We present a principled way of extending a classical AI planning formalism with systems of state constraints, which relate - sometimes determine - the values of variables in each state traversed by the plan. This extension occupies an attractive middle ground between expressivity and complexity. It enables modelling a new range of problems, as well as formulating more efficient models of classical planning problems. An example of the former is planning-based control of networked physical systems - power networks, for example - in which a local, discrete control action can have global effects on continuous quantities, such as altering flows across the entire network. At the same time, our extension remains decidable as long as the satisfiability of sets of state constraints is decidable, including in the presence of numeric state variables, and we demonstrate that effective techniques for cost-optimal planning known in the classical setting - in particular, relaxation-based admissible heuristics - can be adapted to the extended formalism. In this paper, we apply our approach to constraints in the form of linear or non-linear equations over numeric state variables, but the approach is independent of the type of state constraints, as long as there exists a procedure that decides their consistency. The planner and the constraint solver interact through a well-defined, narrow interface, in which the solver requires no specialisation to the planning context.

A second-hand SpaceX rocket has blasted off to the International Space Station, carrying a robot with artificial intelligence and other station supplies. The shipment – packed into a Dragon capsule that is also recycled – should reach the station on Monday. This marked SpaceX's fastest reflight of a rocket booster. The same first-stage booster launched the planet-hunting TESS satellite in April, while the capsule flew in 2016. The Dragon will deliver the robot Cimon, which stands for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion and is pronounced Simon.

Posted By C. M. Rubin on Jun 11, 2018 "Through rapid genetic sequencing, scientists can identify many different strains of Borrelia burgdorferi as well as new tick-borne microbial infections, such as Borrelia miyamotoi, Borrelia mayonii, and the Heartland virus." Most likely, you or someone you know has been affected by Lyme disease, the most common tick-borne illness in the US with more than 300,000 cases diagnosed each year. In a timely new book, Conquering Lyme Disease (Columbia University Press), Columbia University Medical Center physicians Brian A. Fallon and Jennifer Sotsky reveal that despite the challenges to find a cure for this complex, debilitating disease, precision medicine and biotechnology are accelerating the discovery of new tools with which doctors will be able to diagnose it and treat patients. Could groundbreaking technologies that rapidly increase our understanding and open up new pathways mean a cure for Lyme disease one day soon? The Global Search for Education is pleased to welcome Dr. Brian Fallon to find out how tech is tackling the ticks.

Suppose you could merely imagine a computation, and a digital prostheses, an extension of your biological brain, would turn it into code that instantly realizes what you had in mind. Imagine looking at an image, dataset or set of equations and wanting to analyze and explore its meaning as an artistic whim or part of a scientific investigation. I don't mean you would use an existing software suite to produce a standard visualization, but rather you would make use of an extensive repository of existing code to assemble a new program analogous to how a composer draws upon a repertoire of musical motifs, themes and styles to construct new works, and tantamount to having a talented musical amanuensis who, in addition to copying your scores, takes liberties with your prior work, making small alterations here and there and occasionally adding new works of its own invention, novel but consistent with your taste and sensibilities. Perhaps the interaction would be wordless and you would express your objective by simply focusing your attention and guiding your imagination, the prostheses operating directly on patterns of activation arising in your primary sensory, proprioceptive and associative cortex that have become part of an extensive vocabulary that you now share with your personal digital amanuensis. Or perhaps it would involve a conversation conducted in subvocal, unarticulated speech in which you specify what it is you want to compute and your assistant asks questions to clarify your intention and the two of you share examples of input and output to ground your internal conversation in concrete terms. More than thirty years ago, Charles Rich and Richard Waters published an MIT AI Lab technical report [68] entitled The Programmer's Apprentice: A Research Overview. Whether they intended it or not, it would have been easy in those days for someone to misremember the title and inadvertently refer to it as "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" since computer programmers at the time were often characterized as wizards and most children were familiar with the Walt Disney movie Fantasia, featuring music written by Paul Dukas inspired by Goethe's poem of the same name

"That will be our differentiator," said Tan. "Anyone can build a transaction platform." Currently, the Singapore-based company is available only to business customers, but says it will roll out to residential consumers from Fall 2018, in line with the liberalization of Singapore's retail energy market. The company then plans to expand to Japan and Australia, where there are many power-generating households that Tan said will benefit from the sharing model by selling their excess power to other homes. It's a model that has investors interested, too: Electrify said it raised $30 million in an initial coin offering in March. According to industry analyst Mark Hutchinson, that could be a sign of growing demand for energy disruptors. But, as ever, that will likely mean leaving some traditional players behind.

