We got lucky with the weather in Washington State. It's a clear afternoon with a few scattered clouds, low wind speeds--ideal flying conditions. Mike Dubbury's calm briefing helps, too. Honeywell's senior test pilot talks me through the upcoming trip in the Beechcraft King Air C90, which I'll be piloting. I can't quite relax, though.

Various reports have surfaced in the past year about unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) delivering packages and take-out to your door -- but some options are closer to the ground, literally. And one Silicon Valley city is jumping to test out this new technology, considered the newest frontier in automated delivery. Redwood City, Calif., recently passed a city resolution (PDF) for a nine-month pilot program in which Starship Technologies works with parcel delivery, grocery and food delivery firms who will use its autonomous robots to carry out the deliveries. As a demonstration for the city, the robot delivered a box of cookies from a local bakery. The company has run pilot programs in London; Düsseldorf, Germany; Bern, Switzerland; and Washington, D.C.

Samsung dominates the smartphone industry so much so that one in every five handsets sold worldwide come from the South Korean technology giant. But the firm is still reeling from the recall of millions of its big-screen Galaxy Note 7 devices, which suffered from a battery issue that could cause the device to overheat and, in some cases, explode. That recall left Samsung without a flashy new smartphone to go head-to-head with Apple's iPhone 7 and Google's Pixel as the all-important holiday shopping season approaches. "In a market that is otherwise maturing, Christmas has come early for vendors looking to capitalize with large-screened flagship alternatives like the Apple iPhone 7 Plus and Google Pixel," said IDC analyst Melissa Chau in a report accompanying the research firm's latest smartphone sales estimates. With the Note 7 dead and buried, Samsung must look towards the future for salvation.

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.

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or even beats humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in crucial ways. We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly human-like learning and thinking machines will have to reach beyond current engineering trends in both what they learn, and how they learn it. Specifically, we argue that these machines should (a) build causal models of the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely solving pattern recognition problems; (b) ground learning in intuitive theories of physics and psychology, to support and enrich the knowledge that is learned; and (c) harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. We suggest concrete challenges and promising routes towards these goals that can combine the strengths of recent neural network advances with more structured cognitive models.

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!"