The 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo will deploy a facial recognition system to identify more than 300,000 athletes, staff, volunteers, and journalists at the games. It's the first time that facial recognition technology will be used for security at the Olympics. The planned system is supposed to address several unique security considerations for the upcoming games. Unlike many previous Olympics, Tokyo will not have a centralized Olympic Park in which athletes and others can travel freely between the main facilities--instead, the 2020 Games will be spread out across the Tokyo metropolitan area. Given that setup, people will need to authenticate their identities at more than 40 venues across the city, which could potentially lead to longer wait times to enter the facilities.

The world of an 80s teenager was one of arcade machines, LPs and Nintendo game consoles. And now you can step back in time and enter that world thanks to a computer museum that has recreated it using a series of fascinating exhibitions. They include an 80s classroom with'state-of-the-art' Apple IIe computers, a'friend's basement' that contains wood-panelled walls and a classic Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console, and a videogame arcade. A typical basement from the 1980s has been recreated at the Living Computers: Museum Labs in Seattle. There is also a 1980s classroom packed with Apple IIe computers.

Artificial intelligence is being credited for helping Hong Kong customs officials increase seizures of fake goods sold online by about one-third in the first six months of this year, resulting in a haul of counterfeit items worth HK$1.96 million (US$247,000). A new supercomputer they began using last December scoured websites 24 hours a day and detected close to 2,000 of the 5,200 items seized by the Customs & Excise Department. Over the same period last year, officers netted 11,800 pieces of counterfeit goods worth HK$1.47 million. A source said the department might look into expanding the capacity of the computer, which gathers important information during investigations, but he stressed it would complement rather than replace manual enforcement work by customs officers. "The analytics tool saves us a lot of time screening online platforms manually," the source said.

Stories of how students and developers get started in applied machine learning are an inspiration. In this post, you will hear about Álvaro Lemos story and his transition from student to getting a machine learning internship. I'm from Salvador, Bahia (Brazil), but currently, I live in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais (also in Brazil). I am studying Electrical Engineering at the Federal University of Minas Gerais and since the beginning of my undergraduation course, I've been involved with software development in some way. On my first week as a freshman, I joined a research group called LabCOM to help a colleague on his master's degree project.

In automatic speech recognition (ASR) what a user says depends on the particular context she is in. Typically, this context is represented as a set of word n-grams. In this work, we present a novel, all-neural, end-to-end (E2E) ASR sys- tem that utilizes such context. Our approach, which we re- fer to as Contextual Listen, Attend and Spell (CLAS) jointly- optimizes the ASR components along with embeddings of the context n-grams. During inference, the CLAS system can be presented with context phrases which might contain out-of- vocabulary (OOV) terms not seen during training. We com- pare our proposed system to a more traditional contextualiza- tion approach, which performs shallow-fusion between inde- pendently trained LAS and contextual n-gram models during beam search. Across a number of tasks, we find that the pro- posed CLAS system outperforms the baseline method by as much as 68% relative WER, indicating the advantage of joint optimization over individually trained components. Index Terms: speech recognition, sequence-to-sequence models, listen attend and spell, LAS, attention, embedded speech recognition.

This work focuses on support vector machine (SVM) with feature selection. A MILP formulation is proposed for the problem. The choice of suitable features to construct the separating hyperplanes has been modelled in this formulation by including a budget constraint that sets in advance a limit on the number of features to be used in the classification process. We propose both an exact and a heuristic procedure to solve this formulation in an efficient way. Finally, the validation of the model is done by checking it with some well-known data sets and comparing it with classical classification methods.

The Venezuelan government's account of Saturday's attempted assassination-by-drone of President Nicolás Maduro has raised more questions than it has answered. Here's what we know: A video of the event shows the chaos that ensued when the drones exploded, with Maduro abruptly stopping his speech and soldiers in the crowd fleeing. The president was unharmed, but seven National Guard soldiers were injured. Hours later, Maduro appeared on national television to accuse the outgoing Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, and far-right elements in the U.S. of plotting the alleged attack. A little-known group called "Soldados de Franelas" claimed responsibility for the attack on Twitter. The group regularly posts anti-Maduro content but little else is known about them.

Maduro, whose approval ratings hover around 25 percent, with opponents blaming his policies for worsening an economic meltdown, has called government supporters to unite in the face of what he described as right-wing plots led by the neighboring Colombian government and exiles in the United States.

Momo – the story and the picture – are utterly horrifying. And that's just about the only thing anyone can know for sure. The story is linked with a bizarre and chilling photo, as well as a series of stories that are just as sinister. The picture is being used by people on WhatsApp who trick young people into extreme behaviour that includes taking their own lives, according to those reports. It has led to warnings from the police, telling children to be careful and their parents to look after them. Many include the image, and suggestions that it has some sort of unknown power.

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY – Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro accused political foes of trying to kill him during an open-air speech Saturday using explosives-laden drones, prompting a host of questions about the alleged attack and who might have been behind it. Wherever the investigation leads, Maduro's allegations raised the specter of unmanned aerial vehicles being used by militant groups or others to launch bombing, chemical or biological attacks, a tactic that has long worried security experts. The market for commercial drones has flourished in recent years amid widespread availability and falling prices. So-called quadcopters -- drones with four rotors -- that can be operated from more than a mile away (1.6 km) and can fly for more than 20 minutes on one charge cost less than $1,000 to buy online, though they are generally capable of carrying only a limited payload. Militant groups such as Islamic State have used drones to carry out attacks by dropping grenades or crashing into infrastructure.