A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Chatbots now work well for ordering a pizza, but managing a complex travel itinerary is a different story. Ask any technology expert about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) in travel and they'll breathlessly tell you we're on the verge of a revolution. They'll describe a world in the not-too-distant future where smart applications can find and book a bargain airfare, manage your trip and troubleshoot any problems that might come up with greater speed and efficiency than any human travel agent. But ask any traveler to describe their experience with AI, and you might hear a different story: One of struggling to be understood by technology that claims to be smart. These early days of travel bots that specialize in customer service, chat, messaging and search are a cautionary tale.

Gaming is an addiction but for cyber criminals, it is a lucrative business. IT security researchers at ESET have discovered a new malware targeting gamers around the world. Dubbed "Joao" by researchers; the malware exists in third party websites offering malicious setups for Aeria games. The malware works in such a way that once executed it can install other malicious codes on a targeted device. Furthermore, Joao takes advantage of "Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs)," a platform for role-playing video games and massively multiplayer online games where a large number of gamers get together to interact. The attackers behind Joao have developed the malware in such a way that when a victim executes the game launcher, it silently launches itself in the background and sends device information to the attackers including its operating system, name and what privileges a user has on that device.

Late last week, as some staff astronomers embarked on trips to see Monday's solar eclipse, two of NASA's space-based observatories--Hubble and Chandra X-ray--and at least two land-based telescopes scrambled to capture a far more explosive event. The astronomers who stayed behind trained their telescopes on a patch of sky where they hoped to find an astrophysical Rosetta stone: a cataclysmic event capable of producing electromagnetic signals on top of gravitational waves separately detected by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Advanced LIGO). Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences. The LIGO collaboration made headlines in February 2016 when it announced it had detected gravitational waves from two colliding black holes. Four months later, while still in its first observing run, the team confirmed the detection of a second black hole merger.

Convolutional dictionary learning (CDL or sparsifying CDL) has many applications in image processing and computer vision. There has been growing interest in developing efficient algorithms for CDL, mostly relying on the augmented Lagrangian (AL) method or the variant alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). When their parameters are properly tuned, AL methods have shown fast convergence in CDL. However, the parameter tuning process is not trivial due to its data dependence and, in practice, the convergence of AL methods depends on the AL parameters for nonconvex CDL problems. To moderate these problems, this paper proposes a new practically feasible and convergent Block Proximal Gradient method using a Majorizer (BPG-M) for CDL. The BPG-M-based CDL is investigated with different block updating schemes and majorization matrix designs, and further accelerated by incorporating some momentum coefficient formulas and restarting techniques. All of the methods investigated incorporate a boundary artifacts removal (or, more generally, sampling) operator in the learning model. Numerical experiments show that, without needing any parameter tuning process, the proposed BPG-M approach converges more stably to desirable solutions of lower objective values than the existing state-of-the-art ADMM algorithm and its memory-efficient variant do. Compared to the ADMM approaches, the BPG-M method using a multi-block updating scheme is particularly useful in single-threaded CDL algorithm handling large datasets, due to its lower memory requirement and no polynomial computational complexity. Image denoising experiments show that, for relatively strong additive white Gaussian noise, the filters learned by BPG-M-based CDL outperform those trained by the ADMM approach.

On the very first day of Wolfram Camp, I called Stephen Wolfram "Steve." "It's Stephen, actually," said the world's most controversial physicist in his crisp-yet-droll British accent. In another life, the creator of Wolfram Alpha would have made an excellent BBC Radio News announcer. "No one under the age of 50 calls me Steve," he added. Katie Orenstein is a New York City-based writer, programmer, and thespian who moonlights as a high school senior.

Science fiction gets a bad rap in some circles for being a genre with nothing but a bunch of spaceships and robots. It's also got drama, action, and even some romance. It's also full of spaceships and robots and if you're not really into those things, well, the door is over there. If you do adore droids and contraptions that fly through the cosmos, though, we have something here that's just for you. Below is a selection of the best sci-fi movies you can currently stream on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon.

Participants run ahead of Puerto de San Lorenzo's fighting bulls during the third bull run of the San Fermin festival in Pamplona, northern Spain. Each day at 8:00 am hundreds of people race with six bulls, charging along a winding, 848.6-metre (more than half a mile) course through narrow streets to the city's bull ring, where the animals are killed in a bullfight or corrida, during this festival, immortalised in Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel "The Sun Also Rises" and dating back to medieval times and also featuring religious processions, folk dancing, concerts and round-the-clock drinking. Iraqi women, who fled the fighting between government forces and Islamic State (IS) group jihadists in the Old City of Mosul, cry as they stand in the city's western industrial district awaiting to be relocated

There have been many kinds of books, with many kinds of meanings. This one book was special because it was the first fictional story produced via artificial intelligence. It was the first book in the sense that its contents made sense. Before this book, all other attempts of letting an AI write a book had produced things that were pastiches of randomness. A couples of sentences here and there surrounded by text that made no sense.

Elon Musk, founder, CEO and lead designer at SpaceX and co-founder of Tesla, speaks at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference in Washington, U.S., July 19, 2017. A revolution in warfare where killer robots, or autonomous weapons systems, are common in battlefields is about to start. Both scientists and industry are worried. The world's top artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics companies have used a conference in Melbourne to collectively urge the United Nations to ban killer robots or lethal autonomous weapons. An open letter by 116 founders of robotics and artificial intelligence companies from 26 countries was launched at the world's biggest artificial intelligence conference, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), as the UN delays meeting until later this year to discuss the robot arms race.

President Trump has shifted to a more traditional foreign policy for the conflict in Afghanistan, giving the green light to send additional troops but offering no "blank check." Here are the stories you shouldn't miss today: The nearly 17-year conflict in Afghanistan is America's longest war, one that Donald Trump, as a citizen, had long criticized. Now that he's president, Trump said in a televised address last night, that view has changed. The commander in chief wouldn't provide troop levels or timetables for the open-ended military commitment he's approved, but his advisors are seeking 4,000 more troops, a 50% increase, and increased counter-terrorism operations. "We are not nation-building again," he said.