One of the ironies of cloud computing is that, the more its cookie-cutter architecture allows it to scale, then the more it becomes possible to reintroduce diversity into that architecture. While cloud computing's early successes came from working out how to automatically manage serried ranks of identical general-purpose commodity computers, the vast scale that providers have now reached makes it economically and operationally viable to introduce pools of specialized computing into that infrastructure. Nowhere is this more pertinent than in the analysis of huge volumes of data, in applications such as big data and, increasingly, machine learning. In search of high performance in these applications, the leading cloud providers are investing in increasingly esoteric processor technologies, even to the extent of custom-building their own designs, as both Google and IBM are known to have done, while Microsoft and Amazon are thought to be doing the same -- perhaps also Apple and Facebook. Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is a case in point.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

An "evolving" artistic tribute to pioneering scientist Alan Turing is to be unveiled just a few miles from his west London birthplace. The work, called Message from the Unseen World, uses artificial intelligence to light up a wall with words and phrases from a poem written in honour of the scientist, who was played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the 2014 Oscar-winning The Imitation Game. Turing was a pioneering mathematician who is now hailed for his work as part of the war-time team tasked with cracking Nazi codes. He is widely credited as the father of modern computing, but died a broken man in 1954, aged 41, after chemical castration following a conviction for homosexual activity. The installation on Bishop's Bridge Road, near the entrance to Paddington Tube station, is based on a poem by Nick Drake which imagines the scientist looking back on his life.

A 53-year-old man died Wednesday after his Tesla Model S crashed into a tree and burst into flames on a highway about 25 miles south of Amsterdam. Technical personnel from the company joined Dutch investigators at the scene "to establish the facts of the incident," including to confirm whether the car's Autopilot feature was engaged at the time. A Tesla spokesperson reportedly said: "We are undertaking a full investigation and will share our findings as soon as possible." While there has been no other official public statement from the company so far, Dana Hull, a reporter for Bloomberg, said on her Twitter page that Tesla confirmed the car's self-driving feature "was not engaged at any time." Updated from @TeslaMotors: "Thus far, we can confirm from the car's logs that Autopilot was not engaged at any time" https://t.co/RKEX3zkEB1 The cause of the accident in the Netherlands is still not known.

Apple's Siri upgrades will let you dictate LinkedIn messages, verbally search for shoe photos on Pinterest, and hail an Uber, hands-free. When Apple unveils its new iPhone Wednesday, it's expected to push hard on software improvements available for its next mobile operating system, iOS 10, available for current iPhones and a predicted new iPhone model. The iPhone's voice-activated digital assistant Siri will be a key part of this upgrade, say tech analysts and developers. Siri, primarily used for voice commands to dial phone numbers, set reminders and get traffic information, has been opened to third-party developers after five years of existence. Apple, via a spokeswoman, said app developers are creating "completely new ways for users to interact" within apps.

Austin startup CognitiveScale has raised 21.8 million to ramp up sales and marketing of its artificial intelligence technology. The company, founded by members of the IBM Watson team, received the funding from Norwest Venture Partners and Intel Capital. It has raised a total of 32 million since inception. CognitiveScale has created a cloud platform that can mine huge databases and use natural language to present data in an easy to understand format. The platform can be plugged into a company's website and extracts insights from the company's existing data.

The Tate Britain art museum has just launched a new artificial intelligence exhibit that applies machine learning technology to images in some pretty unique ways. Called "Recognition," the exhibit is the winner of Tate's annual IK Prize, which was created in association with Microsoft and awards "digital innovation." It compares images from Tate's enormous archive of artwork with up-to-the-minute Reuters news photography, based on various pattern-recognition tools. These include object recognition, facial recognition, composition analysis, and even natural language processing for looking at captions and text. "From the moment it launched, it's continually scanning both databases and comparing images, trying to find works which are comparable -- whether that be visually or thematically -- and then publishing them online in a virtual gallery," Tony Guillan, producer of the IK Prize, told Digital Trends.

Mercedes-Benz has transformed a van into a mobile distribution center - complete with drone parking. Teaming up with drone startup Matternet, the concept'Vision Van' acts as a landing and launch pad for Matternet M2 delivery drones that can carry up to 4.4 pounds for 12 miles on a single charge. These drones connect to Mercedes-Benz van's on-board and cloud-based systems that automatically loads items into the drone with the help of robotic shelving systems. Mercedes-Benz has transformed a van into a mobile distribution center. Teaming up with drone startup Matternet, the concept'Vision Van' acts as a landing and launch pad for Matternet M2 delivery drones that can carry up to 4.4 pounds for 12 miles on a single charge Using software and robots, packages are scanned, sorted and placed in specific racks, which are then loaded on to the truck with a driverless handling vehicle. Unlike Amazon and Google, Mercedes designed its method to work alongside human workers, which steer the van using a joystick and still delivery packages on foot.

Optimization on manifolds is a class of methods for optimization of an objective function, subject to constraints which are smooth, in the sense that the set of points which satisfy the constraints admits the structure of a differentiable manifold. While many optimization problems are of the described form, technicalities of differential geometry and the laborious calculation of derivatives pose a significant barrier for experimenting with these methods. We introduce Pymanopt (available at https://pymanopt.github.io), a toolbox for optimization on manifolds, implemented in Python, that---similarly to the Manopt Matlab toolbox---implements several manifold geometries and optimization algorithms. Moreover, we lower the barriers to users further by using automated differentiation for calculating derivative information, saving users time and saving them from potential calculation and implementation errors.

Accurately determining dependency structure is critical to discovering a system's causal organization. We recently showed that the transfer entropy fails in a key aspect of this---measuring information flow---due to its conflation of dyadic and polyadic relationships. We extend this observation to demonstrate that this is true of all such Shannon information measures when used to analyze multivariate dependencies. This has broad implications, particularly when employing information to express the organization and mechanisms embedded in complex systems, including the burgeoning efforts to combine complex network theory with information theory. Here, we do not suggest that any aspect of information theory is wrong. Rather, the vast majority of its informational measures are simply inadequate for determining the meaningful dependency structure within joint probability distributions. Therefore, such information measures are inadequate for discovering intrinsic causal relations. We close by demonstrating that such distributions exist across an arbitrary set of variables.