For too long, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has existed inside a heavily shielded bubble, one in which game makers target retailers and journalists with carefully controlled messages designed to stoke the imagination of the most dedicated of game players. And what have those players wanted? Indeed, at the pre-conference events ahead of the Tuesday start of this year's E3, it seemed at first that nothing had changed. At L.A. Live on Sunday afternoon, Electronic Arts offered insiders a look at a sequel to "Titanfall," a military-esque shooter featuring giant robots, as well as the gritty, World War I-set "Battlefield I." Then Monday morning at Microsoft's bonanza at USC's Galen Center, cheers erupted during a demo of the latest "Gears of War" when a woman used a gun to obliterate an already downed creature. These sorts of displays do little to debunk age-old stereotypes about games and those who play them.

Analysts are saying that Apple's upcoming updates to its Siri voice assistant should help the company address criticisms that it can't compete on artificial intelligence. Apple is now opening Siri to apps made by other companies, and like Google and Microsoft, it's bringing the digital assistant to desktop and laptop computers. It's also making Siri smarter by using what Apple calls differential privacy. Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy explains it as Apple using non-personal information in aggregate to teach Siri new tricks, then having all the personalization take place on the individual device. It's in contrast to Google's approach of doing everything over the internet -- that is, in the "cloud."

Two Belgian hospitals have added an innovative staff member to their reception desks: humanoid robots called Pepper. The robots took up assistant reception duties at hospitals in Ostend and Liege on Monday.. Related: Man v machine: can computers cook, write and paint better than us? The humanoid assistant, which has a screen on his chest and a round head, is the first robot in the world to be used to greet people in a medical setting, his software creators said. Standing 140cm (4ft 7in) tall and equipped with wheels under his white frame, Pepper can recognise the human voice in 20 languages and detect if he is talking to a man, woman or child. In Liege the robot helper, who costs about 30,000 ( 23,000), will for the moment remain in the hospital's reception area. But at the AZ Damiaan hospital in Ostend, he can accompany visitors to the department they are looking for, said Raphaël Tassart of the Belgian firm Zora Bots which developed the software inside his robot brain.

Nuclear energy provides electricity for a large segment of the global population, but it has one Achilles' heel that remains to be adequately addressed: the waste. According to a report from Business Standard, however, scientists from the DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have made a breakthrough finding that could lead to a viable solution to this lingering problem. A team of scientists has developed a new material that can clean up nuclear waste gases created as a byproduct of fuel reprocessing plants. The researchers say the material allows for the efficient, safe and cheap disposal of harmful byproducts of generating nuclear energy. The study was carried out by an international team based in Switzerland at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL).

This natural paradigm extends the Bayesian framework to dimensionality reduction tasks in higher dimensions with simpler models at greater speeds. Here an orthogonal basis is treated as a single point on a manifold and is associated with a linear subspace on which observations vary maximally. Throughout this paper, we employ the Grassmann and Stiefel manifolds for various dimensionality reduction problems, explore the connection between the two manifolds, and use Hybrid Monte Carlo for posterior sampling on the Grassmannian for the first time. We delineate in which situations either manifold should be considered. Further, matrix manifold models are used to yield scientific insight in the context of cognitive neuroscience, and we conclude that our methods are suitable for basic inference as well as accurate prediction. All datasets and computer programs are publicly available at http://www.ics.uci.edu/

The choice of approximate posterior distribution is one of the core problems in variational inference. Most applications of variational inference employ simple families of posterior approximations in order to allow for efficient inference, focusing on mean-field or other simple structured approximations. This restriction has a significant impact on the quality of inferences made using variational methods. We introduce a new approach for specifying flexible, arbitrarily complex and scalable approximate posterior distributions. Our approximations are distributions constructed through a normalizing flow, whereby a simple initial density is transformed into a more complex one by applying a sequence of invertible transformations until a desired level of complexity is attained. We use this view of normalizing flows to develop categories of finite and infinitesimal flows and provide a unified view of approaches for constructing rich posterior approximations. We demonstrate that the theoretical advantages of having posteriors that better match the true posterior, combined with the scalability of amortized variational approaches, provides a clear improvement in performance and applicability of variational inference.

Approximate variational inference has shown to be a powerful tool for modeling unknown complex probability distributions. Recent advances in the field allow us to learn probabilistic models of sequences that actively exploit spatial and temporal structure. We apply a Stochastic Recurrent Network (STORN) to learn robot time series data. Our evaluation demonstrates that we can robustly detect anomalies both off- and on-line.

Virtual personal assistants can do just about everything: They can help a person order things online, turn the lights on and off, or play music from a favorite playlist. A new personal assistant is joining the abundance of time-management tools out there, using artificial intelligence to help developers tackle the problems of managing their time and scheduling everything so their day can be fulfilling. The virtual assistant's name is Trevor AI, and it's an app that is available today in the App Store. Development for Android will begin as soon as the app secures funding, which should happen in the next two months. The project for Trevor AI started when founder George Petrov, a business and computer software expert, brought his raw idea to the Founder Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria in December 2015.

WHERE: PRIME and French Tech Hub office 2415 Third Street, Suite 231, San Francisco, CA 94107 Free parking in adjacent streets or metered parking at 901 Illinois Street (Closes at 9:00 PM). We are still looking for innovative startups to pitch during this event. If you have developed products or services that fit within the scope of this techmeeting, and you would like to pitch at the event, please tell us more. The Open Innovation Club aims to foster Open Innovation between all stakeholders involved in the innovation ecosystem: large companies, start-ups, research labs, and universities. Corporate members of the Open Innovation Club collaborate to identify new solutions, access a large pool of innovators, start-ups and ressources in the U.S and France, and accelerate the innovation - adoption - integration continuum.

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