"Predatory" payments in hugely popular computer games like Fortnite and Hearthstone are equivalent to gambling but are unregulated and could lead young people to addiction and financial difficulty, experts are warning. In the wake of gaming addiction being recognised by the World Health Organisation, psychologists have drawn attention to what they describe as the "increasing similarity of gaming and gambling" in what has rapidly grown into a multi-billion-pound entertainment sector. They single out a type of in-game micropayment known as "loot boxes", where players buy a random reward, potentially including rare characters or powerful weapons. In an editorial published on Thursday in the journal Addiction, Dr Daniel King and Professor Paul Delfabbro, of the University of Adelaide, said: "These schemes may entice some players with access to credit cards to spend more money than they can afford." Younger players in particular are "less equipped" to reign in their spending, the pair warned. In Fortnite, the wildly popular survival shoot-'em-up which has a free to play version, players can access a campaign to play alongside friends and use the game's "V-Buck" currency to buy quirky llama loot piñatas, which give a random reward. Coins can be bought with real money or won more slowly through the game. More expensive llamas, such as the Legendary Troll Loot Truck Lllama, cost at least £10 in V-bucks but include 20 items.

Each day, Mark Koh and his team at Kuala Lumpur-based data training & content moderation company Supahands help their clients test the limits of the question'how much data is too much data?' Data drives innovation, but it is only valuable if it is assigned a purpose, and it is only usable if it is organized to serve that purpose. As companies continue to move toward digitization and automation, and more data is at their disposal than ever before, the amount of data requiring cleaning, tagging, and categorizing has exploded. Amazon and Google are two examples of companies that have set themselves apart through data-driven innovation, but many organizations don't have the scale, time or expertise to understand and make use of their data with the speed and accuracy needed to take full advantage of it. That's where Supahands comes in. Headquartered amidst the hustle-and-bustle and congestion of Malaysia's capital city, the Supahands team aims to create a less polluted data universe.

Google devices and apps have experienced serious outages that lasted for more than 12 hours and affected millions of users. The issue affected Google Home and Google Home Mini – speakers that respond to voice commands – as well as Chromecast – a device that plugs into a television and allows people to watch video content. Users were angry at both the length of the outage and the lack of information from Google about it, once it had been identified. Google has not given a reason why these devices went down, only apologising for the service problems and identifying a fix for the issues. The bug meant that when some Google Home owners asked a question of their speaker, it responded: "There was a glitch, try again in a few seconds." If they tried to reset the device, it would sometimes fail to reboot.

This year also marks the Convention's 10th anniversary. As the artificial intelligence (AI) era inexorably unfolds across every dimension of our life, the principles enshrined in these two human rights documents can steer this great innovation in a direction that will benefit all humanity. It is essential that society reflects upon these documents and the opportunities – and some possible challenges – that AI presents to human rights, dignity and the advancement of society. "The Convention (on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities)… takes to a new height the movement from viewing persons with disabilities as'objects' of charity, medical treatment and social protection towards viewing persons with disabilities as'subjects' with rights, who are capable of claiming those rights and making decisions for their lives based on their free and informed consent as well as being active members of society..." The impact of technology innovation on inclusion and accessibility is well known: humans have always sought to augment their own capabilities. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is remarkable drafting and deeply perceptive, because it pushes innovation into the realms of each person's individual expression of our shared humanity.

We describe the multi-GPU gradient boosting algorithm implemented in the XGBoost library (https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost). Our algorithm allows fast, scalable training on multi-GPU systems with all of the features of the XGBoost library. We employ data compression techniques to minimise the usage of scarce GPU memory while still allowing highly efficient implementation. Using our algorithm we show that it is possible to process 115 million training instances in under three minutes on a publicly available cloud computing instance. The algorithm is implemented using end-to-end GPU parallelism, with prediction, gradient calculation, feature quantisation, decision tree construction and evaluation phases all computed on device.