With GPS technology at our fingertips and Siri available to navigate our every turn, paper maps have been rendered obsolete. But that is exactly what Japanese photographer Sohei Nishino has created with his series of collaged "Diorama Maps," which went on view Friday at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. After initial research of a city, Nishino spends up to three months walking it while snapping photos in black and white. "He climbs up to rooftops and high floors of buildings to get a multifaceted bird's-eye view," curator Corey Keller said. "These vantage points give him an alternative perspective of the city."

The possibility of a catastrophic asteroid on course to slam into Earth is extremely rare – but, experts say it's just a matter of time before this threat becomes a reality. To prepare for such an event, NASA has teamed up with the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a series of exercises intended to simulate an asteroid emergency. In the most recent exercise, the experts prepared for a hypothetical object 300-800 feet wide approaching far too quickly to be redirected, necessitating a mass evacuation of the metropolitan Los Angeles area with 100 percent chance of impact. The possibility of a catastrophic asteroid on course to slam into Earth is extremely rare, but experts say it's just a matter of time before the threat becomes a reality. To prepare for such an event, NASA teamed up with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Economists have become increasingly interested in studying the nature of production functions in social policy applications, with the goal of improving productivity. Traditionally models have assumed workers are homogenous inputs. However, in practice, substantial variability in productivity means the marginal productivity of labor depends substantially on which new workers are hired--which requires not an estimate of a causal effect, but rather a prediction. Annoyed at being automatically tagged with Facebook's facial-recognition system? Wearing a pair of tie-dye-looking glasses could help.

JAPANESE carmaker Honda Motor Co. has chosen to headquarter its artificial intelligence (AI) research hub in Tokyo, saying its own home ground will enable closer interactions between scientists and researchers compared to Silicon Valley. According to Bloomberg, the research and development (R&D) center will launch in 2017 and will consolidate all the company's current AI teams from Silicon Valley, Europe, and Japan in Tokyo. Yoshiyuki Matsumoto, president of Honda's research arm, said in an interview that the carmakers chose Tokyo due to saturation in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is home to thousands of tech companies and startups. Honda chooses Tokyo over Silicon Valley for AI research centre – THE BUSINESS TIMES https://t.co/r25wCfNHKy Matsumoto was quoted saying: "We won't make much difference if we did the same things as everyone else in Silicon Valley. And not everyone has succeeded there."

As a San Francisco resident, I've often been awed and inspired by the sight of the Golden Gate Bridge. A team from MIT's Media Lab ran a photo of the landmark through its "Nightmare Machine" and now it looks like a moving, tentacled monster that will grab and crush any car that dares to cross it. The Nightmare Machine uses deep-learning algorithms (and possibly evil spirits) to turn ordinary images of people and places into scary ones. To help the AI learn maximum spookiness, the public is invited to rate the faces as "scary" or "not scary." The Halloween-perfect project comes from MIT Media Lab's Scalable Cooperation group, which studies how technology is reshaping the nature of human cooperation.

An MIT project distorted photos of the capitol building and other famous sites using an artificial intelligence algorithm to make horror images. An MIT project distorted photos of the capitol building and other famous sites using an artificial intelligence algorithm to make horror images. Welcome to the "Nightmare Machine," a horror-imagery project created by three researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian and Iyad Rahwan used artificial intelligence algorithms "to learn how haunted houses, or toxic cities look. Then, we apply the learnt style to famous landmarks and present [to] you: AI-powered horror all over the world!"

Walt Martin is kneeling, legs folded behind him, butt resting on his heels. "I've got to practice my yoga," he says, clearly joking. Never mind that we're in the cab of an 18-wheeler cruising through Colorado at 55 mph and Martin was, until a moment ago, the guy at the wheel. Maybe he was feeling cocky. After all the truck, outfitted with 30,000 worth of hardware and software from San Francisco startup Otto, had just hours before made the world's first autonomous truck delivery.

In one of my previous articles I envisioned the state of Customer Success in the year 2041. The future looks bright for our community, but in fact the future is happening right now. Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce conference is taking place in the San Francisco Bay Area even as I write these words, creating the perfect setting for a topic that underlies all my earlier predictions. You see, while the future of Customer Success will definitely include Automation, Virtual Reality (VR), and The Internet of Things (IoT), the thread linking all of these advancements together is Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this article I will discuss how AI can both help and hinder Customer Success. All new technologies present the possibility of a double-edged sword, and we have never been faced with a blade quite as sharp as AI.

We tend to think of R and other such ML tools only in the context of the workplace, to do "weighty" things aimed at saving millions. A little judicious use of R may help us hugely in our personal lives too. The ideas of regression, classification trees etc. can be powerful tools in valuation, as I found out. Recently, I was in a five-car accident on the infamous 101 in the San Francisco bay area. Luckily, none of us required an ambulance and all of us walked away.

The Cupertino tech firm has significantly scaled back its auto department, with hundreds of employees - from a team of around 1,000 - said to have left, according to new reports. The company is thought to be refocusing its efforts on developing software for self-driving cars, rather than building its own vehicle. Earlier this year, a concept video revealed ideas for a futuristic-looking Apple car, with a wide dashboard display and smart capabilities. Claims that Apple is working on cars may seem like a leap, but it isn't the first time such projects have been discussed by the Californian firm. In an interview last year, Apple board member Mickey Drexler said that before his death in 2011 Steve Jobs had considered building a car.