CVS Health will try delivering prescriptions with self-driving vehicles in a test that begins next month. The drugstore chain said Thursday that it will partner with the Silicon Valley robotics company Nuro to deliver medicines and other products to customers near a Houston-area store. A CVS spokesman said the prescriptions will routinely be delivered within an hour of being ordered. Customers will have to confirm their identity in order to unlock their delivery after the vehicle arrives. Nuro has previously started partnerships to test the delivery of pizzas for Domino's or groceries for Kroger, also in the Houston area.

A longheld theory that animals raised in captivity perform better in cognitive testing may need to be rethought. A new study organized by the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna found evidence that wild animals perform just as well at intelligence tests as their lab-raised counterparts. To test the theory, researchers compared two groups of Goffin's cockatoos, a species often found in the tropical jungles of Singapore, Indonesia, and Puerto Rico. The team compared a lab-raised'colony' of 11 cockatoos at their lab in Vienna to eight wild cockatoos recently taken into captivity at a field laboratory in Indonesia. The researchers compared the performance of both groups in a series of simple problem solving tests and found the wild cockatoos were just as clever as the lab-raised ones.

Clearview AI is about to deal with more pushback beyond corporate objections and occasional bans. The American Civil Liberties Union has sued Clearview AI for allegedly violating Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act with its combination of facial recognition and internet data scraping. The ACLU claimed that the real-time identification technology infringed privacy rights by collecting faceprints from state residents without notifying them or obtaining consent. This facial data harvesting is bad for everyone, but it's particularly harmful to "Latinas and survivors," according to Mujeres Latinas en Acción's Linda Xóchitl Tortolero. She argued that it enables stalkers, abusers, "predatory companies" and immigration agents to illegally track and target people.

Unnecessary restrictions on blood donors should be removed to maximize the blood and plasma available for use. With a vaccine for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) likely more than a year away, we must identify effective therapies for patients now. One promising approach is the use of plasma from patients who have recovered from COVID-19 (1, 2). To facilitate this strategy, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently revised some of the restrictions on blood donation, including a decrease in deferral time for men who have sex with men (MSM) to 3 months (3). This is a positive change to an outdated guideline, but it does not go far enough.

Science's COVID-19 coverage is supported by the Pulitzer Center. Timothy Sheahan, a virologist studying COVID-19, wishes he could keep pace with the growing torrent of new scientific papers related to the pandemic. But there have just been too many--more than 5000 papers a week. "I'm not keeping up," says Sheahan, who works at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A loose-knit army of data scientists and software developers is pressing hard to change that.

CVS Health will try delivering prescriptions with self-driving vehicles in a test that begins next month. The drugstore chain said Thursday that it will partner with the Silicon Valley robotics company Nuro to deliver medicines and other products to customers near a Houston-area store. A CVS spokesman said the prescriptions will routinely be delivered within an hour of being ordered. Customers will have to confirm their identity in order to unlock their delivery after the vehicle arrives. Nuro has previously started partnerships to test the delivery of pizzas for Domino's or groceries for Kroger, also in the Houston area.

Despite decades of research, general purpose in-hand manipulation remains one of the unsolved challenges of robotics. One of the contributing factors that limit current robotic manipulation systems is the difficulty of precisely sensing contact forces -- sensing and reasoning about contact forces are crucial to accurately control interactions with the environment. As a step towards enabling better robotic manipulation, we introduce DIGIT, an inexpensive, compact, and high-resolution tactile sensor geared towards in-hand manipulation. DIGIT improves upon past vision-based tactile sensors by miniaturizing the form factor to be mountable on multi-fingered hands, and by providing several design improvements that result in an easier, more repeatable manufacturing process, and enhanced reliability. We demonstrate the capabilities of the DIGIT sensor by training deep neural network model-based controllers to manipulate glass marbles in-hand with a multi-finger robotic hand. To provide the robotic community access to reliable and low-cost tactile sensors, we open-source the DIGIT design at https://digit.ml/.

Deep learning applications require optimization of nonconvex objective functions. These functions have multiple local minima and their optimization is a challenging problem. Simulated Annealing is a well-established method for optimization of such functions, but its efficiency depends on the efficiency of the adapted sampling methods. We explore relations between the Langevin dynamics and stochastic optimization. By combining the Momentum optimizer with Simulated Annealing, we propose CoolMomentum - a prospective stochastic optimization method. Empirical results confirm the efficiency of the proposed theoretical approach.

Named Entity Understanding (NEU) plays an essential role in interactions between users and voice assistants, since successfully identifying entities and correctly linking them to their standard forms is crucial to understanding the user's intent. NEU is a challenging task in voice assistants due to the ambiguous nature of natural language and because noise introduced by speech transcription and user errors occur frequently in spoken natural language queries. In this paper, we propose an architecture with novel features that jointly solves the recognition of named entities (a.k.a. Named Entity Recognition, or NER) and the resolution to their canonical forms (a.k.a. Entity Linking, or EL). We show that by combining NER and EL information in a joint reranking module, our proposed framework improves accuracy in both tasks. This improved performance and the features that enable it, also lead to better accuracy in downstream tasks, such as domain classification and semantic parsing.

Distributed representation of words has improved the performance for many natural language tasks. In many methods, however, only one meaning is considered for one label of a word, and multiple meanings of polysemous words depending on the context are rarely handled. Although research works have dealt with polysemous words, they determine the meanings of such words according to a batch of large documents. Hence, there are two problems with applying these methods to sequential sentences, as in a conversation that contains ambiguous expressions. The first problem is that the methods cannot sequentially deal with the interdependence between context and word interpretation, in which context is decided by word interpretations and the word interpretations are decided by the context. Context estimation must thus be performed in parallel to pursue multiple interpretations. The second problem is that the previous methods use large-scale sets of sentences for offline learning of new interpretations, and the steps of learning and inference are clearly separated. Such methods using offline learning cannot obtain new interpretations during a conversation. Hence, to dynamically estimate the conversation context and interpretations of polysemous words in sequential sentences, we propose a method of Simultaneous Contextualization And INterpreting (SCAIN) based on the traditional Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) algorithm. By using the SCAIN algorithm, we can sequentially optimize the interdependence between context and word interpretation while obtaining new interpretations online. For experimental evaluation, we created two datasets: one from Wikipedia's disambiguation pages and the other from real conversations. For both datasets, the results confirmed that SCAIN could effectively achieve sequential optimization of the interdependence and acquisition of new interpretations.