The time to converge to the steady state of a finite Markov chain can be greatly reduced by a lifting operation, which creates a new Markov chain on an expanded state space. For a class of quadratic objectives, we show an analogous behavior where a distributed ADMM algorithm can be seen as a lifting of Gradient Descent algorithm. This provides a deep insight for its faster convergence rate under optimal parameter tuning. We conjecture that this gain is always present, as opposed to the lifting of a Markov chain which sometimes only provides a marginal speedup.

User preference integration is of great importance in multi-objective optimization, in particular in many objective optimization. Preferences have long been considered in traditional multicriteria decision making (MCDM) which is based on mathematical programming. Recently, it is integrated in multi-objective metaheuristics (MOMH), resulting in focus on preferred parts of the Pareto front instead of the whole Pareto front. The number of publications on preference-based multi-objective metaheuristics has increased rapidly over the past decades. There already exist various preference handling methods and MOMH methods, which have been combined in diverse ways. This article proposes to use the Web Ontology Language (OWL) to model and systematize the results developed in this field. A review of the existing work is provided, based on which an ontology is built and instantiated with state-of-the-art results. The OWL ontology is made public and open to future extension. Moreover, the usage of the ontology is exemplified for different use-cases, including querying for methods that match an engineering application, bibliometric analysis, checking existence of combinations of preference models and MOMH techniques, and discovering opportunities for new research and open research questions.

Anyone who's ever flown a drone of any sort will tell you that sooner or later, you're going to crash it. The question is how exactly you will go about doing this, and how much of the drone will be functional after it's happened. Most flying animals somewhat frustratingly don't have this problem: Birds and insects run into things occasionally (or all the time, for small bugs), and just shrug it off and keep on going, thanks to their biological design, which includes both stiffness and flexibility. Now roboticists at the EPFL, in Lausanne, Switzerland, are relying on these same qualities to design a highly resilient quadrotor that's impressively difficult to destroy. There are three primary strategies for designing drones with impact resistance.

The operator of the disaster-struck Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant said Thursday it will attempt to examine the inside of reactor 1 next Tuesday using a remote-controlled robot. The move follows a botched attempt by another self-propelled robot to take a look inside reactor 2, which had also sustained a meltdown after the March 11, 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. That robot became unable to move when it encountered debris and eventually could not be retrieved. These are the first attempts by Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings Inc. to examine the insides of the wrecked reactors since the nuclear disaster started. For the reactor 1 inspection, Tepco said the new robot will carry out a four-day probe inside the containment vessel.

A Volkswagen'Cedric' self-driving automobile is presented during the Volkswagen Group Shaping The Future / Create Innovation event ahead of the 87th Geneva International Motor Show on March 6, 2017 in Geneva, Switzerland. As many of the most innovative companies in the world race to bring autonomous vehicle solutions to market, a fierce debate has emerged in the industry about the best way to build those solutions. An AV must make countless tactical choices moment to moment to navigate through its environment, choices that are second nature to experienced human drivers: how fast to go, whether to stop at a traffic signal, whether to slow to let another vehicle merge, whether to change lanes to avoid a parked car. These are highly safety-critical decisions. They can mean the difference between life and death on the road, millions of times over, every day. Given the stakes, it is no surprise that the question as to which technological approach to apply here has taken on huge importance and inspired vigorous debate.

With the CIA's ability to'breach almost anything connected to the internet' made public, many citizens have begun questioning their devices. A clip has surfaced showing an anonymous woman asking Amazon's Alexa a series of questions - starting with'would you lie to me' and finishing with'Alexa, are you connected to the CIA?' The virtual assistant swiftly responded to the first question, but shutdown after it was interrogated about its connections with the US government agency. A video appeared on Reddit that has people questioning their virtual assistants. A woman is seen asking Amazon's Alexa a series of questions. ' 'I am not always right, but I would never intentionally lie to you or anyone else,' responded Alexa. Alexa answered, 'The Unites States Central Intelligence Agency, CIA'.

When John Forbes Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, schizophrenic, and paranoid delusional, was asked how he could believe that space aliens had recruited him to save the world, he gave a simple response. "Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously." Nash is hardly the only so-called mad genius in history. Even ignoring those great creators who did not kill themselves in a fit of deep depression, it remains easy to list persons who endured well-documented psychopathology, including the composer Robert Schumann, the poet Emily Dickinson, and Nash.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has permeated many industries from finance to healthcare, and sales is no exception. Within sales tech, there are a number of startups using AI and machine learning capabilities to help facilitate and streamline the sales process, particularly in the area of voice call and speech analytics. We used the CB Insights platform to surface 10 notable, early- to mid-stage (Series C or earlier) sales tech startups developing software platforms that specifically incorporate AI and machine learning. We selected these companies based on several factors including the recency and size of the companies' disclosed funding, as well as Mosaic scores, CB Insights' algorithm that uses financial and non-financial signals to predict private company health. After evaluating the companies on the list, we determined that the 10 companies below are some of the top companies to pay attention to.

Airbus and Italdesign have unveiled Pop.Up, a modular autonomous flying car concept that can operate on the ground and in the air. It comprises a capsule that can be attached to and detached from a wheeled base or drone-like rotors, both of which are electric, depending on the passenger's needs. Airbus believes it could also be used with hyperloop systems in the future, for super-fast transport. Pop.Up is just a concept, but Airbus envisages that the vehicles would form part of a wider ride-hailing system, much like Uber. 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.

NVIDIA Tuesday unveiled the NVIDIA Jetson TX2, a credit card-sized platform that puts AI computing to work in the world all around us. Over the past five years, the mobile revolution has brought more and more devices online, Deepu Talla, vice president and general manager of the Tegra business at NVIDIA, told an audience of press, analysts and robotics enthusiasts at an event in San Francisco. At the same time, GPU-based deep learning has given computers the ability to understand -- and react to -- the data streaming in from all these devices in uncanny new ways. Both through training -- which creates smart systems -- and through inference -- which creates systems that are able to react intelligently to the world around them in real time. "We're seeing a lot of this inference not just in the cloud, but also moving towards the edge, whether it's a robot, or a drone or a security camera," Talla said.