Harold Cohen, artist and pioneer in the field of computer-generated art, died on April 27, 2016 at the age of 87. Cohen is the author of AARON, perhaps the longest-lived and certainly the most creative artificial intelligence program in daily use. Cohen viewed AARON as his collaborator. At times during their decades-long relationship, AARON was quite autonomous, responsible for the composition, coloring and other aspects of a work; more recently, AARON served Cohen by making drawings that Cohen would develop into paintings. Cohen's death is the end of a lengthy partnership between an artist and an artificial intelligence.

It's no secret that quantum computers could render many of today's encryption methods useless, and now the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology wants the public to help it head off that threat. The federal agency recently published a report focusing on cryptography in a quantum world that outlines a long-term approach for avoiding the problem before it happens. "There has been a lot of research into quantum computers in recent years, and everyone from major computer companies to the government want their cryptographic algorithms to be what we call'quantum resistant,'" said NIST mathematician Dustin Moody. "So if and when someone does build a large-scale quantum computer, we want to have algorithms in place that it can't crack." Encryption often relies on the challenge of factoring large numbers to ensure security, but researchers at MIT and the University of Innsbruck in Austria recently demonstrated what they said is the first five-atom quantum computer capable of cracking such encryption schemes.

It's not only drones and driverless cars that may become the norm someday -- ocean-faring ships might also run without captains or crews. The Pentagon on Monday showed off the world's largest unmanned surface vessel, a self-driving 132-foot ship able to travel up to 10,000 nautical miles on its own to hunt for stealthy submarines and underwater mines. The military's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, in conjunction with the Navy will be testing the ship off the San Diego coast over the next two years to observe how it interacts with other vessels and avoids collisions. Unlike smaller, remote-controlled craft launched from ships, the so-called "Sea Hunter" is built to operate on its own. "It's not a joy-stick ship," said DARPA spokesman Jared B. Adams, standing in front of the sleek, futuristic-looking steel-gray vessel docked at a maritime terminal in the heart of San Diego's shipbuilding district, where TV crews filmed the robotic craft.

Neuroimaging research has predominantly drawn conclusions based on classical statistics, including null-hypothesis testing, t-tests, and ANOVA. Throughout recent years, statistical learning methods enjoy increasing popularity, including cross-validation, pattern classification, and sparsity-inducing regression. These two methodological families used for neuroimaging data analysis can be viewed as two extremes of a continuum. Yet, they originated from different historical contexts, build on different theories, rest on different assumptions, evaluate different outcome metrics, and permit different conclusions. This paper portrays commonalities and differences between classical statistics and statistical learning with their relation to neuroimaging research. The conceptual implications are illustrated in three common analysis scenarios. It is thus tried to resolve possible confusion between classical hypothesis testing and data-guided model estimation by discussing their ramifications for the neuroimaging access to neurobiology.

It's not only drones and driverless cars that may become the norm someday -- ocean-faring ships might also run without captains or crews. The Pentagon on Monday showed off the world's largest unmanned surface vessel, a self-driving 132-foot ship able to travel up to 10,000 nautical miles on its own to hunt for stealthy submarines and underwater mines. The military's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, in conjunction with the Navy will be testing the ship off the San Diego coast over the next two years to observe how it interacts with other vessels and avoids collisions. Unlike smaller, remote-controlled craft launched from ships, the so-called "Sea Hunter" is built to operate on its own. "It's not a joy-stick ship," said DARPA spokesman Jared B. Adams, standing in front of the sleek, futuristic-looking steel-gray vessel docked at a maritime terminal in the heart of San Diego's shipbuilding district, where TV crews filmed the robotic craft.

RE•WORK will host it's annual East Coast events on Deep Learning and the Internet of Things in Boston on 12 & 13 May. Over 300 machine learning and IoT enthusiasts and experts will come together to hear keynote presentations, panel discussions, fireside chats and to explore the startup showcase area. The Deep Learning Summit brings together leaders from industry, academia and startups to explore advances in deep learning methods and techniques, as well as their business applications in areas including finance, manufacturing, healthcare & transportation. The Connected Home Summit is the fifth installment in RE•WORK's Internet of Things series, following the Connected City Summit held in London earlier in 2016 and previous IoT Summits in San Francisco, London and Boston as well as dinners and meetups in 2015. The Summits are a unique opportunity to meet and interact with CTOs, founders, data scientists, engineers, designers and industry experts leading the connected home and deep learning revolutions.

It provides an agnostic introduction to operational ML with open source and cloud platforms. It is the first ML workshop to go all the way from data preparation to the integration of predictive models in real-world applications and their deployment in production. Participants will learn to use Python open source libraries scikit-learn, Pandas and SKLL, and cloud platforms Microsoft Azure ML, Amazon ML, BigML and Indico (along with their APIs).

In warehouses, hospitals and retail stores, and on city streets, industrial parks and the footpaths of college campuses, the first representatives of this new invading force are starting to become apparent. "The robots are among us," says Steve Jurvetson, a Silicon Valley investor and a director at Elon Musk's Tesla and SpaceX companies, which have relied heavily on robotics. A multitude of machines will follow, he says: "A lot of people are going to come in contact with robots in the next two to five years." The arrival of the robots -- and their potentially devastating effect on human employment -- has been widely predicted. Now, the machines are starting to roll or walk out of the labs.

A new app that uses a neural network combined with facial recognition software to help put names to faces in random photographs by scanning social network data is being used in Russia to identify and harass young women who have previously appeared in pornographic films. Trinity Digital, an app developer in Russia, released a free iOS and Android app called FindFace in February that enables people to identify people by taking a random photograph and using its neural network to figure out the person's name, location, occupation and other details. A neural network is a huge network of computers that are trained using computer algorithms to solve complex problems quickly, as well as improving artificial intelligence by gaining a deeper recognition and understanding of art and the world around us. On 9 April, members of a disreputable imageboard called Dvach, which is like the Russian cousin of 4chan, launched a campaign to deliberately try to locate and identify actresses who appear in pornography, as well as women listed on Intimcity, a Russian website advertising prostitution and escort services. Using FindFace, the Dvach users not only identified the women, but they also shared archived copies of their profiles on Vkontakte (the Russian version of Facebook) publicly online and repeatedly spammed the families of the women letting them know that they had been outed as porn stars and prostitutes.

SAN DIEGO – The U.S. military is beginning tests of the world's largest unmanned surface vessel -- a self-driving, 132-foot (40-meter) ship designed to travel thousands of miles (kilometers) at sea without a single crew member on board. The so-called Sea Hunter has the potential to revolutionize not only the military's maritime operations but commercial shipping, according to military officials. Military officials showed off the ship in San Diego on Monday before it set sail to a nearby naval base where the testing will be conducted. The sleek, futuristic-looking steel-gray vessel was docked at a maritime terminal in the heart of San Diego's shipbuilding district, where TV crews filmed the robotic craft. No media access was given to the inside of the vessel.