Nasa isn't about to announce it has made contact with aliens, despite a hugely viral video, the agency has confirmed. The video – posted on an account associated with the hacking collective Anonymous – had claimed that Nasa was "on the verge" of making a new announcement on the discovery of alien life. The long and sometimes rambling footage used a range of evidence to suggest that the agency had discovered something that it would be making public soon. But Nasa has now confirmed that, as thought, there's no new evidence of life on Earth. At least according to senior scientist Thomas Zurbuchen, upon whose comments much of the video was based.

Anonymous claims Nasa is about to announce it has found alien life. The truth is a little more complicated – but no less wondrous. An account affiliated with the hacking and activism collective has released a viral video claiming Nasa is "on the verge" of detailing contact with extraterrestrial species. It takes much of its evidence from the work the space agency is doing to explore space and look for alien worlds across the universe. And while such claims might overestimate just how quickly the discovery will emerge, they are based in the truth.

His impact on artificial intelligence research has been so deep that some people in the field talk about the "six degrees of Geoffrey Hinton" the way college students once referred to Kevin Bacon's uncanny connections to so many Hollywood movies. Dr. Hinton's students and associates are now leading lights of artificial intelligence research at Apple, Facebook, Google and Uber, and run artificial intelligence programs at the University of Montreal and OpenAI, a nonprofit research company. "Geoff, at a time when A.I. was in the wilderness, toiled away at building the field and because of his personality, attracted people who then dispersed," said Ilse Treurnicht, chief executive of Toronto's MaRS Discovery District, an innovation center that will soon house the Vector Institute, Toronto's new public-private artificial intelligence research institute, where Dr. Hinton will be chief scientific adviser. Dr. Hinton also recently set up a Toronto branch of Google Brain, the company's artificial intelligence research project. His tiny office there is not the grand space filled with gadgets and awards that one might expect for a man at the leading edge of the most transformative field of science today.

Today, SpaceX will hopefully launch and land a Falcon 9 rocket that it's already flown to space. The launch window opens at 2:10 PM and lasts for two hours; launch time is currently scheduled for 3:10 PM ET. You can livestream the launch, with commentary, at SpaceX's website. This mission is called BulgariaSat-1 and will carry Bulgaria's first geostationary communications satellite into a high geostationary orbit around the Earth. It's launching from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and a drone ship called "Of Course I Still Love You" will be waiting in the Atlantic Ocean for the Falcon 9's first-stage landing. If things don't go as planned, there's another launch window tomorrow at 2:10 PM ET.

There are flying cars and Concorde's would-be supersonic successor, a company offering to deliver cargo to the Moon - for a mere $1.2 million per kilogram - and the latest in funky futuristic aviation ideas, both big and small. No doubt about it: the Paris Air Show is an aerospace geek's paradise. But with everything from the smallest drones to the largest passenger jets on display, it's tough to sift through it all. So here's a guide to some of the cool things that caught our eye this week. Visitors looks at the flying car Pegasus 1, built by French entrepreneur Jerome Dauffy at Paris Air Show, in Le Bourget, east of Paris, France, Tuesday, June 20, 2017 in Paris.

The US military says it has shot down an armed, Iran-made drone that had been bearing down on its forces near a garrison in Syria's southeast. In the latest sign of increasingly frequent confrontation with Damascus and its allies, Tuesday's incident closely followed Sunday's US downing of a piloted Syrian army jet in the southern Raqqa countryside after it dropped bombs near US-backed forces. The Pentagon said a US F-15 aircraft, flying over Syrian territory, fired on the drone after it displayed hostile intent and advanced on coalition forces. Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said it had "dirty wings", meaning it was armed. "I can tell you it was an Iranian-made drone," Davis said, declining to speculate on who was operating it.

We consider the problem of approximate Bayesian parameter inference in non-linear state-space models with intractable likelihoods. Sequential Monte Carlo with approximate Bayesian computations (SMC-ABC) is one approach to approximate the likelihood in this type of models. However, such approximations can be noisy and computationally costly which hinders efficient implementations using standard methods based on optimisation and Monte Carlo methods. We propose a computationally efficient novel method based on the combination of Gaussian process optimisation and SMC-ABC to create a Laplace approximation of the intractable posterior. We exemplify the proposed algorithm for inference in stochastic volatility models with both synthetic and real-world data as well as for estimating the Value-at-Risk for two portfolios using a copula model. We document speed-ups of between one and two orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art algorithms for posterior inference.

Boeing just got into the autonomous aviation game, with the goal of building jetliners that fly themselves, no pilots required. "The basic building blocks of the technology clearly are available," Mike Sinnett, Boeing's vice president of product development, said ahead of the Paris Airshow. The prospect of a pilotless passenger plane may strike you as crazy, even terrifying. But developing computer systems sophisticated enough to pull it off is well under way. Autopilot technology already does most of the work once a plane is aloft, and has no trouble landing an airliner even in rough weather and limited visibility.

There is no denying the fact that Artificial Intelligence is the breakthrough technology of recent times. The machines have come a long way from assisting humans in mechanical operations to performing smarter tasks using cognitive intelligence. Every day, we are coming across interesting applications of AI. The ability of Deep Learning algorithms to learn and predict efficiently has opened the doors of possibilities. Nowadays, AI is impacting many other areas as well. In this blog post, we will discuss some niche applications of AI.

A toolkit used across Microsoft to achieve breakthroughs in artificial intelligence is generally available to the public via an open-source license, a team of researchers and software engineers announced today. "The 2.0 version of the toolkit is now in full release," said Chris Basoglu, a partner engineering manager at Microsoft. He has played a key role in developing Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (previously known as CNTK). The full release of Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit 2.0 for use in production-grade and enterprise-grade deep learning workloads includes hundreds of new features incorporated since the beta to streamline the process of deep learning and to ensure the toolkit's seamless integration throughout the wider AI ecosystem. New with the full release today is support for Keras, a user-friendly open-source neural network library that is popular with developers working on deep learning applications.