This paper sets out to resolve how agents ought to act in the Sleeping Beauty problem and various related anthropic (self-locating belief) problems, not through the calculation of anthropic probabilities, but through finding the correct decision to make. It creates an anthropic decision theory (ADT) that decides these problems from a small set of principles. By doing so, it demonstrates that the attitude of agents with regards to each other (selfish or altruistic) changes the decisions they reach, and that it is very important to take this into account. To illustrate ADT, it is then applied to two major anthropic problems and paradoxes, the Presumptuous Philosopher and Doomsday problems, thus resolving some issues about the probability of human extinction.

Last year, Google announced and Hitwise estimated that around 58% of all Google searches were mobile, and more than 20% of mobile searches were via voice. Sources inside Google have hinted that voice search is approaching 25% of mobile now and some expect it to go above 50% in the next 3 to 5 years. For example, voice search was cited as the fastest growing type of search, according to the keynote speech given by Behshad Behzadi, Principal Engineer at Google Zurich, at SMX West in March 2017. We started 2017 with an estimated 8mm voice devices, mostly Amazon Echos with some Google Homes. An industry report from VoiceLabs estimates a total voice-first device footprint of 33 million devices in circulation by the end of 2017.

The Kangbashi district of Ordos, China, looks like a cosmopolitan city of the future. It's just 14 years old but already has all the trappings of a mature municipality. It has a large public library designed to mimic the shape of books on shelves. Elsewhere are a contemporary and cavernous airport, a spectacular-looking stadium, clusters of towering apartment buildings, spacious plazas and parks, a five-story food court with 400 vendors, an intricate opera house, and perfectly paved streets designed to connect more than 300,000 residents to the places they live, work, and play. Although Kangbashi has the appearance of a modern metropolis, the truth is apparent in the one thing it lacks: people. Kangbashi is one of hundreds of "ghost cities" rumored to dot the Chinese countryside. Erected at the height of China's real estate boom, they're pet projects of wealthy local governments that built them to be the center of a virtuous circle: Spending their economic windfalls on megacities, governments believed, would attract inhabitants from outlying agrarian communities, creating new urban centers with which to generate even more wealth.

If you've got a friend you're dying to set up on a date, then there's good news as a new online dating app lets you play'virtual Cupid.' Hinge has unveiled a new standalone app called Hinge Matchmaker that lets people help their single friends to find love by suggesting matches based on your Facebook friends. The beta test version of the app is free to download, and is available to all Hinge markets in the UK, US, Canada, Australia and India. Hinge Matchmaker gives people in a relationship a chance to set up their single friends, based on your Facebook friends who have a profile on Hinge. As the matchmaker, the power is left in your hands to decide whether your friend should connect on Hinge, with the option to send an icebreaker message to get the conversation started. As well as randomly recommending potential couples, Hinge Matchmaker also has an option for you to take control and select a specific friend you'd like to help by selecting the'lock' option on their profile.

Swedish payment terminal company iZettle has won €30 million (£26.6 million) in funding from the European Investment Bank (EIB) to explore artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning for small businesses. AI and machine learning knowledge and technology are often geared towards big companies, and small businesses don't usually have the funds to develop solutions tailored to their needs. To tackle this problem, Stockholm-based iZettle plans to invest in research and development over the next three years, specifically to benefit smaller businesses. "We're proud to receive this stamp of approval from the EIB," said CEO and cofounder of iZettle Jacob de Geer. "It's the type of offer you can't refuse and it will allow us to further accelerate our growth and continue to level the playing field for small businesses, giving them access to tools to take on the big corporations," he said.

It's incredibly difficult to construct a 3D face from a two-dimensional photograph. That's because a single image makes it very hard to approximate different facial expressions across lighting conditions. But now, a team at The University of Nottingham and Kingston University have come up with a way to construct a 3D face from a single image. It works using AI that has already been trained on how to analyze a human face. Using a Convolutional Neural Network (or CNN), their software is able to map 2D pixels to three-dimensional coordinates on the face, regardless of expression or lighting condition.

We cover all kinds of modular robotics around here, and when we do, we're almost always talking about one overall robotic system made up of many different modules, some number of which can be individually controlled or swapped around. What these systems generally have in common is that there's one brain (usually a computer sitting on a desk somewhere) that interprets all of the sensory data from the modules, and then provides directions to each module. Essentially, the individual robots form a nervous system that passes information to the centralized brain, which is the same way that humans work, and so do most non-modular robots. While this sort of system works quite well in a research environment, the ideal use case for modular robots is to make them more decentralized, such that any individual module can be part of a nervous system or a brain on-demand, depending on what the robot as a whole is trying to accomplish. In a recent paper in Nature Communications, Nithin Mathews, Anders Lyhne Christensen, Rehan O'Grady, Francesco Mondada, and Marco Dorigo from universities in Lisbon, Brussels, and Switzerland, present the idea of a "mergeable nervous systems for robots," with a framework for fully modular robotic systems: We present robots whose bodies and control systems can merge to form entirely new robots that retain full sensorimotor control.

Amid heated global competition over developing next-generation cars such as self-driving automobiles and electric vehicles, Toyota Motor Corp. unveiled Tuesday a new sports car brand inspired by its expertise in motor sports. Under the brand name GR, which comes from Toyota's motor sports brand Toyota Gazoo Racing, the auto giant unveiled seven cars remodeled as sports editions, including the Vitz compact, Voxy and Noah minivans, and the Prius and Mark X sedans. They hit Toyota's retail outlets Tuesday. The main target of the new brand is younger customers, who are often said to have lost their passion for driving their own cars, Gazoo Racing President Shigeki Tomoyama said. "What constitutes the heart of the Gazoo brand is a desire for challenges to make innovations by breaking through barriers existing inside Toyota and set by Toyota," Tomoyama, who heads Toyota's in-house company launched in April, said at carmaker's Mega Web showroom in Tokyo's Odaiba waterfront area, adding that the company also plans to sell GR-branded cars in the European Union.

I have a confession to make. I'm a privacy lawyer who researches the risks of face recognition technology – and I will be buying the new iPhone. Apple's next generation smartphone will use face recognition, thanks to infrared and 3D sensors within its front-facing camera. Reports indicate that the face scan and unlock system will be almost instantaneous and require no buttons to be pressed, being always "on" and ready to read your face. Android users can expect similar face unlock features as well.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can identify Alzheimer's disease 10 years before doctors can discover the symptoms, according to new research. A team of researchers in Italy developed an algorithm that can spot structural changes in the brain that are caused by the disease a decade before the signs become apparent. The team from the University of Bari trained the AI by feeding in 67 MRI scans - 38 from Alzheimer's patients and 29 healthy patients - then asked it to analyse the neuronal connectivity to form an algorithm. Following the training, the AI was then asked to process brains from 148 subjects - 52 were healthy, 48 had Alzheimer's disease and 48 had mild cognitive impairment (MCI) but were known to have developed Alzheimer's disease two and a half to nine years later. According to the researchers, the AI diagnosed Alzheimer's disease 86 per cent of the time.