Overexploitation of the world's fish stocks is growing at an alarming rate, says the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Nearly 90% are either at or exceeding sustainable capacity, and in less than 10 years, production is set to grow by 17%. One of the keys to sustainable fisheries has been the employ of human monitors to watch what is being scooped up from the sea. In the United States, fishing boats are routinely accompanied by independent observers who track compliance with fishing regulations. In other countries' waters, it's a whole different story, so those government and independent agencies hoping to halt overfishing are turning to some of the same digital tools that let social media sites recognize faces in photos.

A third of the way through a 20-day man vs. machine poker tournament, the artificial intelligence system has the hot hand. As of Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. ET, the humans and the A.I. system, dubbed Libratus, had already played more than 34,000 hands with about 120,000 hands likely by the end of the tournament. The "Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante" tournament kicked off Jan. 11 at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh. During the tournament, poker pros Jason Les, Dong Kim, Daniel McAulay and Jimmy Chou are playing Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em against Libratus. Libratus pulled ahead early, leading by a little more than $74,000 on the first day of play and by more than twice amount by Day 2. "This is quite nice given that in advance of the event the international betting sites considered us a 4:1 or 5:1 underdog," wrote Tuomas Sandholm, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and lead developer on the Libratus system, in an email to Computerworld.

January 18, 2017 --Barren circles dot the dry grasslands across about 1,500 miles of the Namib Desert stretching down the southwestern coast of Africa, emerging, growing, shrinking, and disappearing in lifetimes of 30 to 60 years. The empty patches are accentuated by a rim of particularly tall grasses that ring the circles, which range from 6 feet to 115 feet wide. The fairy circles, as the strange bare soil spots are called, have long puzzled scientists. Although they look a bit like imprints left by massive raindrops, impacting meteors, or as legend would have it, the feet of gods, researchers suspect the pattern may form as a result of a more systematic natural process. But just what that process might be has been the subject of much debate.

Businesses that have adopted artificial intelligence (AI) technologies expect their revenues to increase by 39% and costs to drop by 37% by 2020, according to research, and 64% say their future growth depends on large-scale AI adoption. This email address is already registered. By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent. By submitting your personal information, you agree that TechTarget and its partners may contact you regarding relevant content, products and special offers. You also agree that your personal information may be transferred and processed in the United States, and that you have read and agree to the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy.

A pioneer in machine learning from the University of Alberta is teaming up with the Royal Bank of Canada on artificial intelligence research. Richard Sutton, a professor at the school's department of computer science and a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, will advise the bank's machine learning research division and collaborate with RBC's second AI research lab, to be located in Edmonton. Sutton specializes in the same branch of machine learning that Google's AlphaGo computer program used, in part, to beat one of the highest-ranking professional players of the board game Go -- until recently, a notoriously difficult game for computers to play. The announcement is the latest in a string of AI-related partnerships, acquisitions and investments that have been struck in Canada in recent months -- the most high-profile of which have involved Facebook and Google, which have been in a fierce competition for access to talent. For over three decades, Sutton has specialized in reinforcement learning. In this branch of machine learning, an algorithm is designed to receive either a reward or penalty based on its behaviour, and learns to make choices that will result in the most reward -- and, hopefully, most desired behaviour -- over time.

An octopus likes to be wined and dined during sex. A study looking at the larger Pacific striped octopus shows that, unlike most octopuses, the male and female face each other when mating – a pose that may allow them to feed together at the same time (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134152). Now glasses can hide you from prying eyes. A team at Japan's National Institute of Informatics has developed a pair of glasses whose patterning foils face recognition software. The Privacy Visor is expected to go on sale in June 2016 for about $240.

It is vital to the economy that Australia embraces innovation, according to Andrew Penn, with the Telstra CEO saying Australia should mimic the telecommunications company's strategy of combining incubation and collaboration with building human skills and developing new technologies. Speaking at the Charles Todd Oration 2015 in Sydney on Thursday, Penn outlined the three drivers of innovation as being a combination of the move to mobile and consequently the Internet of Things (IoT); the widespread usage of cloud computing; and the rise of machine-to-machine (M2M) learning and artificial intelligence. "The exponential growth in data, driven by a massive shift to mobile and the Internet of Things with the ability to store and access that data in the cloud in real-time and the computing power with advanced algorithms and machine learning -- these factors together are providing the capacity to solve almost limitless problems," the CEO said. Citing a recent Deloitte report, Penn claimed that the digital sector contributed AU$79 billion in 2014 -- or 5.1 percent of the GDP -- making it the largest segment of the Australian economy. He said that the rapidity of technological innovation has had far-reaching implications for traditional business, however.

Suppose you could discern market trends, speed up time to see where those trends were going, then bet on what you discovered. Geeks in suits are doing that today. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. I was sitting on a sofa in the guru's office. I trekked to this high mountain outpost a couple of years ago to arrive at one of the planet's power points, the national research labs at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The guru's office was decorated with colorful posters of past conferences that traced the almost mythical career of this high-tech legend: from a maverick physics student who formed an underground band of hippie hackers to break the bank at Las Vegas with a wearable computer, to a principal character in a renegade band of scientists who invented the accelerating science of chaos by studying a dripping faucet, to a founding father of the artificial life movement, to the head of a small lab investigating the new science of complexity in an office kitty-corner to the museum of atomic weapons at Los Alamos -- the office I had trekked to. The guru, Doyne Farmer, looked like Ichabod Crane in a bolo tie. Tall, bony, probably thirty-something, Doyne (pronounced Doan) was about to embark on his next remarkable adventure. He was starting a company to beat the odds on Wall Street by predicting stock prices with computer simu-lations. He was going to hack the global economy. Money is just a type of information, a pattern that, once digitized, becomes subject to persistent programmatic hacking by the mathematically skilled. As the information of money swishes around the planet, it leaves in its wake a history of its flow, and if any of that complex flow can be anticipated, then the hacker who cracks the pattern will become a rich hacker. Some sort of financial hacking has been around as long as computers.

Every few decades, a pandemic flu variant emerges that not only infects humans but also passes rapidly from person to person. The H7N9 avian flu virus that infected more than 130 people in China this spring, primarily from close contact with poultry, hasn't yet become highly contagious among people. But given that humans lack the antibodies to combat the virus, its high lethality rate (44 of the infected died), and the possibility that it could resurface this fall or winter, scientists and public health officials are racing to unravel its mysteries. Recent studies of H7N9 show that it can pass among ferrets, which are often used to model human flu transmission. If the virus gains the ability to spread easily among people, it has the potential to be deadlier than the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic, which may have been responsible for more than 200,000 deaths worldwide. Researchers like Raul Rabadan, a theoretical physicist working in biology at Columbia University, want to understand how viruses that ordinarily infect birds or pigs suddenly jump to humans and then become easily transmissible: "What are the specific mutations that contribute to a virus becoming a human pathogen?" he explained.

Three college kids in Australia have built an autonomous vehicle controlled by a smartphone. To be fair, calling it a "vehicle" is a bit of a stretch. What Tommi Sullivan, Michael Lennon, and Yukito Tsunoda have made at Griffith University in Queensland is the coolest freaking Power Wheels you've ever seen. They used the same four-wheeled plastic toy we drove as toddlers and an Android smartphone to create a fully-functional autonomous "car" that took home the 2013 Queensland iAwards in Brisbane. "A normal unmanned vehicle would usually use a camera or a different sensor or a Ladar [sic] on the top," said Sullivan, who's working on his bachelor's degree in information technology.