Trilobites of the species Ampx priscus were caught in an avalanche of sediment 480 million years ago as they marched in a single-file line on the seafloor of what is now Morocco. The trilobites go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah … well, at least they did, some 480 million years ago. New fossils from Morocco show lines of trilobites in orderly queues, likely buried by a storm as they trekked from one place to another under the Ordovician seas in an ancient game of "follow the leader." "I think people think that collective behavior is something new in the course of evolution, but actually sophisticated behavior started very, very early," said study leader Jean Vannier, a paleontologist at the University of Lyon in France. Vannier and colleagues from Marrakech, Morocco, discovered the trilobites in the southern part of Morocco in an area known for well-preserved fossils of animals from the early Ordovician, a geologic period that began about 485 million years ago and is one of six periods that make up the Paleozoic era.

In the context of convolutional neural networks (ConvNets), LBH mention pooling, but not its pioneer (Weng, 1992), who replaced Fukushima's (1979) spatial averaging by max-pooling, today widely used by many, including LBH, who write: "ConvNets were largely forsaken by the mainstream computer-vision and machine-learning communities until the ImageNet competition in 2012," citing Hinton's 2012 paper (Krizhevsky et al., 2012). Earlier, committees of max-pooling ConvNets were accelerated on GPU (Ciresan et al., 2011a), and used to achieve the first superhuman visual pattern recognition in a controlled machine learning competition, namely, the highly visible IJCNN 2011 traffic sign recognition contest in Silicon Valley (relevant for self-driving cars). The system was twice better than humans, and three times better than the nearest non-human competitor (co-authored by LeCun of LBH). It also broke several other machine learning records, and surely was not "forsaken" by the machine-learning community. In fact, the later system (Krizhevsky et al. 2012) was very similar to the earlier 2011 system. Here one must also mention that the first official international contests won with the help of ConvNets actually date back to 2009 (three TRECVID competitions) - compare Ji et al. (2013).

People have more trust in robots than their managers, according to the second annual AI at Work study conducted by Oracle and Future Workplace. The study of 8 370 employees, managers and HR leaders across 10 countries, found that AI has changed the relationship between people and technology at work and is reshaping the role HR teams and managers need to play in attracting, retaining and developing talent. Contrary to common fears around how AI will impact jobs, employees, managers and HR leaders across the globe are reporting increased adoption of AI at work and many are welcoming AI with love and optimism. AI is becoming more prominent with 50% of workers currently using some form of AI at work compared to only 32% last year. Workers in China (77%) and India (78%) have adopted AI over two-times more than those in France (32%) and Japan (29%).

Hyundai has debuted the world's first autonomous driving technology which self-learns from a driver's individual style. A built-in AI observes the driver's patterns to mimic their style in as safe a manner as possible. The use of a self-learning AI means the autonomous features should more closely replicate that of if the driver was still in full control of the vehicle. Hyundai is rolling out the feature for cruise control initially and calling it Smart Cruise Control-Machine Learning (SCC-ML). "The new SCC-ML improves upon the intelligence of the previous ADAS technology to dramatically improve the practicality of semi-autonomous features. Hyundai Motor Group will continue the development efforts on innovative AI technologies to lead the industry in the field of autonomous driving."

Valley Insights is the result of the partnership between Valley Irrigation and Prospera, which was announced earlier this year. According to Valley Irrigation, the Valley Insights limited release "has demonstrated successful results this growing season, turning data into useful, actionable information for growers in Washington and Nebraska. The service has exceeded expectations by already reaching its targeted goal of one million acres by 2020." We are gaining traction with the initial launch of Valley Insights. The partnership between Valley and Prospera has exceeded expectations by already reaching its targeted goal of one million acres by 2020.

If you look at the past four years we've been enjoying substantial economic growth, in order for the economy to be resilient to external shocks we have to continue to diversify and explore new niches to sustain our economic growth. So for this reason we have delved into niche economic areas. We started 2 years ago with Blockchain and we've been attracting significant investment to our island, not only in terms of crypto but also in other areas of technological developments. Now we're seeing new development in companies that are investing in technology and coming here to work and operate from Malta. We're also seeing a spill-over effect, such as companies from the iGaming industry who are producing new products supported by blockchain technology.

In the fall of 2017, Sam Bowman, a computational linguist at New York University, figured that computers still weren't very good at understanding the written word. Sure, they had become decent at simulating that understanding in certain narrow domains, like automatic translation or sentiment analysis (for example, determining if a sentence sounds "mean or nice," he said). But Bowman wanted measurable evidence of the genuine article: bona fide, human-style reading comprehension in English. So he came up with a test. 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 develop ments and trends in mathe matics and the physical and life sciences.

The conference focuses on four main themes and will be augmented by additional discussions. Our key themes are structural and institutional change in gender equality in R&I; a broader concept of equality in R&I; digitalization and gender equality; and gender equality in innovation. Follow conference live stream from this link. This session will take stock of the advancement over the past 20 years of gender equality policy in European research and innovation, its achievements and continued challenges. Structural change is today the dominant approach to advancing gender equality in Research Funding and Performing Organisations in the EU.

On Linkedin recently I have been seeing a lot of people talking about how we can reduce the number of hours that we work, with the idea being that a reduction of hours and more free time will lead to us being happier and healthier and therefore increasing productivity when we are working. Some of the methods I have seen suggested include things like unlimited paid holiday and flexi-time. Recently at the Labour Party conference, they announced that if elected they would implement a 4 day week. Many project managers I'm sure would appreciate reducing the number of hours worked, and it will no doubt improve our lives away from work. But at the end of the day, we still need to make sure that we deliver the projects to deadline.

A Lexus advertisement has become a part of folklore in advertisement circles. Well, it is the world's first ad to be scripted by AI. The system fed on data from many past advertisements of many other luxury products and came up with a script. The ad showed an engineer marveling at his creation who then turns sad as his creation, the automobile is taken away from him to be subjected to a grueling test. In the end, the power brakes that he has built into the car saves the day.