Google has said that it will begin fact-checking images that appear from its search results. Starting today, a'Fact Check' label will start appearing under thumbnails. Clicking on the thumbnail will show a quick summary of the fact check, including the claim and a rating from a fact-checker such as Politifact. This tool is organised using ClaimReview, which is a method used by publishers to indicate fact-checked content to search engines, which are already used by Google Search and Google News. Fact-checkers have to meet Google's criteria before they can be used as the source.

The Segway is dead, its makers have announced. The company – which is also called Segway, and officially refers to the famous rolling vehicle as the "Segway PT" – said that it will "retire" the machine from next month. "This decision was not made lightly, and while the current global pandemic did impact sales and production, it was not a deciding factor in our decision," Segway said in a statement. As well as meaning that no new versions of the vehicle will be created, 21 people will be laid off next month with twelve others being kept on for the next year. The Segway was much-hyped – and sometimes mocked – as the future of personal transportation when it was first unveiled nearly 20 years ago.

The roar inside a packed stadium is felt more than heard, a kind of whole-body buzz. As the announcer on the PA brings the crowd to a crescendo, techno music pumping and lights strafing our heads, distant figures file onto the stage, sit in front of keyboards and PC screens, and fit helicopter-grade headphones over their ears to shut out the sound of 10,000 people chanting their names. Two years ago I traveled to Katowice, Poland, to make a short video documentary about e-sports. IEM 2018 was the biggest yet, with a million-dollar prize pot and around 100,000 fans turning up to cheer on their favorite teams. This year, those teams played in silence.

Behind these smart drones are well-trained deep-learning models based on Baidu's PaddlePaddle, the first open-source deep-learning platform in China. Like mainstream AI frameworks such as Google's TensorFlow and Facebook's PyTorch, PaddlePaddle, which was open sourced in 2016, provides software developers of all skill levels with the tools, services, and resources they need to rapidly adopt and implement deep learning at scale. PaddlePaddle is being used by more than 1.9 million developers and 84,000 enterprises globally. Industries throughout China are using the platform to create specialized applications for their sectors, from the automotive industry's acceleration of autonomous vehicles to the health-care industry's applications for fighting covid-19. Indeed, the coronavirus pandemic, which has spread over 150 countries and caused a worldwide economic shock, is increasing demands for AI transformation.

The news: An open letter from a growing coalition of AI researchers is calling out scientific publisher Springer Nature for a conference paper it reportedly planned to include in its forthcoming book Transactions on Computational Science & Computational Intelligence. The paper, titled "A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing," presents a face recognition system purportedly capable of predicting whether someone is a criminal, according to the original press release. It was developed by researchers at Harrisburg University and was due to be presented at a forthcoming conference. The demands: Citing the work of leading Black AI scholars, the letter debunks the scientific basis of the paper and asserts that crime-prediction technologies are racist. It also lists three demands: 1) for Springer Nature to rescind its offer to publish the study; 2) for it to issue a statement condemning the use of statistical techniques such as machine learning to predict criminality and acknowledging its role in incentivizing such research; and 3) for all scientific publishers to commit to not publishing similar papers in the future.

Automated facial recognition technology that searches for people in public places breaches privacy rights and will "radically" alter the way Britain is policed, the court of appeal has been told. At the opening of a legal challenge against the use by South Wales police of the mass surveillance system, lawyers for the civil rights organisation Liberty argued that it is also racially discriminatory and contrary to data protection laws. In written submissions to the court, Dan Squires QC, who is acting for Liberty and Ed Bridges, a Cardiff resident, said that the South Wales force had already captured the biometrics of 500,000 faces, the overwhelming majority of whom are not suspected of any wrongdoing. Bridges, 37, whose face was scanned while he was Christmas shopping in Cardiff in 2017 and at a peaceful anti-arms protest outside the city's Motorpoint Arena in 2018, says the use of automatic facial recognition (AFR) by South Wales police caused him "distress". The case has been brought after South Wales police and the Home Office won a high court case last year that effectively gave the green light for national deployment of the technology.

The concept of the fourth industrial revolution was first introduced in Hannover earlier in this decade. This followed several decades of industrial automation, albeit at lower levels of functionality and complexity. Many developments have since shaped several industry 4.0 technologies that were previously under the purview of researchers. This is possible today, mainly due to innovations in technology, software, and hardware. Already, the increasing human-machine, machine-machine, and human-human connectivity influence production systems and processes across the world. Industry 4.0 trends and technologies are fundamental in achieving connected manufacturing geared towards smart and autonomous factories.

Our Innovation Analysts recently looked into emerging technologies and up-and-coming startups working on big data solutions. As there is a large number of startups working on a wide variety of solutions, we want to share our insights with you. This time, we are taking a look at 5 promising synthetic data startups. For this research, we identified 56 relevant solutions and picked 5 to showcase below. These companies were chosen based on a data-driven startup scouting approach, taking into account factors such as location, founding year, and technology among others.

Apple's latest Watch update encourage users to wash their hands properly by showing them a 20-second timer on their wrist while they are doing it. The firm announced the new feature at their annual Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday alongside a spate of other updates. Apple said washing hands properly for at least 20 seconds can help prevent the spread of illnesses, such as the deadly coronavirus that put the world in lockdown. It uses the motion sensors, microphones and machine learning to detect when someone starts washing their hands then initiates a 20-second countdown timer. Other new features announced for the wearable device include the ability to swap Watch faces, dance tracking in the fitness app and sleep monitoring.

Despite being the workhorse of deep learning, the backpropagation algorithm is no panacea. It enforces sequential layer updates, thus preventing efficient parallelization of the training process. Furthermore, its biological plausibility is being challenged. Alternative schemes have been devised; yet, under the constraint of synaptic asymmetry, none have scaled to modern deep learning tasks and architectures. Here, we challenge this perspective, and study the applicability of Direct Feedback Alignment (DFA) to neural view synthesis, recommender systems, geometric learning, and natural language processing. In contrast with previous studies limited to computer vision tasks, our findings show that it successfully trains a large range of state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, with performance close to fine-tuned backpropagation. When a larger gap between DFA and backpropagation exists, like in Transformers, we attribute this to a need to rethink common practices for large and complex architectures. At variance with common beliefs, our work supports that challenging tasks can be tackled in the absence of weight transport.