Technology companies are racing to develop ultra-precise digital maps that can guide self-driving cars to within inches of where they should be -- a hurdle the industry needs to clear if it hopes to deliver on its promise of widespread use of driverless vehicles. The government is backing a three-dimensional mapping system developed by Mitsubishi Electric Corp. that includes a wealth of details, such as trees and pedestrians. It promises to be off by no more than 25 cm. That would be a big improvement over satellite-based GPS, which is used by ships, aircraft and increasingly by drivers or those on mobile phones but can be off by up to 20 meters, especially inside buildings or underground. The developers say the improved mapping technology will likely be used first in vehicles in isolated areas such as warehouses, or it might be used to help drivers of vehicles that aren't entirely autonomous.

The High-Level Expert Group will make recommendations on how to address mid-and long-term challenges and opportunities related to artificial intelligence (AI). The recommendations will feed into the policy development process, the legislative evaluation process and the development of a next-generation digital strategy. The Group will also prepare draft ethics guidelines that will build on the work of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies and of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights in this area. The guidelines will cover issues such as fairness, safety, transparency, the future of work, and more broadly the impact on upholding fundamental rights, including privacy and personal data protection, dignity, consumer protection and non-discrimination. The draft guidelines will be finalised by the end of the year and presented to the Commission at the beginning of 2019.

Tourette's syndrome is a neuro-psychiatric disease defined by the occurrence of so-called "tics". Tics are sudden, fast and recurring non-rhythmic movements or sound expressions. The development of tics is associated with specific abnormalities of brain activity. Basal ganglia in particular are attributed a role in the development of tics. The underlying mechanisms are still largely unexplored.

Nvidia today announced plans to open an AI research facility in Toronto to further explore novel approaches to deep learning. The team will be led by deep learning and computer vision expert and University of Toronto assistant professor Sanja Fidler. The lab will operate out of Nvidia's Toronto office, which will double its current headcount of 50 employees in order to triple the number of AI and deep learning researchers working there by the end of the year, according to a Nvidia blog post published today. Though hiring is underway, Nvidia does not anticipate opening the research lab until August, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. A Nvidia robotics research lab in Seattle is also scheduled to open in the coming months, senior director Dieter Fox told VentureBeat in a recent interview.

FILE - In this April 6, 2017, file photo, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks in New York. The Justice Department's internal watchdog is expected to criticize the FBI's handling of the Clinton email investigation, stepping into a political minefield as it details how a determinedly non-partisan law enforcement agency came to be entangled in the 2016 presidential race. President Donald Trump will look to the inspector general report to provide a fresh line of attack against the FBI's two former top officials, Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, as he claims that a politically tainted bureau tried to undermine his campaign and, through the Russia investigation, his presidency.

June's NAACL conference saw machine learning specialists from technology company Iprova present a paper introducing a new and effective method for the unsupervised training of machine learning algorithms to infer sentence embeddings. The NAACL (North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics) Human Language Technologies (HLT) conference took place at the Hyatt Regency New Orleans hotel, Louisiana, from June 1–6, 2018. The research paper, entitled "Unsupervised Learning of Sentence Embeddings using Compositional n-Gram Features", will be presented by Matteo Pagliardini. Pagliardini is a senior machine learning engineer at Iprova and one of the three scientists that authored the research paper and developed the new model for unsupervised training, Sent2Vec. While there have been several successes in deep learning in recent years, the paper notes that these have almost exclusively relied on supervised training.

The event, held in London, UK, from 11-17 June, will be visited by 55,000 attendees and host a number of events focused on many different aspects of technological innovation and business. Among the areas being explored at this year's event are the development of artificial intelligence, the role of big data and the internet of things, and the opportunities for tech companies to work in the UK. The event has already seen a number of large international businesses announce new investments in the UK technology sector. This includes Amazon, which will create 2,500 jobs in the UK, and Salesforce, which plans to invest some $2.5bn ( €2.12bn) in the UK over the next five years, and open a second data centre in the country in 2019. Meanwhile, businesses such as Ocado, Rolls Royce and Amazon have backed a new government scheme to facilitate the development of artificial intelligence by creating a new masters programme for artificial intelligence, and £1bn in investments. One announcement made at London Tech Week is the upcoming launch of a new'start-up visa' in Spring 2019, which aims to make it easier for entrepreneurs hoping to start technology companies in the UK access visas to do so, replacing a previous system which was only open to graduates.

Acid Software, the developer of the school shooting video game is defending the product and vowing to continue selling it online as parents of slain children and other mass shooting victims work to get the game wiped off the internet. The developer for a video game that stimulates a school shooting has found new ways to sell his game after an online gaming platform removed it, following huge backlash from the parents of children killed in school shootings. "Active Shooter" was removed from the platform Steam after anti-gun activists and the parents of students killed during school shootings criticized the game for allowing players to simulate school shootings by playing the role of the shooter. Ryan Petty, the father of Alaina Petty who was killed in the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, slammed the game, calling it "despicable," and said it was "unacceptable" that Steam allowed games like this to be shared. Anton Makarevskiy, the game's developer, defended it through his entity, Acid Software, citing free expression rights.

South African-based data scientists at Principa are at it again; this time using predictive analytics and machine learning to foretell the results of the 2018 Football World Cup. The 2018 FIFA World Cup kicks off tomorrow in Russia with the host nation taking on Saudi Arabia in Group A. Principa has already predicted the results for all the first games in the first round of matches. The company's data scientists use different algorithms to develop models that can predict the outcome of the matches. Principa notes that as the objective of machine learning is to develop models that can retrain themselves to adapt when exposed to new data, the algorithms will be re-trained with the results of each match to improve the accuracy of the following round's generated prediction. It points out that the purpose is to see how well different predictive analytics techniques used successfully in other areas can outperform the best human-made predictions.

The longevity and biotechnology industries are focusing on aging in a big way, and it's beginning to show. The fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and regenerative medicine are putting their money on combating aging and age-related diseases, and the benefits are likely to be immense. While biotechnology and AI are relatively new concepts, the announcements of funding and collaboration yesterday by and between three companies are bringing those concepts that much closer to the forefront of medicine. Insilico Medicine, a Baltimore-based next-generation AI company specializing in the application of deep learning for target identification, drug discovery and aging research, yesterday announced a collaboration agreement with WuXi AppTec, a leading global contract research outsourcing provider based in Shanghai, China, serving the pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device industries. "It's a big step not only for Insilico Medicine but for AI and the pharmaceutical industries," said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc.