testing self-driving car technology with the ultimate goal of removing the need for drivers from its ride-hailing business. The company, currently valued at somewhere upwards of 60 billion, announced it has begun testing a Ford Fusion retro-fitted with sensors and cameras on the streets of Pittsburgh. "Real-world testing is critical to our efforts to develop self-driving technology," the company said in a blog post announcing the move. "Self-driving cars have the potential to save millions of lives and improve quality of life for people around the world." The tests will be run by Uber's Advanced Technologies Center, which the company opened in Pittsburgh in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University in February last year, with the goal of inducting autonomous vehicles into its fleet by 2020.

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The advances have also fueled speculation of a wave of job losses as machines replace humans, just as the industrial revolution rendered many occupations redundant. The World Economic Forum predicted in January that by 2020, 5 million jobs could be lost to machines. Experts said when it came to the banking and finance sector, the topic needed a more nuanced approach. Speaking on a panel discussing global trends in fintech at InnovFest UnBound, a digital technology conference organized in Singapore, Avinash Hegde, co-founder of a chat bot service Supertext, explained that low-skilled finance jobs, such as basic analytics and number crunching, could soon be done by AI. "The way we interact with business and financial analysts is going to dramatically change in the next few years," he said. Would financial analysts find themselves out of a job?

This tiny robot uses electro-adhesion to "perch" on objects. A Harvard-turned-MIT researcher and his colleagues just dropped some pretty cool Spider-Man tech in the latest issue of Science magazine: surface clinging via "electrostatic adhesion." It's a widely applicable breakthrough that will, for instance, keep future robots perched while they wait for instructions. Flying drones use a lot of energy hovering, but the researchers, who hail from institutes across the U.S. and Hong Kong, may have found the first step in a path to conserving energy during activity. Like birds and insects, drones could save tons of energy if they were able to "perch" instead of hovering, as shown in the video below.

Wordnets are an effective resource for natural language processing and information retrieval, especially for semantic processing and meaning related tasks. So far, wordnets have been constructed for many languages. However, the automatic development of wordnets for low-resource languages has not been well studied. In this paper, an Expectation-Maximization algorithm is used to create high quality and large scale wordnets for poorresource languages. The proposed method benefits from possessing cross-lingual word sense disambiguation and develops a wordnet by only using a bi-lingual dictionary and a monolingual corpus. The proposed method has been executed with Persian language and the resulting wordnet has been evaluated through several experiments. The results show that the induced wordnet has a precision score of 90% and a recall score of 35%.

We propose an algorithm for detecting patterns exhibited by anomalous clusters in high dimensional discrete data. Unlike most anomaly detection (AD) methods, which detect individual anomalies, our proposed method detects groups (clusters) of anomalies; i.e. sets of points which collectively exhibit abnormal patterns. In many applications this can lead to better understanding of the nature of the atypical behavior and to identifying the sources of the anomalies. Moreover, we consider the case where the atypical patterns exhibit on only a small (salient) subset of the very high dimensional feature space. Individual AD techniques and techniques that detect anomalies using all the features typically fail to detect such anomalies, but our method can detect such instances collectively, discover the shared anomalous patterns exhibited by them, and identify the subsets of salient features. In this paper, we focus on detecting anomalous topics in a batch of text documents, developing our algorithm based on topic models. Results of our experiments show that our method can accurately detect anomalous topics and salient features (words) under each such topic in a synthetic data set and two real-world text corpora and achieves better performance compared to both standard group AD and individual AD techniques. All required code to reproduce our experiments is available from https://github.com/hsoleimani/ATD

The US Air Force is working on a'space fence' to protect spacecraft from orbiting junk. It plans to activate it in just under two years to replace a similar system that was shut down in 2013. While the military has dubbed the system a'fence', it is in fact a radar system that sends signal into space to track objects the size of a tennis ball. The US Air Force is working on a'space fence' to protect spacecraft from orbiting junk. It plans to activate it in just under two years to replace a similar system that was shut down in 2013.

Google is set to allow its Chromebook laptops to run Android apps in a bit to take on Apple and Microsoft. The laptops run a version of Google's Chrome browser instead of an operating system like Windows - but until now have been unable to download apps. According to market research firm IDC, in Q1 of this year Chromebook shipments overtook Macs in the U.S. The laptops run a version of Google's Chrome browser instead of an operating system like Windows - but until now have been unable to download apps. Later this year, they will be able to run all android apps, Google said. The machine uses Google's Chrome OS, which is based on the firm's web browser.