As speedy as today's supercomputers are, they're still nowhere near the complexity and power of the brains sitting inside of our heads. But the rapid rise of computing technology and artificial intelligence poses a very interesting question: will we one day be able to upload our minds to the cloud? Imagine mapping all of the information inside your head to a stack of servers; your mind living forever in a carefully cooled data center. It sounds like the start of a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, or the idea behind the excellent gaming thriller SOMA, but there are already scientists working making this concept a reality. Take the 2045 Initiative, for example, spearheaded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov with the aim of dispensing with our biological bodies by - you've guessed it - 2045.

I keep hearing Data Scientists say that'Statistics is Dead', and they even have big debates about it attended by the good and great of Data Science. Interestingly, there seem to be very few actual statisticians at these debates. So why do Data Scientists think that stats is dead? Where does the notion that there is no longer any need for statistical analysis come from? Is statistics dead or is it just pining for the fjords?

In the burgeoning field of computer science known as machine learning, engineers often refer to the artificial intelligences they create as "black box" systems: Once a machine learning engine has been trained from a collection of example data to perform anything from facial recognition to malware detection, it can take in queries--Whose face is that? Is this app safe?--and spit out answers without anyone, not even its creators, fully understanding the mechanics of the decision-making inside that box. But researchers are increasingly proving that even when the inner workings of those machine learning engines are inscrutable, they aren't exactly secret. In fact, they've found that the guts of those black boxes can be reverse-engineered and even fully reproduced--stolen, as one group of researchers puts it--with the very same methods used to create them. In a paper they released earlier this month titled "Stealing Machine Learning Models via Prediction APIs," a team of computer scientists at Cornell Tech, the Swiss institute EPFL in Lausanne, and the University of North Carolina detail how they were able to reverse engineer machine learning-trained AIs based only on sending them queries and analyzing the responses.

Prof Raghavan also serves as the Director of the NSF-sponsored Industry/ University Cooperative Research Center for Visual and Decision Informatics. In this role, he co-ordinates several multi-institutional, industry-driven research projects and manages a budget of over 500K/year. From 1997 to 2003, he led a 2.3M research and development project in close collaboration with the USGS National Wetlands Research Center and with the Department of Energy's Office of Science and Technical Information on creating a digital library with data mining capabilities incorporated. His research interests are in Big Data, data mining, information retrieval, machine learning and Internet computing. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed research papers --appearing in top-level journals and proceedings - that cumulatively accord him an h-index of 31, based on citations.

It was the best of times p His photographs capture the culture of rock and punk music; the beguiling moments with the Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Blondie, Dead Boys, Richard Hell, Lydia Lunch and many more as they made New York's CBGB club their home in the late 1970s. John Thackwray, a French and South African commercial filmmaker and photographer, has traveled the globe since 2010, and photographed over 1,200 bedrooms of young people born in the 1980s and 1990s. More than a decade ago, the European Space Agency launched an orbiter named Rosetta, bound on a circuitous voyage to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In the years since, Rosetta has been drawn in and flung along by multiple gravity assist maneuvers, visiting the Earth three times and making … A few weeks ago we suggested you follow 5 topics that cover the more basic aspects of the business of blogging. Today let's focus on something equally important: the life of a blogger. This week I attended MMA SM2 Innovation Summit in New York, which took place during Advertising Week.

Smart transportation uses information technology and artificial intelligence to efficiently manage and coordinate transportation systems. The application of smart transportation network allows the travelling population to have better knowledge of the traffic for better coordination. In addition, the use of smart transportation also ensures safety for the drivers. The market is experiencing growth due to their increasing demand across all geographic locations. The rising need for safe and secured transportation and planning of smart cities by governments have propelled the growth of the global smart transportation market. However, the high initial investment and lack of data might restrain the market's growth during the forecast period.

An artificial intelligence agent developed by two Carnegie Mellon University computer science students has proven to be the game's ultimate survivor --, outplaying both the game's built-in AI agents and human players. The students, Devendra Chaplot and Guillaume Lample, used deep-learning techniques to train the AI agent to negotiate the game's 3-D environment, still challenging after more than two decades because players must act based only on the portion of the game visible on the screen. Their work follows the groundbreaking work of Google's DeepMind, which used deep-learning methods to master two-dimensional Atari 2600 videogames and, earlier this year, defeat a world-class professional player in the board game Go. In contrast to the limited information provided in Doom, both Atari and Go give players a view of the entire playing field. "The fact that their bot could actually compete with average human beings is impressive," said Ruslan Salakhutdinov, an associate professor of machine learning who was not involved in the student project.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Here's a taste of what's to come: In contrast to the usual approach to operating self-driving cars, we did not program any explicit object detection, mapping, path planning or control components into this car. Instead, the car learns on its own to create all necessary internal representations necessary to steer, simply by observing human drivers.

It was the best of times p His photographs capture the culture of rock and punk music; the beguiling moments with the Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Blondie, Dead Boys, Richard Hell, Lydia Lunch and many more as they made New York's CBGB club their home in the late 1970s. John Thackwray, a French and South African commercial filmmaker and photographer, has traveled the globe since 2010, and photographed over 1,200 bedrooms of young people born in the 1980s and 1990s. More than a decade ago, the European Space Agency launched an orbiter named Rosetta, bound on a circuitous voyage to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In the years since, Rosetta has been drawn in and flung along by multiple gravity assist maneuvers, visiting the Earth three times and making … A few weeks ago we suggested you follow 5 topics that cover the more basic aspects of the business of blogging. Today let's focus on something equally important: the life of a blogger. This week I attended MMA SM2 Innovation Summit in New York, which took place during Advertising Week.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has unveiled a new GPU-powered cloud computing service for artificial intelligence, seismic analysis, molecular modeling, genomics, and other applications that need vast amounts of parallel processing power. AWS said its P2 instances for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) are aimed at applications that require "massive parallel floating point performance" . "These instances were designed to chew through tough, large-scale machine learning, deep learning, computational fluid dynamics, seismic analysis, molecular modeling, genomics, and computational finance workloads," said Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at AWS. While GPUs were first associated with gaming, they're now finding a new life in dealing with huge computing workloads, as they can be scaled out so that banks of GPUs handle tasks in parallel. This is in contrast to the traditional approach of scaling up, where increasingly complex problems were tackled using individual machines with ever faster CPUs, which is becoming increasingly hard to do.