Microsoft Real Estate and Security (RE&S) is responsible for heating and cooling 115 buildings in the Puget Sound area. Microsoft Core Services and Engineering (CSEO) partnered with RE&S to improve the effectiveness of the schedules for their heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system to reduce costs and increase employee comfort. CSEO implemented machine learning to predict when employees will arrive into Microsoft buildings each morning and how long it will take for a building to reach its optimal comfort temperature. As a result, we were able to generate a dynamic HVAC schedule that resulted in significant cost savings and increased employee comfort for RE&S. We're continuing to implement machine learning in our buildings throughout the Puget Sound region and we're encouraging the rest of Microsoft to use machine learning to optimize operations and drive digital transformation.

Self-driving start-up backed by Toyota has transformed its robo-taxi fleet into a driverless grocery delivery service last week. The move came in response to the ongoing lockdown in California and the heightened need for essential goods amid the Coronavirus pandemic. The start-up, Pony.ai, is partnering with e-commerce site Yamibuy on the initiative and its fleet consists of 10 self-driving electric Hyundai Konas. The outfit had been participating in a robo-taxi pilot in the city of Irvine, California, since November 2019 but was forced to ground its fleet in March owing to the state's lockdown orders. Now the vehicles will run delivery trips from Yamibuy's distribution center to residences, condos and apartment complexes in Irvine.

In keeping with our mission to provide comprehensive advertising analysis, MediaRadar puts together a report of the most important mergers and acquisitions news each week. Stay in the loop, whether you sell advertising space or focus on business development. This week, Gilead takes out FortySeven, Apple acquires start-up Voysis and Infor is purchased by Koch Industries. The American biotechnology company, Gilead has completed an acquisition of Forty Seven, Inc. at a rate of $97.50 per share that equates to a lump sum of $4.9 billion in cash. The deal bolsters Gilead's portfolio of oncology drugs through Forty Seven Inc.'s blood cancer medicine, which is expected to be on the market within 2 years.

Most existing work on automated fact checking is concerned with predicting the veracity of claims based on metadata, social network spread, language used in claims, and, more recently, evidence supporting or denying claims. A crucial piece of the puzzle that is still missing is to understand how to automate the most elaborate part of the process -- generating justifications for verdicts on claims. This paper provides the first study of how these explanations can be generated automatically based on available claim context, and how this task can be modelled jointly with veracity prediction. Our results indicate that optimising both objectives at the same time, rather than training them separately, improves the performance of a fact checking system. The results of a manual evaluation further suggest that the informativeness, coverage and overall quality of the generated explanations are also improved in the multi-task model.

In the heart of Silicon Valley, Stanford clinicians and researchers are exploring whether artificial intelligence could help manage a potential surge of Covid-19 patients -- and identify patients who will need intensive care before their condition rapidly deteriorates. The challenge is not to build the algorithm -- the Stanford team simply picked an off-the-shelf tool already on the market -- but rather to determine how to carefully integrate it into already-frenzied clinical operations. "The hardest part, the most important part of this work is not the model development. But it's the workflow design, the change management, figuring out how do you develop that system the model enables," said Ron Li, a Stanford physician and clinical informaticist leading the effort. Li will present the work on Wednesday at a virtual conference hosted by Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Fox News finds the coronavirus outbreak has left San Francisco streets and tourist sites including Chinatown and Fisherman's Wharf largely deserted. Get all the latest news on coronavirus and more delivered daily to your inbox. New drone footage and other video shot by Fox News shows once-busy streets and tourist areas in Los Angeles and San Francisco eerily deserted as the coronavirus has kept people indoors. Fisherman's Wharf, one of San Francisco's busiest tourist areas, once brimming with souvenir shops and seafood stalls and situated near Ghirardelli Square, was shuttered after the city's mayor called for a shelter-in-place, restricting people from leaving their homes except for trips to the grocery store or for medical supplies. The Golden Gate Bridge, which usually has seen over 100,000 cars and other vehicles a day and Alamo Square -- which overlooks the famous "Painted Ladies" -- were surprisingly barren.

Modern capitalism has never seen anything quite like the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In a matter of months, the deadly contagious bug has spread around the world, hobbling any economy in its path. In the United States, where consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of economic activity, commerce has come to a standstill as people stay home to slow the virus' spread. Hotels and restaurants and airlines have taken massive hits; Delta has cut its flight capacity by 70 percent. One in five US households has already lost work.

UPS has partnered with the German tech company Wingcopter to build a fleet of rugged, high speed delivery drones. The drones will be based on a model designed by Wingcopter, which can travel at speeds of up to 150mph and has a range of 75 miles. The drones can also endure a variety of difficult weather conditions, including wind speeds of up to 45mph. The agreements marks the first external partnership for UPS's Flight Forward program, which is focused on developing a range of drone delivery options, according to a report in TechCrunch. 'Drone delivery is not a one-size-fits-all operation,' UPS's Bala Ganesh said.

The education ministry said Tuesday it has completed its first screening of new textbooks under new teaching guidelines that are planned to be fully implemented from April 2021, approving 106 textbooks in 10 subjects. The average number of pages for a batch of textbooks approved to be used by junior high school students starting in fiscal 2021 rose 7.6 percent from that for current textbooks, the ministry said. The total number of textbook pages exceeded 11,000 in A5 format at the time of applications. The new teaching guidelines place importance on active learning methods, in which students learn proactively through debates and other learning activities, in order to nurture their intellectual ability to find and resolve problems themselves. For this purpose, many of the new textbooks present learning challenges at the outset of chapters and subchapters, and encourage students to have debates in groups after the end of the sections to deepen their understanding.

The global degradation of water resources is a matter of great concern, especially for the survival of humanity. The effective monitoring and management of existing water resources is necessary to achieve and maintain optimal water quality. The prediction of the quality of water resources will aid in the timely identification of possible problem areas and thus increase the efficiency of water management. The purpose of this research is to develop a water quality prediction model based on water quality parameters through the application of a specialised recurrent neural network (RNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and the use of historical water quality data over several years. Both multivariate single and multiple step LSTM models were developed, using a Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation function and a Root Mean Square Propagation (RMSprop) optimiser was developed. The single step model attained an error of 0.01 mg/L, whilst the multiple step model achieved a Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 0.227 mg/L.