Google's plan to monitor home activities "crosses a moral boundary" that "needlessly encourages a conflict between science and ethics," says Australia's chief science adviser Alan Finkel. Earlier this month Google obtained a patent on the use of an array of sensors and cameras to monitor home life, and claims the technology has the capability to see the title of the book you're reading in bed. The system could also electronically lock doors and turn off running taps. Speaking at an artificial intelligence (AI) summit at Monash University, Melbourne on Thursday, Finkel likened this to a complete stranger offering you unlimited furniture and non-stick frying pans, in exchange for sitting in your bedroom for the next fortnight to observe your behaviour. "We are repulsed by this prospect not because of its unfamiliarity, but because we innately feel that it violates fundamental principles we rightfully hold dear," Finkel said.

Chip giants such as Nvidia, Intel and Qualcomm rarely miss an opportunity to tout their achievements and technology prowess in artificial intelligence. The message on AI from NXP Semiconductors, however, is neither so loud nor so clear. NXP's AI strategy has been a mystery ever since CEO Richard Clemmer revealed the company has had "no internal technology development going on" in machine learning. That declaration, in October 2016, came as a shock. How in the world, was NXP -- a leading automotive chip supplier -- planning to lead the market in the era of ADAS and AV with "no internal development of machine learning?"

Roundup Hello, here's a short but sweet round up of news from the world of machine learning beyond what we have already covered on El Reg.

The General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark is widely used to evaluate Natural Language Processing (NLP) models. Although GLUE includes a range of English sentence-pairing, word prediction and other NLP tasks, it cannot evaluate the performance of Chinese NLP models. Now, a group of NLP researchers and enthusiasts, including graduates from Tsinghua University, Peking University, and Zhejiang University, have introduced ChineseGLUE, a benchmark designed to encourage the development and assessment of Chinese language models. GLUE was introduced in 2018 by researchers from New York University, University of Washington and DeepMind. Since then, new pretrained language models such as Google's BERT have rapidly improved performance in Natural Language Understanding (NLU), a NLP research area with a focus on machine reading comprehension through sentiment analysis and grammatical judgment, etc.

At last, it is here! Few new technologies have ever been more anticipated and more predicted than the self-driving car. Anyone who drives cannot help but imagine not having to drive any more. It has been said that they will change our cities, our homes, our commerce, even our fundamental way of life. But at the same time, the actual progress has seemed … well … glacial, to the casual driver's eye.

ICCV 2019 today announced its Best Paper Awards in three categories. The ICCV (IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision) is a top international biannual computer vision gathering comprising a main conference and several co-located workshops and tutorials. ICCV 2019 received 4,303 papers -- more than twice the number submitted to ICCV 2017 -- and accepted 1,075, for a reception rate of roughly 25 percent. Abstract: We introduce SinGAN, an unconditional generative model that can be learned from a single natural image. Our model is trained to capture the internal distribution of patches within the image, and is then able to generate high quality, diverse samples that carry the same visual content as the image.

China is vastly outpacing the U.S. in planning for and investing in critical research, and it is producing more and more top minds in AI and quantum computing. By 2030, China will likely be the world's leading spender on research and development, per the report. Compare that to the U.S., where the share of government money spent on research has dwindled from 1.1% of GDP to 0.7%. Restoring that to historical levels is crucial, as about a third of patented American inventions in the last decade have leaned on federally funded research, the report notes. China is vastly outpacing the U.S. in planning for and investing in critical research, and it is producing more and more top minds in AI and quantum computing.

In the not too distant future, robots may be dispatched as last-mile delivery vehicles to drop your takeout order, package, or meal-kit subscription at your doorstep -- if they can find the door. Standard approaches for robotic navigation involve mapping an area ahead of time, then using algorithms to guide a robot toward a specific goal or GPS coordinate on the map. While this approach might make sense for exploring specific environments, such as the layout of a particular building or planned obstacle course, it can become unwieldy in the context of last-mile delivery. Imagine, for instance, having to map in advance every single neighborhood within a robot's delivery zone, including the configuration of each house within that neighborhood along with the specific coordinates of each house's front door. Such a task can be difficult to scale to an entire city, particularly as the exteriors of houses often change with the seasons.

Disco Elysium establishes the character you play – a washed-up detective living out of a hotel room – with enviable efficiency. The game opens as you emerge from unconsciousness into a shuffling, amnesiac hangover following a three-day bender. Your work tie ribbons from the ceiling fan, your room is a wreck, and your immediate purpose is lost to the week's substance abuse. You spend the next few minutes clothing yourself (an exertion that, for an unlucky player, can lead to a terminal heart attack). Then you begin to piece together your identity, and discover why you have wound up in this rundown port town, "a puddle at the end of some drainpipe", as one character puts it, not unfairly.