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.

THE French Riviera is lovely at this time of year. The steering wheel spins to take the car round a bend – but my hands stay in my lap. And since there's no need to keep my eyes on the road, I'm free to enjoy the beachfront view. An oddly pixelated man with a two-dimensional windsurfer under his arm gives me the eye. Sadly, my Riviera is being projected on a large wrap-around screen in a room-sized simulator in Wokingham, UK.

How did you become interested in artificial intelligence (AI)? I am a documentary filmmaker, writer and speaker. I was making a film around 15 years ago about AI and got to speak to some of the major players in the field, including Ray Kurzweil, the Director of Engineering at Google who started the singularity industry, and Rodney Brookes, the premier roboticist of our time who founded iRobot (a company that created the Roomba vaccum cleaner and robots for military use) and then established a company called Rethink Robotics. Both Kurzweil and Brookes were optimistic about the time when we will share the planet with smarter-than-human machines – and I was too. I was, and still am, a gigantic proponent of AI, despite my book's title Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era.

Almost a year after it came out in the US, Facebook is releasing its facial recognition-powered photo app Moments in Europe. Except the new version won't actually include any facial recognition technology, thanks to the company's long-running fight with the Irish data protection commissioner over whether the technology is actually legal in the EU. Launched in June, Moments is Facebook's answer to dedicated photo management applications like Google Photos and Apple's Photos. The app bundles pictures together by the event they're taken at, and applies facial recognition technology to identify who's in each picture. Facebook takes the offering a step further than Apple or Google, by leveraging its social network: once you've created your "moments", you can share them with other people at the same event, to ensure that they have the photos of them, and you have the photos of you.

In a collaboration between Japan's Softbank Robotics and French-based Aldebaran Robotics, Pepper was officially put on the market for domestic use in June of 2015. Priced at about 1,600 with 200 in monthly data and insurance fees, the first thousand models available for launch sold out in under a minute. The company has stated that they aim to keep Pepper affordable, comparing the cost of the robot to that of a pet dog in Japan. Outside of personal ownership, the android has been used to assist Japanese citizens in banks and shops, including the promotion of Nescafe coffee machine sales. And in a limited run, large-scale experiment, Softbank opened a phone shop staffed exclusively by Pepper robots.