A silent communications system in which nonaural carriers, in the very low or very high audio-frequency range or in the adjacent ultrasonic frequency spectrum are amplitude- or frequency-modulated with the desired intelligence and propagated acoustically or vibrationally, for inducement into the brain, typically through the use of loudspeakers, earphones, or piezoelectric transducers. The modulated carriers may be transmitted directly in real time or may be conveniently recorded and stored on mechanical, magnetic, or optical media for delayed or repeated transmission to the listener.

Economics correspondent Paul Solman and Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom discuss existential threats such as nuclear winter and how the biggest threat to humanity may be what we don't yet know. Editor's note: Economics correspondent Paul Solman recently traveled to Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. And yes, there is an institute that studies only that -- the future of the human species. In PBS NewsHour's Thursday Making Sen$e report, Paul speaks with the institute's founding director Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher known for his work on artificial intelligence and existential threats. You can watch Bostrom's TED talk on "superintelligence" -- what happens when computers become smarter than humans -- here.

The first international robotics competition for high schoolers made headlines before it even started -- and after the event was over as well. First there was the story of the all-girl Afghanistan team, which was denied visas to attend for unknown reasons. Then there was the post-competition story: All six teens on the Burundi team were reported missing on Wednesday, the day after the competition ended, with reports that two of them were headed to Canada. At the last minute, the Afghan team did get visas. They waved their country's flag during the parade of nations at the event's opening ceremonies.

The robotics work programme implements the robotics strategy developed by SPARC, the Public-Private Partnership for Robotics in Europe (see the Strategic Research Agenda). Every week, euRobotics will publish a video interview with a project, so that you can find out more about their activities. Hephaestus project addresses novel concepts to introduce Robotics and Autonomous Systems use in the Construction Sector where the presence of this type of products is minor or almost non-existent. It focuses to give novel solutions to one of the most important parts of the construction sector, the part related to the facades and the works that need to be done when this part of a building is built or need maintenance. It proposes a new automatized way to install these products providing a whole solution not only highly industrialized in production but also in installation and maintenance. Hephaestus aims at automating the On-site Execution or Installation process for empowering and strengthening the Construction Sector in Europe and for positioning the European Robotic Industry as leader and reference in the huge and new growing market for the robotics.

The Chair of Engineering Geology at ETH Zurich invites applications for a PhD position in the area of slope stability analysis. The successful candidate must have a MSc in Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering or related field and be strongly interested in research. Knowledge and experience in remote sensing and machine learning algorithms are of prime importance. Good technical and writing skills are desired. The duration of the position is about 3-4 years.

There are few things social media users love more than flooding their feeds with photos of food. Yet we seldom use these images for much more than a quick scroll on our cellphones. Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) believe that analyzing photos like these could help us learn recipes and better understand people's eating habits. In a new paper with the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), the team trained an artificial intelligence system called Pic2Recipe to look at a photo of food and be able to predict the ingredients and suggest similar recipes. "In computer vision, food is mostly neglected because we don't have the large-scale datasets needed to make predictions," says Yusuf Aytar, an MIT postdoc who co-wrote a paper about the system with MIT Professor Antonio Torralba.

Google has denied suggestions that its iconic desktop homepage is in line for a major redesign. The company this week unveiled a new feed experience that will transform the look of its mobile app with the addition of cards, videos and news stories. The announcement sparked rumours that Google's famously clean, simple desktop homepage was also in line for the same redesign. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Yes, most faculty, graduate students, and a lot of engineering teams in industry have already abandoned everything else and shifted to deep learning. Most new graduate students in applied areas such as computer vision that I meet, know nothing about probabilistic graphical models for instance, and their proposed solution to any problem is a CNN/LSTM/GAN. It is a huge deal to have an algorithm that can absorb large amounts of data - which is what deep learning methods enable. The (re-)discovery of such an algorithm (deep neural network training) has thus made possible many new applications, which were not possible just a few years ago. How excited are you about the steam engine today?

The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital transformation case study highlights how online travel and events pioneer lastminute.com To learn how a culture of IT innovation helps make highly dynamic customer interactions for online travel a major differentiator, we're joined by Filippo Onorato, Chief Information Officer at lastminute.com group in Chiasso, Switzerland. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Gardner: Most people these days are trying to do more things more quickly amid higher complexity. What is it that you're trying to accomplish in terms of moving beyond disruption and being competitive in a highly complex area?

"To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life." Jeremy England is concerned about words--about what they mean, about the universes they contain. He avoids ones like "consciousness" and "information"; too loaded, he says. When he's searching for the right thing to say, his voice breaks a little, scattering across an octave or two before resuming a fluid sonority. The 34-year-old assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the architect of a new theory called "dissipative adaptation," which has helped to explain how complex, life-like function can self-organize and emerge from simpler things, including inanimate matter. This proposition has earned England a somewhat unwelcome nickname: the next Charles Darwin. But England's story is just as much about language as it is about biology. There are some 6,800 unique languages in use today. Not every word translates perfectly, and meaning sometimes falls through the cracks.