It sounds like something out of a sci-fi film - an AI that constantly monitors the Earth, looks for unusual activity. However, CosmiQ Works, a division of the CIA's venture arm, has revealed SpaceNet, a project with Amazon, satellite mapping firm DigitalGlobe and chip firm Nvidia to train algorithms to work out what's happening on our planet. The project will create a giant online database of hi-res images that AIs will be able to use to teach themselves - and started with images of Rio during the Olympics. SpaceNet will launch with an initial contribution of DigitalGlobe multi-spectral satellite imagery and 200,000 curated building footprints across the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 'Each minute something is happening in the world,' said said Tony Frazier, Senior Vice President at DigitalGlobe.

Why can't computers watch the Earth from above and automatically map our roads, buildings, and trash heaps? Satellite operator DigitalGlobe is teaming up with Amazon, the venture arm of the CIA, and chipmaker Nvidia to try to make it happen. In a joint project, DigitalGlobe today released satellite imagery depicting the whole of Rio de Janeiro to a resolution of 50 centimeters. The outlines of 200,000 buildings inside the city's roughly 1,900 square kilometers have been manually marked on the photos. The SpaceNet data set, as it is called, is intended to spark efforts to train machine-learning algorithms to interpret high-resolution satellite photos by themselves.

This artist's impression shows the planet Proxima b orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System. The double star Alpha Centauri AB also appears in the image between the planet and Proxima itself. Proxima b is a little more massive than the Earth and orbits in the habitable zone around Proxima Centauri, where the temperature is suitable for liquid water to exist on its surface. It was just over 20 years ago--a blink of a cosmic eye--that astronomers found the first planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. All these new worlds were gas-shrouded giants like Jupiter or Saturn and utterly inhospitable to life as we know it--but for years each discovery was dutifully reported as front-page news, while scientists and the public alike dreamed of a day when we would find a habitable world. An Earth-like place with plentiful surface water, neither frozen nor vaporized but in the liquid state so essential to life. Back then the safe bet was to guess that the discovery of such a planet would only come after many decades, and that when a promising new world's misty shores materialized on the other side of our telescopes, it would prove too faraway and faint to study in any detail.

One way to solve lasso problems when the dictionary does not fit into available memory is to first screen the dictionary to remove unneeded features. Prior research has shown that sequential screening methods offer the greatest promise in this endeavor. Most existing work on sequential screening targets the context of tuning parameter selection, where one screens and solves a sequence of $N$ lasso problems with a fixed grid of geometrically spaced regularization parameters. In contrast, we focus on the scenario where a target regularization parameter has already been chosen via cross-validated model selection, and we then need to solve many lasso instances using this fixed value. In this context, we propose and explore a feedback controlled sequential screening scheme. Feedback is used at each iteration to select the next problem to be solved. This allows the sequence of problems to be adapted to the instance presented and the number of intermediate problems to be automatically selected. We demonstrate our feedback scheme using several datasets including a dictionary of approximate size 100,000 by 300,000.

Naturalist Charles Darwin believed the expanse of open ocean in the Pacific was an'impassable barrier' that separated species living on its east and west coasts. This, he argued, accounted for the differences seen in animals on each side of the ocean in much the same way as a mountain range or a desert may split habitats and lead to different species evolving on either side. Now researchers have proved him correct after showing that coral living in the eastern tropical Pacific are completely isolated from the rest of the ocean. Researchers have simulated how coral larvae spread across the Pacific Ocean using computer simulations. While coral themselves are invertebrates that form large static reefs fixed in place by their hard exoskeletons, they can spread by producing swarms of larvae that can colonise new areas.

The idea for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's surprising "Super Mario" appearance at the closing ceremony of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics came originally from former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, now president of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics organizing committee. The behind-the-scenes story was disclosed by Toshiro Muto, director-general of the committee. "I hear he (Abe) willingly accepted our request when we told him he was the most suitable person to go on stage to raise publicity for the 2020 Games," Muto said Monday. At the Rio closing ceremony Sunday, Abe popped up from a huge green pipe, dressed as Mario from Nintendo Co.'s popular "Super Mario Bros." video game franchise. Tokyo 2020 organizers said in a statement that the idea came up during a brainstorming session.

On Sunday, the Japanese prime minister turned up at the Olympics closing ceremonies to promote the 2020 Tokyo games dressed up as Mario, the eponymous hero of the popular video game series created in 1985. Who is Mario and how did he come by his global appeal? Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared as the Nintendo game character Super Mario at the Olympics closing ceremonies to promote the 2020 Tokyo games. Mario Brothers is the best-selling video franchise of all time, with more than 490 million units sold since 1995, according to research firm NPD. There are more than 100 games, for various gaming systems, ranging from Donkey Kong to Super Mario Kart, in which Mario is the primary character, and many more in which he makes appearances.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, dressed as Super Mario, holds a red ball during the closing ceremony of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Japanese PM Shinzo Abe's show-stopping appearance at today's closing ceremony in Rio, dressed as iconic game character Super Mario, already sets the tone for what lies in store. Japan is known internationally for its technological innovations, so Tokyo 2020 organizers are aiming to launch ambitious tech projects that will boost the economy and wow crowds. Tourists staying next to the Olympic Village in Tokyo's Odaiba neighborhood can choose, for example, to hang out with robot helpers of all sizes and sorts that offer up tips on the best transport, food and entertainment options in Tokyo. And that won't be the only place they'll encounter their robotic counterparts.

The global healthcare Natural Language Processing (NLP) market is expected to grow from 1.10 billion in 2015 to 2.67 billion by 2020, according to a new report. "Natural Language Processing Market for Health Care and Life Sciences Industry by Type (Rule-Based, Statistical, and Hybrid NLP Solutions) – Worldwide Forecast and Analysis to 2015 – 2020" is published by MarketsandMarkets, The explosive growth in healthcare and life sciences industries, with their vast troves of unstructured clinical data in EHRs, are the main market drivers. As the report describes it, NLP technologies assist machines in understanding the language used by humans to communicate both reading and writing. This form of communication assists the computer in performing various other additional tasks. NLP techniques extract important information from the vast amount of clinical data and analyze it for enhanced processing and analytics.

Enrique Zarate, 19, had spent just a year in college when he landed an apprenticeship at a new BMW facility in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. If he performs well, in a year he'll win a well-paid position, with benefits, working with robots at the company's newest plant. Within a decade or so, most of the BMW 3 series cars that Americans buy will probably come from Mexico, built by people like Zarate. "When you start with such little experience, and get such a big salary, it's unbelievable," says Zarate, whose father is a taxi driver and whose mother is a housewife. Exports from Mexican factories have jumped 13% since 2012.