Melbourne researchers have developed a robotic arm to send signals to the brain that could enable amputees to regain a sense of touch and increased movement to missing limbs. The joint project between St Vincent's Hospital's Aikenhead Centre for Medical Discovery and Melbourne University is looking at how arm and brain signals communicate. Two recent breakthroughs have seen researchers decode the complex signals the human brain uses to control movement, as well as discovering a way of passing messages directly from a brain to a mechanical arm. Research has been ongoing for several years, but scientists believe they are even closer to simulating a'normal' arm and to control the movement of a prosthetic limb in the same way they move a normal human arm and hand. They hope to breakthrough in the next couple of years as understanding of how the brain reads and interprets signals increases.

We introduce Bayesian Poisson Tucker decomposition (BPTD) for modeling country--country interaction event data. These data consist of interaction events of the form "country $i$ took action $a$ toward country $j$ at time $t$." BPTD discovers overlapping country--community memberships, including the number of latent communities. In addition, it discovers directed community--community interaction networks that are specific to "topics" of action types and temporal "regimes." We show that BPTD yields an efficient MCMC inference algorithm and achieves better predictive performance than related models. We also demonstrate that it discovers interpretable latent structure that agrees with our knowledge of international relations.

I've been re-reading Frank Harrell's Regression Modelling Strategies, a must read for anyone who ever fits a regression model, although be prepared - depending on your background, you might get 30 pages in and suddenly become convinced you've been doing nearly everything wrong before, which can be disturbing. I wanted to evaluate three simple modelling strategies in dealing with data with many variables. Using data with 54 variables on 1,785 area units from New Zealand's 2013 census, I'm looking to predict median income on the basis of the other 53 variables. The features are all continuous and are variables like "mean number of bedrooms", "proportion of individuals with no religion" and "proportion of individuals who are smokers". None of these is exactly what I would use for real, but they serve the purpose of setting up a competition of strategies that I can test with a variety of model validation techniques.

Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species. From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things. 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. Ray and I were both speakers at George Gilder's Telecosm conference, and I encountered him by chance in the bar of the hotel after both our sessions were over. I was sitting with John Searle, a Berkeley philosopher who studies consciousness. While we were talking, Ray approached and a ...

Switzerland will become the first country in the world to hold a nationwide referendum on the introduction of a basic income on Sunday. The proposal, if passed, would give every adult legally resident in Switzerland an unconditional income of 2,500 Swiss francs ( 1,755; 2,554) a month, whether they work or not. Supporters point to the fact that 21st-Century work is increasingly automated, with more and more traditional jobs, in factories, retail and even in finance and accounting, being done by machines. And they do not need salaries. The campaign has staged some eyecatching demonstrations, including one in which hundreds of "robots" danced through the streets of Zurich, promising to "free" humans from the daily grind of Monday to Friday work, just to pay the bills. "The robots are saying'we don't want to grab your work and make you suffer'," said campaigner Che Wagner.

The overall goal is to target treatment specifically to each individual so that clinical outcomes for that individual are optimized. One direction of attack is to use patient data to discover decision rules which specify the treatment to use as a function of a vector of features from the patient. Regression and classification are important statistical tools for estimating such rules based on either observational data or data from a randomized trial, and machine learning can help with this because of its ability to artfully handle high dimensional feature spaces with potentially complex interactions.

Social media and interplanetary mission -- what do they have in common? Well, they have in common the Mars Orbiter Mission, also known as'Mangalyaan'. It was launched on 5th November by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). It generated a lot of interest across the globe among millions of people on Social Media networks. In this blog, we analyze how Twitterati reacted to this news. Asia was by far the most interested in the subject, covering 74% of all the tweets on'Mangalyaan'.

An Australian professor is developing a robot to monitor the health of grazing livestock, a development that could bring big changes to a profession that's relied largely on a low-tech approach for decades but is facing a labor shortage. Salah Sukkarieh, a robotics professor at the University of Sydney, sees robots as necessary given how cattlemen are aging. The average age of a farmer in Australia is 52, according to the Australian Farm Institute. Sukkarieh is building a four-wheeled robot that will run on solar and electric power. It will roam pastures alongside livestock and monitor the animals using cameras, thermal sensors and infrared.

Jobs have become a core Brexit issue. Would leaving the EU be good or bad for job creation? Why are migrants taking so many of the new jobs being created in the UK, and what are the implications for the freedom of movement for labour? But the changing nature of work is an issue that runs throughout the developed world, far beyond the UK and Europe. We see this through the prism of our relationship with Europe, for the UK and Germany have become the two strongest job markets in this time zone and have accordingly been sucking in labour from elsewhere.

Companies everywhere are looking for ways to improve customer service. For example, companies with call-in support centers might track how long agents take to answer calls, or how long customers stay on hold. While many companies are looking at every possible method to gain customer insights, many don't go far enough. How many businesses take facial recognition into account as a way to track the quality of their customer service efforts? Big data could make facial recognition for brick-and-mortar businesses just as ubiquitous as call tracking is for call centers. The growth of VoIP and cloud computing has sparked a revolution in customer service.