The latest entrant into the new space race has a wingspan longer than the distance traveled by the Wright Brothers in their earliest flights. Its landing gear has a total of 28 wheels. And the local county had to issue special construction permits for the scaffolding needed to build what would be the world's largest airplane. Only someone like Paul Allen -- the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, owner of the Seattle Seahawks, dreamer and space enthusiast -- might attempt to build something like this: a twin-fuselage behemoth as wide as a football field that, fully loaded, would weigh 1.3 million pounds, be powered by six 737 engines and have 60 miles of wiring coursing through it. Called Stratolaunch, the plane would be bigger than Howard Hughes' famed Spruce Goose, which flew once, in 1947. But Allen's creation comes as the space industry is being disrupted by entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, who like him, aim to revolutionize space travel.

The architecture includes maths capabilities that could be used by other software as part of a heterogeneous system architecture. That could include neural network software but ARM executives stressed that Bifrost is first and foremost an architecture for raster, tile-based graphics processing units (GPUs). The previous architecture – Midgard – is the one that underlies ARM's T-series Mali GPUs and has up to 16 unified shader cores and SIMD [single-instruction multiple data] instruction set architecture. Bifrost supports up to 32 unified shader cores with a scalar ISA, full hardware cache coherency and something called clause execution. The primary goal, according to Sean Ellis, GPU architect with ARM, was to achieve more performance per square millimeter of silicon and per line of "real-world" shader code. Whereas Midgard GPUs use SIMD vectorization Bifrost GPUs will use quad vectorization in which four scalar threads from a 2 by 2 pixel are executed in lock step.

As I write this article I'm travelling on an Airbus A380-800, one of the most advanced passenger planes in the world but despite the fact we have the technology to operate it fully autonomously airlines still provide pilots and Airbus still build a cockpit. Because they know we are all more comfortable having a human in the loop – even despite the fact that, ironically, real world tests at Heathrow have shown that fully autonomous aircraft are safer and more efficient than their 20th century equivalents. On the other hand UAV manufacturers in the defence industry have no such compulsion about removing the human. Having a human in the loop gives us comfort and a feigned assurance that, despite everything we are still in control. However, in the next twenty years there are going to be fewer and fewer humans in the loop as technologies from Artificial Intelligence to Autonomous Vehicles kick us to the curb.

Betty is part of the 7.2 million EU-funded STRANDS project where robots are learning how to act intelligently and independently in real-world environments while understanding 3D space. Although Betty's creators say the programmes are designed to create robots which will'clean floors in MacDonalds' or stocktake experts have warned that jobs will be lost because of AI. Richard Susskind, an Oxford professor who has advised governments around the world, recently told the Hay Festival that computers will soon outperform even the best professionals. He said: "It's no longer science fiction. In our view a lot of these technologies will be coming through in the 2020s. "We're not saying that doctors are going to be replaced overnight, we're not even saying in the 2020s, but we are saying that the practical impact of artificial intelligence research coming out of research laboratories is remarkable.

In statistical relational learning, the link prediction problem is key to automatically understand the structure of large knowledge bases. As in previous studies, we propose to solve this problem through latent factorization. However, here we make use of complex valued embeddings. The composition of complex embeddings can handle a large variety of binary relations, among them symmetric and antisymmetric relations. Compared to state-of-the-art models such as Neural Tensor Network and Holographic Embeddings, our approach based on complex embeddings is arguably simpler, as it only uses the Hermitian dot product, the complex counterpart of the standard dot product between real vectors. Our approach is scalable to large datasets as it remains linear in both space and time, while consistently outperforming alternative approaches on standard link prediction benchmarks.

We've noticed a lot of talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) among online marketplaces, including eBay (eBay CEO Devin Wenig said AI technology will render the search box redundant), Alibaba (invested in Twiggle), and Amazon (CEO Jeff Bezos said we're at the beginning of a golden age of AI). According to Facebook's detailed post published on Wednesday, June 1, DeepText is a deep-learning artificial intelligence system that is able to understand the content of several thousand posts per second. The system will also be able to filter out malicious, hateful, or hurtful speech on the social network, along with photos that contravene Facebook's policies. Published By: Eunice Gettys on June 5, 2016 08:37 am EST Microsoft Corporation ( NASDAQ:MSFT) announced back in March that Windows 10 had exceeded 300 million active users, calculating from when the operating system was launched in mid-2015, making it the company's most successful operating system ever. Here are five things in technology that happened this past week and how they affect your business.

In an effort to take a lead in artificial intelligence, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has established a new AI research group in Europe. Based in Zurich, Switzerland, the group will mainly focus on making machines learn and understand the way humans do. Google, in one of its official blogs, mentions that the largest Google research facility outside the US is already in Zurich. It is the same research facility that came up with the conversation engine for Allo, Google's smart chat software. Adding a separate artificial intelligence division to it means Google has something cooking. According to Google's announcement, the research will follow three aspects: Machine intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Understanding, and Machine Perception.

IBM delivers cognitive computing to healthcare and weather forecasting. Google launches a new machine learning research center. GE uses machine learning to restore a power plant in Northern Italy. Microsoft acquires one of the big contributors to big data open source software. Those are the highlights of this week's Big Data Roundup.

Where does true power reside? Is it waving at you from a stage-lit, Presidentially-sealed podium? Or tucked away inside a billionaire's wallet? Can you smell it in a mahogany-clad clubroom at Yale in the smoke of a Bonesman's cigar, or catch a glimpse of its dark feathers perching on the advisory council of a transnational bank? One thing we know for sure: the nature and location of power is changing, and the agents of that change are the Californian technology companies that have the taken the 21st century by the throat.

Robots have already invaded the operating room in some hospitals, but in Belgium they will soon be taking on the potentially more difficult task -- for robots, at least -- of greeting patients and giving them directions. The Citadelle regional hospital in Liège and the Damiaan general hospital in Ostend will be working with Zora Robotics to test patients' reactions to robot receptionists in the coming months. Zora already has experience programming the diminutive humanoid robot Nao to act as a chatty companion for the elderly, offering it as a form of therapy for those with dementia. Now the Belgian company is working with Nao's newer, bigger sibling, Pepper. Both were developed by French robotics company Aldebaran, now owned by Japanese Internet conglomerate SoftBank.