Driverless cars could soon be coming to a street near you. Following the completion of the UK's largest collaborative trial of autonomous cars, which started in 2015, UK Autodrive has now been given the green light to start testing the driverless technology in public spaces around Milton Keynes and Coventry. This marks a significant milestone in the development of autonomous vehicles and signals that we are one step closer to driverless technology becoming a mainstream reality. In fact, it's estimated that by 2035, 25% of the new vehicles sold could be fully autonomous, and the industry will be worth £28 billion by 2035. Furthermore, it has the government's backing.

WIRE)--The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), the world's leading organization transforming business and society by accelerating the adoption of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), today announced the Smart Factory Machine Learning for Predictive Maintenance Testbed. The testbed is led by two companies, Plethora IIoT, a company, designing and developing cutting-edge answers for Industry 4.0, and Xilinx, the leading provider of All Programmable technology. This innovative testbed explores machine-learning techniques and evaluates algorithmic approaches for time-critical predictive maintenance. This knowledge leads to actionable insight enabling companies to move away from traditional preventative maintenance to predictive maintenance, which minimizes unplanned downtime and optimizes system operation. This would ultimately help manufacturers increase availability, improve energy efficiency and extend the lifespan of high-volume CNC manufacturing production systems.

Four members of our research team spent the past week at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2017) in Copenhagen, Denmark. The conference handbook can be found here and the proceedings can be found here. The program consisted of two days of workshops and tutorials and three days of main conference. Videos of the conference talks and presentations can be found here.The conference was superbly organized, had a great venue, and a social event with fireworks. With 225 long papers, 107 papers, and 9 TACL papers accepted, there was a clear uptick of submissions compared to last year.

In this episode of the ARCHITECHT Show, Elastic founder and CEO Shay Banon talks about the evolution of Elasticsearch -- from an open source side project (the first iteration was a recipe-search app for his wife) to popular big data tool to the core of a company worth nearly a billion dollars. He also shares his thoughts and strategies on the growth of Elastic, which, somewhat under the radar, has expanded to include multiple products and employ hundreds of people around the world. In this episode of the ARCHITECHT AI Show, Derrick Harris speaks with Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas of Fast.ai, Among other things, Howard and Thomas discuss the promise of deep learning and early student successes (including Hot Dog, Not Hot Dog app from Silicon Valley), as well as the threat of job losses from AI and how seriously we should take Elon Musk's AI warnings. AIMatter is based in Belarus and built an app, called Fabby, that lets users add effects to their selfies.

Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering says there are two things you can do to stop nefarious actors from forcing you into FaceID. According to Federighi, "If you don't stare at the phone, it won't unlock," & "If you grip the buttons on both sides of the phone when you hand it over, it will temporarily disable Face ID." Clearly, iPhone X owners will have to practice their squeezing techniques. It would be painful and costly to be held up and discover that you were squeezing it all wrong. The ACLU & the EFF recently sued the DHS for searching the phones and laptops of 11 plaintiffs at the US border without a warrant. The group of plaintiffs includes 10 US citizens and one lawful permanent resident, several of whom are Muslims or people of color.

On 6th October 15 top level speakers from companies such as Google, Gartner, Unilever, Global Future of Work Foundation and Ricoh USA will take part in this event which once again makes Barcelona the global centre for new game-changing and innovative trends in HR. Is digital selection the way to ensure equal opportunities without personal biases? Could new technologies be a weapon or tool in Middle Eastern women's fight for equality? How can information security and privacy be guaranteed in increasingly digital environments? All of these questions will be answered at the fourth edition of the International HR Conference Barcelona, organised by Advantage Consultores, which will take place on 6th October in the Telefónica Auditorium in Barcelona. We maintain our commitment to Barcelona as an international reference point for Human Resources.

Afew years ago the cosmologist Max Tegmark found himself weeping outside the Science Museum in South Kensington. He'd just visited an exhibition that represented the growth in human knowledge, everything from Charles Babbage's difference engine to a replica of Apollo 11. What moved him to tears wasn't the spectacle of these iconic technologies but an epiphany they prompted. "It hit me like a brick," he recalls, "that every time we understood how something in nature worked, some aspect of ourselves, we made it obsolete. Once we understood how muscles worked we built much better muscles in the form of machines, and maybe when we understand how our brains work we'll build much better brains and become utterly obsolete." Tegmark's melancholy insight was not some idle hypothesis, but instead an intellectual challenge to himself at the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence. What will become of humanity, he was moved to ask, if we manage to create an intelligence that outstrips our own?

Are your colleagues lousy at communicating with each other? A chatbot could help, specifically one called CoachBot. Developed by the London-based HR company Saberr, it asks about workplace dynamics and provides the team with reports. A unit within the UK's National Health Service is trialling it, as are 10 companies, including Unilever and Logitech. When Coachbot arrives in the workplace, staff have to introduce themselves to it.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has, for the last couple of years, dominated headlines as technologies associated with AI advance and appetite grows exponentially for AI products. Key market players in industries too many to mention are looking towards AI innovation to stay ahead of their competitors and gain market share, seeing AI as the catalyst for success. This appetite only serves to make AI start-ups a more attractive proposition to the global VC community. AI spending is forecasted to grow from $640m in 2016 to $37bn by 2025, according to market research firm Tractica. Tractica's research director, Aditya Kaul, told website Datanami that cases like image recognition, algorithmic securities trading and healthcare patient data management, "have huge scale potential", as well as in areas such as business services, consumer products, industry (industrial robotics), advertising, finance, media and defence.

High-dimensional partial differential equations (PDE) appear in a number of models from the financial industry, such as in derivative pricing models, credit valuation adjustment (CVA) models, or portfolio optimization models. The PDEs in such applications are high-dimensional as the dimension corresponds to the number of financial assets in a portfolio. Moreover, such PDEs are often fully nonlinear due to the need to incorporate certain nonlinear phenomena in the model such as default risks, transaction costs, volatility uncertainty (Knightian uncertainty), or trading constraints in the model. Such high-dimensional fully nonlinear PDEs are exceedingly difficult to solve as the computational effort for standard approximation methods grows exponentially with the dimension. In this work we propose a new method for solving high-dimensional fully nonlinear second-order PDEs. Our method can in particular be used to sample from high-dimensional nonlinear expectations. The method is based on (i) a connection between fully nonlinear second-order PDEs and second-order backward stochastic differential equations (2BSDEs), (ii) a merged formulation of the PDE and the 2BSDE problem, (iii) a temporal forward discretization of the 2BSDE and a spatial approximation via deep neural nets, and (iv) a stochastic gradient descent-type optimization procedure. Numerical results obtained using ${\rm T{\small ENSOR}F{\small LOW}}$ in ${\rm P{\small YTHON}}$ illustrate the efficiency and the accuracy of the method in the cases of a $100$-dimensional Black-Scholes-Barenblatt equation, a $100$-dimensional Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation, and a nonlinear expectation of a $ 100 $-dimensional $ G $-Brownian motion.