FOR the time being, Cape Town has dodged a bullet. After months of unrelenting drought, the recent winter rains have begun to refill its parched dams. That doesn't mean things are easy. City residents are still limited to using 50 litres of water a day, scarcely enough to half-fill a bath. But at least so-called day zero, when the taps run dry and residents have to wait in line to collect survival rations of water, has been averted.

Forest loss is being driven by various factors, including commodity production, forestry, agriculture, wildfire, and urbanization. Curtis et al. used high-resolution Google Earth imagery to map and classify global forest loss since 2001. Just over a quarter of global forest loss is due to deforestation through permanent land use change for the production of commodities, including beef, soy, palm oil, and wood fiber. Despite regional differences and efforts by governments, conservationists, and corporations to stem the losses, the overall rate of commodity-driven deforestation has not declined since 2001. Global maps of forest loss depict the scale and magnitude of forest disturbance, yet companies, governments, and nongovernmental organizations need to distinguish permanent conversion (i.e., deforestation) from temporary loss from forestry or wildfire.

Abstract--In this work we propose R-GPM, a parallel computing framework for graph pattern mining (GPM) through a user-defined subgraph relation. More specifically, we enable the computation of statistics of patterns through their subgraph classes, generalizing traditional GPM methods. R-GPM provides efficient estimators for these statistics by employing a MCMC sampling algorithm combined with several optimizations. We provide both theoretical guarantees and empirical evaluations of our estimators in application scenarios such as stochastic optimization of deep high-order graph neural network models and pattern (motif) counting. We also propose and evaluate optimizations that enable improvements of our estimators accuracy, while reducing their computational costs in up to 3-orders-of-magnitude. Finally, we show that R-GPM is scalable, providing near-linear speedups on 44 cores in all of our tests. A pattern is a template of subgraphs, say, two females and two males in a social network connected as a fully connected 4-node subgraph. On the other hand, the relevance of a pattern is given by the properties of its occurrences in the graph.

I asked the smartest people I know for their tech predictions for the next 20 years (2018 – 2038). What are the breakthroughs we can expect on our countdown to the Singularity? I compiled 50 predictions in a document distributed to my Abundance 360 and Abundance Digital communities. Quantum Supremacy Achieved: The first demonstration of a quantum computation that can't be simulated with classical supercomputers is announced. Flying car operations take off in a dozen cities in the world.

Earlier this year, Tinder began testing out a feature that serves up a list of curated profiles for users who were willing to pay a few extra bucks each month. Now, the popular dating app has announced that the feature, called'Top Picks,' is now launching worldwide. However, it's only available for paying subscribers of Tinder Gold, which costs £7.49 Tinder announced that'Top Picks' is now available worldwide. Top Picks quietly launched in the US and UK last week, after it was tested in Germany, Brazil, France, Canada, Turkey, Mexico, Sweden, Russia and the Netherlands, according to TechCrunch.

At TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018, BMW today premiered its digital personal assistant for its cars, the aptly named BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant. But you won't have to say "Hey, BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant" to wake it up. You can give it any name you want. The announcement comes only a few weeks after BMW also launched its integration with Amazon's Alexa, but it's worth stressing that these are complementary technologies. BMW's own assistant is all about your car, while its partnerships with Amazon and also Microsoft enables other functions that aren't directly related to your driving experience.

That the modern world is a complex place will not have escaped your notice. We are all dimly, unsettlingly aware that our lives are enmeshed in systems we can't fully comprehend. The last meal you ate probably contained produce grown in another country that was harvested, processed, packaged, shipped, then sold to you. The phone in your hand is the end-product of an even more convoluted chain; one that relies on human labor from mines in Africa, assembly lines in China, and standing desks in San Francisco. Explaining how these systems connect and the effect they have on the world is not an easy task.

A world renowned pioneer in social robotics, Cynthia Breazeal splits her time as an Associate Professor at MIT, where she received her PhD and founded the Personal Robots Group, and Founder and Chief Scientist of Jibo, a personal robotics company with over $85 million in funding. While Breazeal's work has won numerous academic awards, industry accolades, and media attention, she had to fight early skepticism in the 1990s from other experts in robotics and AI. At the time, robots were seen as physical and industrial tools, not social or emotional companions. Her first social robot, Kismet, was unfairly called out in popular press as "useless". Breazeal bucked the trend with a very different vision: "I wanted to create robots with social and emotional intelligence that could work in collaborative partnership with people. In 2-5 years, I see social robots helping families with things that really matter, like education, health, eldercare, entertainment, and companionship." She hopes her work and influence will inspire others to create robots "not only with smarts, but with heart, too."

A key opponent of high-tech, automated weapons known as'killer robots' is blaming countries like the U.S. and Russia for blocking consensus at a U.N.-backed conference, where most countries wanted to ensure that humans stay at the controls of lethal machines. Coordinator Mary Wareham of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots spoke Monday after experts from dozens of countries agreed before dawn Saturday at the U.N. in Geneva on 10 'possible guiding principles' about such'Lethal Automated Weapons Systems.' Point 2 said: 'Human responsibility for decisions on the use of weapons systems must be retained since accountability cannot be transferred to machines.' Killer robots must be banned to prevent unlawful killings, injuries and other violations of human rights'before it's too late', according to Amnesty International. Wareham said such language wasn't binding, adding that'it's time to start laying down some rules now.' Members of the LAWS conference will meet again in November. Last week Amnesty International said killer robots must be banned to prevent unlawful killings, injuries and other violations of human rights'before it's too late', as the talks kicked off.

Amazon.com is in talks with Chile to house and mine massive amounts of data generated by the country's giant telescopes, which could prove fertile ground for the company to develop new artificial intelligence tools. The talks, which have been little reported on so far and which were described to Reuters by Chilean officials and an astronomer, are aimed at fuelling growth in Amazon.com President Sebastian Pinera's center-right government, which is seeking to wean Chile's $325 billion economy from reliance on copper mining, announced last week it plans to pool data from all its telescopes onto a virtual observatory stored in the cloud, without giving a timeframe. Amazon.com is in talks with Chile to house and mine massive amounts of data generated by the country's giant telescopes, which could prove fertile ground for the company to develop new artificial intelligence tools. The government talked of the potential for astrodata innovation, but did not give details.