Twitter has moved to beef-up its AI and VR arms with the purchase of Magic Pony Technology - a UK-based company which it has acquired for a reported 150m. Its technology uses'neutral networks' to improve the quality of photos and videos - this means that the technology is trained to think like a human. It works in a way that is similar to how the human eye sees objects from different angles and processes them into one image. This technology is also likely to be used to develop virtual reality and augmented reality features and experiences. It also exploits machine learning - technology that can learn by itself as it gathers data.

An industrial robotic arm pours a glass of beer at the Automatica trade fair in Munich on Tuesday. Munich: Europe's growing army of robot workers could be classed as "electronic persons" and their owners liable to paying social security for them if the European Union adopts a draft plan to address the realities of a new industrial revolution.Robots are being deployed in ever-greater numbers in factories and also taking on tasks such as personal care or surgery, raising fears over unemployment, wealth inequality and alienation. Their growing intelligence, pervasiveness and autonomy requires rethinking everything from taxation to legal liability, a draft European Parliament motion, dated May 31, suggests. Some robots are even taking on a human form. Visitors to the world's biggest travel show in March were greeted by a lifelike robot developed by Japan's Toshiba and were helped by another made by France's Aldebaran Robotics.

Munich: Europe's growing army of robot workers could be classed as "electronic persons" and their owners liable to paying social security for them if the European Union adopts a draft plan to address the realities of a new industrial revolution.Robots are being deployed in ever-greater numbers in factories and also taking on tasks such as personal care or surgery, raising fears over unemployment, wealth inequality and alienation. Their growing intelligence, pervasiveness and autonomy requires rethinking everything from taxation to legal liability, a draft European Parliament motion, dated May 31, suggests. Some robots are even taking on a human form. Visitors to the world's biggest travel show in March were greeted by a lifelike robot developed by Japan's Toshiba and were helped by another made by France's Aldebaran Robotics. The draft motion called on the European Commission to consider "that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations".

"We think it would be very bureaucratic and would stunt the development of robotics," he told reporters at the Automatica robotics trade fair in Munich, while acknowledging that a legal framework for self-driving cars would be needed soon. The report added that robotics and artificial intelligence may result in a large part of the work now done by humans being taken over by robots, raising concerns about the future of employment and the viability of social security systems. The draft motion, drawn up by the European parliament's committee on legal affairs also said organisations should have to declare savings they made in social security contributions by using robotics instead of people, for tax purposes. Schwarzkopf said there was no proven correlation between increasing robot density and unemployment, pointing out that the number of employees in the German automotive industry rose by 13 percent between 2010 and 2015, while industrial robot stock in the industry rose 17 percent in the same period. The motion faces an uphill battle to win backing from the various political blocks in European Parliament.

Back in 1997, Andy Grove, then chief executive officer of Intel, became one of the first corporate titans to embrace the teachings of Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. Sensing that Intel might be undercut by PC chip rivals with cheaper wares, Grove invited Christensen to speak to his team about industrial leaders of the past who had waited too long to address emerging threats. Within a few quarters, Intel had brought out a line of lower-end Celeron chips for PCs, which pretty much smashed the dreams of Intel wannabes such as Advanced Micro Devices. Intel is no longer a case study in adaptability. On the contrary, it has whiffed in the market for mobile chips used in smartphones and tablets, by far the largest new opportunity for chip makers in the past 10 years.

The Clock Drawing Test (CDT) is a rapid, inexpensive, and popular neuropsychological screening tool for cognitive conditions. The Digital Clock Drawing Test (dCDT) uses novel software to analyze data from a digitizing ballpoint pen that reports its position with considerable spatial and temporal precision, making possible the analysis of both the drawing process and final product. We developed methodology to analyze pen stroke data from these drawings, and computed a large collection of features which were then analyzed with a variety of machine learning techniques. The resulting scoring systems were designed to be more accurate than the systems currently used by clinicians, but just as interpretable and easy to use. The systems also allow us to quantify the tradeoff between accuracy and interpretability. We created automated versions of the CDT scoring systems currently used by clinicians, allowing us to benchmark our models, which indicated that our machine learning models substantially outperformed the existing scoring systems.

Attack graphs provide compact representations of the attack paths that an attacker can follow to compromise network resources by analysing network vulnerabilities and topology. These representations are a powerful tool for security risk assessment. Bayesian inference on attack graphs enables the estimation of the risk of compromise to the system's components given their vulnerabilities and interconnections, and accounts for multi-step attacks spreading through the system. Whilst static analysis considers the risk posture at rest, dynamic analysis also accounts for evidence of compromise, e.g. from SIEM software or forensic investigation. However, in this context, exact Bayesian inference techniques do not scale well. In this paper we show how Loopy Belief Propagation - an approximate inference technique - can be applied to attack graphs, and that it scales linearly in the number of nodes for both static and dynamic analysis, making such analyses viable for larger networks. We experiment with different topologies and network clustering on synthetic Bayesian attack graphs with thousands of nodes to show that the algorithm's accuracy is acceptable and converge to a stable solution. We compare sequential and parallel versions of Loopy Belief Propagation with exact inference techniques for both static and dynamic analysis, showing the advantages of approximate inference techniques to scale to larger attack graphs.

Graph-based methods for signal processing have shown promise for the analysis of data exhibiting irregular structure, such as those found in social, transportation, and sensor networks. Yet, though these systems are often dynamic, state-of-the-art methods for signal processing on graphs ignore the dimension of time, treating successive graph signals independently or taking a global average. To address this shortcoming, this paper considers the statistical analysis of time-varying graph signals. We introduce a novel definition of joint (time-vertex) stationarity, which generalizes the classical definition of time stationarity and the more recent definition appropriate for graphs. Joint stationarity gives rise to a scalable Wiener optimization framework for joint denoising, semi-supervised learning, or more generally inversing a linear operator, that is provably optimal. Experimental results on real weather data demonstrate that taking into account graph and time dimensions jointly can yield significant accuracy improvements in the reconstruction effort.

Europe's growing army of robot workers could be classed as'electronic persons' and their owners liable to paying social security for them if the European Union adopts a draft plan to address the realities of a new industrial revolution. Robots are being deployed in ever-greater numbers in factories and also taking on tasks such as personal care or surgery, raising fears over unemployment, wealth inequality and alienation. Their growing intelligence, pervasiveness and autonomy requires rethinking everything from taxation to legal liability, a draft European Parliament motion, dated May 31, suggests. Europe's growing army of robot workers could be classed as'electronic persons' and their owners liable to paying social security under a draft EU proposal. The draft motion called on the European Commission to consider'that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations'.

If you're lucky enough to get a ticket to this year's Wimbledon tennis championships, be prepared to be scanned by a supercomputer. Cameras linked to IBM's Watson "machine-learning" platform may be monitoring your facial expressions and trying to work out what emotions you are displaying. If Watson learns quickly enough over the fortnight, it will apparently be able to work out which player you are supporting just by reading your face. The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) and its tech partner IBM are remaining tight-lipped on the details of the new technology - not least because it needs legal approval and raises privacy concerns. But it is another example of how sport is becoming increasingly digital, for fans, players and venues alike. Even if Watson isn't tracking your every cheer and grimace at the championships - which begin on Monday 27 June - it will be digesting millions of conversations on social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and using natural language processing to identify common topics - not necessarily just about tennis.