Robotics company Boston Dynamics released a new video showcasing its upgraded Atlas robot, and the footage features a slew of impressive (and somewhat unsettling) new capabilities. The humanoid Atlas robot, which has been overhauled with a sleeker design, can be seen at the beginning of the video walking around untethered before it opens the front door to Boston Dynamics' office and steps outside. The bot is then seen walking on uneven and snowy terrain, maneuvering around trees and correcting its balance several times. The new-and-improved robot is "designed to operate outdoors and inside buildings," Boston Dynamics wrote in a description of the video posted on YouTube. "It is specialized for mobile manipulation. It is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated. It uses sensors in its body and legs to balance and LIDAR and stereo sensors in its head to avoid obstacles, assess the terrain, help with navigation and manipulate objects."

We may have reached an inflection point. The problem space of chess is so astonishingly large that incremental increases in hardware speed and algorithms are unlikely to result in meaningful gains from here on out. Turns out I was kinda … totally completely wrong. The number of possible moves, or "problem space", of Chess is indeed astonishingly large, estimated to be 1050: Deep Blue was interesting because it forecast a particular kind of future, a future where specialized hardware enabled brute force attack of the enormous chess problem space, as its purpose built chess hardware outperformed general purpose CPUs of the day by many orders of magnitude. In the heady days of 1997, Deep Blue could evaluate 200 million chess positions per second.

Google's artificial intelligence (AI) ethics board, established when Google acquired London AI startup DeepMind in 2014, remains one of the biggest mysteries in tech, with both Google and DeepMind refusing to reveal who sits on it. Google set up the board at DeepMind's request after the cofounders of the 400 million research-intensive AI lab said they would only agree to the acquisition if Google promised to look into the ethics of the technology it was buying into. Business Insider asked Google once again who is on its AI ethics board and what they do but it declined to comment. A number of AI experts told Business Insider that it's important to have an open debate about the ethics of AI given the potential impact it's going to have on all of our lives. Artificial intelligence is the field of building computer systems that understand and learn from observations without the need to be explicitly programmed, as defined by Nathan Benaich, an AI investor at venture capital firm Playfair Capital.

Teams representing the University of California, Berkeley and Arizona State compete in the Grand Final of last year's Heroes of the Dorm tournament at the Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles. By the end of this week, four teams will advance to determine a champion after an intense multi-week competition. Their names will look familiar -- UConn, Miami and Oregon -- and monetary stakes are high, to the tune of 500,000. They're battling with video game controllers in the growing arena of competitive video gaming, whose increasing popularity has attracted the attention of big names in tech and media, from Electronic Arts to ESPN to Yahoo, as they see a growing audience eager to learn about the competitive scene and engage more in games at the center of its rise. 'We have the early markers of what will ultimately make eSports mainstream," says Joost van Dreunen, CEO of SuperData Research, which gathers data on the global games market. But it could require a generational shift before competitive video gaming -- known to many as "eSports" -- formally becomes mainstream entertainment. On April 3, the "Heroic Four" will be determined in Heroes of the Dorm, a competitive video game tournament hosted by Blizzard Entertainment, based on its action game Heroes of the Storm. For the second year, teams representing colleges from across the U.S., including the University of Connecticut and Arizona State University, are playing for glory and more than 500,000 in scholarships and prizes, including a free ride through school for the winning team. Fans watch the action online on ESPN, Twitch and YouTube, and they can even join tournament pools, where the winner with the most accurate bracket snags 10,000. It's the latest example of competitive video gaming's increased following, as younger fans gravitate towardeSports. The market is valued at 747 million, according to SuperData, and is expected to more than double to 1.9 billion in three years. The rising audience -- SuperData estimates it at 134 million as of last year -- is pushing video game publishers and cable networks to create competitive video game experiences and explore broadcasting options. The eSports market is young. Whalen Rozelle, Director of eSports at Riot Games -- makers of the hit competitive game League of Legends -- says it's still in "our pre-teen phase," with plenty of room to grow. "The industry still hasn't really figured out'is every game an eSport?

The nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is widely used in signal and image processing, including bio-informatics, blind source separation and hyperspectral image analysis in remote sensing. A great challenge arises when dealing with a nonlinear formulation of the NMF. Within the framework of kernel machines, the models suggested in the literature do not allow the representation of the factorization matrices, which is a fallout of the curse of the pre-image. In this paper, we propose a novel kernel-based model for the NMF that does not suffer from the pre-image problem, by investigating the estimation of the factorization matrices directly in the input space. For different kernel functions, we describe two schemes for iterative algorithms: an additive update rule based on a gradient descent scheme and a multiplicative update rule in the same spirit as in the Lee and Seung algorithm. Within the proposed framework, we develop several extensions to incorporate constraints, including sparseness, smoothness, and spatial regularization with a total-variation-like penalty. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated with the problem of unmixing hyperspectral images, using well-known real images and results with state-of-the-art techniques.

It's been another busy week across the tech world, bringing some news that had been long-anticipated, and some surprises that were far from expected. With the weekend upon us again, 7 Days is here once more to bring you up to speed on what you may have missed, so get comfy, and let's crack on… We begin this week with bad news for owners of most BlackBerry devices. Facebook has revealed that it will end access to certain APIs on BB OS 7.1 and BlackBerry 10, which means that the next Facebook update for BlackBerry will lose several major features. On Wednesday, Google announced its plans to launch Android Pay in the UK "in the coming months", but while numerous major financial institutions and retailers are onboard, two of the country's'Big Four' banking groups – Barclays and RBS, which includes NatWest – haven't signed up. We've known for a while that the next version of Android would include split-screen multitasking support.

How many times a day do we ourselves, or hear someone else, utter the phrase "Google it"? It's hard to imagine that a phrase so ubiquitous and universally understood has been around for less than two decades. The word "Google" has become synonymous with online search, and when we think about why this, it's because Google yields the most relevant, comprehensive results, quickly. Essentially, it has changed the way we find and interact with content and information. We've seen the cultural effect Google has had on search and discovery on a broad level, but consider the implications for online media and publishing organizations interested in honing these same powerful search and discovery capabilities, a process referred to as dynamic semantic publishing.

YOU ARE MY SEDUCTIVE SYMPATHY. This was one of a number of enigmatic notes pinned to the computing department noticeboard at the University of Manchester, UK, back in August 1953. There was no great mystery about "MUC", however: that could only be "Manchester University Computer", the world's first commercial programmable electronic computer. Designed to work on atomic bombs, X-ray crystallography and other serious science, what business had this Ferranti Mark 1 writing love letters? The answer, of course, was a gifted, under-occupied programmer.

A new 300-page research report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Robot Revolution – Global Robot & AI Primer, and to a lesser extent BSG's report: Man and Machine in Industry 4.0, make for interesting reading and highlight the role of AI and the changing nature of jobs and work in the exponential growth of the robotics industry. "We are facing a paradigm shift which will change the way we live and work," the authors of the BoA ML report said. "The pace of disruptive technological innovation has gone from linear to parabolic in recent years. Penetration of robots and artificial intelligence has hit every industry sector, and has become an integral part of our daily lives." BoA ML report projects that the total global market for robots and artificial intelligence will reach 152.7 billion by 2020, and estimates that the adoption of these technologies could improve productivity by 30% in some industries.

New lip-reading technology developed at the University of East Anglia could help in solving crimes and provide communication assistance for people with hearing and speech impairments. The visual speech recognition technology, created by Helen L. Bear, PhD, and Prof Richard Harvey of UEA's School of Computing Sciences, can be applied "any place where the audio isn't good enough to determine what people are saying," Bear said. Those include criminal investigations, entertainment, and especially where are there are high levels of noise, such as in cars or aircraft cockpits, she said. Bear said unique problems with determining speech arise when sound isn't available -- such as on video footage -- or if the audio is inadequate and there aren't clues to give the context of a conversation. The sounds '/p/,' '/b/,' and '/m/' all look similar on the lips, but now the machine lip-reading classification technology can differentiate between the sounds for a more accurate translation.