Earlier this year, the union representing U.S. airport security agents called for hiring 6,000 additional screeners to reduce long waits and help handle the rise in summer travelers. Government positions -- especially those at an agency like the Transportation Security Administration -- require a rigorous screening process in which officials might consider 100 employees for every one hire made. Airport security is clearly an area that could benefit from automation. Through a process known as organizational change management, TSA could automate some entry-level IT jobs that were previously handled by tech employees and repurpose those employees to ease the demand for additional security screeners. Automation allows employees to focus on more complex tasks, and artificial intelligence-based technology can handle knowledge work in a fraction of the time and with no errors -- a level of performance humans can't match.

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

Humans pick up on sarcasm instinctively and usually do not need help figuring out if, say, a social media post has a mocking tone. Machines have a much tougher time with this because they are typically programmed to read text and assess images based strictly on what they see. Nothing, unless computer scientists could help machines better understand wordplay used in social media and on the internet. And it looks like they may be on the verge of doing just that. Just what you needed--a sarcasm-detection engine that helps marketers tell whether you were praising or mocking their product, and adjust their messages to sell you more stuff.

Rackspace sells for 4.3 billion to Apollo Global Cloud Integration Market (2016-2021) - Key Players are IBM, MuleSoft & NEC Corporation ... Cloud player Rackspace goes private in 4.3B deal Rackspace jumps after Apollo Global buys it in 4.3 billion deal

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your thick-necked 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 we report the untethered operation of a robot composed solely of soft materials. The robot is controlled with microfluidic logic that autonomously regulates fluid flow and, hence, catalytic decomposition of an on-board monopropellant fuel supply.

We all know that hiring managers can be racist when choosing the "right" (read: white) candidate for a job, but what about computers? If you have a name like Ebony or Jamal at the top of your resume, new research suggests that some algorithms will make less "pleasant" associations with your moniker than if you are named Emily or Matt. Machines are increasingly being used to make all kinds of important decisions, like who gets what kind of health insurance coverage, or which convicts are most likely to reoffend. The idea here is that computers, unlike people, can't be racist, but we're increasingly learning that they do in fact take after their makers. As just one example, ProPublica reported in May that an algorithm used by officials in Florida systematically rated white offenders as being lower risk of committing a future crime than blacks.

Data Natives Speaker Dr. Stefan Kühn is Lead Data Scientist at codecentric. Together with his team he is developing robust, fast and intelligent algorithms and is applying modern machine learning methods for analyzing large datasets. Before codecentric he was a researcher in the Scientific Computing Group at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences Leipzig with a focus on Tensor Approximation and Higher-Order Singular Value Decomposition. He earned a Diploma in Applied Mathematics, with a focus on Mathematical Optimization, at the University of Hamburg. He went on to get PhD in Applied Mathematics with a focus on Numerics, Tensor Approximation and Higher-Order Singular Value Decomposition, at the Max Planck Insitute for Mathematics in the Sciences Leipzig in 2012. High-dimensional data is very hard to analyze and understand.

I had the pleasure of participating in Milan's FI-WARE VIP Bootcamp (4–6th May, 2016), under invitation by EBAN. There, along with several other investors and entrepreneurs, we assisted 15 startups from all across Europe to improve the structure and the presentation of their VC pitches. One of the people who actively participated, giving their full support to the event (and as a volunteer, nonetheless) was Federico Travella, founder and CEO of NoviCap, an extremely interesting venture in the "fintech" sector that came up with an innovative way of providing working capital for every kind of business. In discussion with Federico and other participants, the topic of AI was brought up, seen as a contributing factor to increasing unemployment, and through that, to social discontent and political instability. It's surely an interesting subject and is connected to the broader issue of technological progress and its social impact.

For more than 30 years, Gibbs has advised on and developed product and service marketing for many businesses and he has consulted, lectured, and authored numerous articles and books. There's no doubt that pretty much everything humans do can be sliced, diced, and replicated by algorithms so it's not surprising that recent work by Tom S. F. Haines, Oisin Mac Aodha, and Gabriel J. Brostow, researchers at University College London, has resulted in the fall of yet another bastion of being human: Handwriting. Their paper, called "My Text in Your Handwriting," describes software that semi-automatically analyzes a sample of a handwriting, then generates whatever text you want in what looks like the identical style of the original handwriting sample. Authors produce different glyphs to represent the same element of writing – the way one individual writes an "a" will usually be different to the way others write an "a". Although an individual's writing has slight variations, every author has a recognisable style that manifests in their glyphs and their spacing.

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