Despite facial recognition's seal of approval from law enforcement agencies across the U.S., recent experiments show the technology is far from infallible. In a demonstration by the American Civil Liberties Union, about 26 California lawmakers were misidentified by face-matching software built by Amazon, putting the rate of a mismatch at about 1 in 5. The results mimic a similar test done by the advocacy group in 2018 when a test saw Amazon's software, called'Rekognition', mismatch 28 members of congress -- many of whom were people of color. The ACLU says a test of Amazon's facial recognition software misidentified 1 in 5 lawmakers fed into its system Similarly, the software attempted to match their head shots against a database of known criminals -- a process that has become commonplace for the at least 200 departments across the U.S. who use Rekognition software. According to the LA Times, the test is fueling calls from California legislators to limit the technology's application in a law enforcement capacity, including its integration with police body cameras.

Russia's space agency has released eerie footage of its human-like android which will board the International Space Station next week. Nicknamed Fedor - which stands for Final Experimental Demonstration Research - the anthropomorphous machine was seen undergoing a battery of stress-tests at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Dubbed Putin's robo-naut, the machine can be seen determining targets and honing in on specific points, such as steering wheels, which will surely come in handy while they're in orbit. The scenes come ahead of its inclusion on the unmanned Soyuz MS-14 spacecraft on 22 August 2019. 'MMA fighter' loses temper and battles two revellers at once In action: Dubbed Putin's robo-naut, the machine can be seen determining targets and honing in on specific points, such as steering wheels, which will surely come in handy while they're in orbit On time: Putin's deputy premier, Dmitry Rogozin, claimed the war in Syria had shown Russia the importance of robots in difficult environments, and promised Fedor would make its space debut in five years - a deadline it will soon meet Fedor stands 6-foot tall, weighs no less than 233 pounds depending on extra equipment, and can lift up to 44 pounds of cargo.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine's Abstractions blog. It's very easy to break things in biology," said Loren Frank, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. "It's really hard to make them work better." Yet against the odds, researchers at the New York University School of Medicine reported earlier this summer that they had improved the memory of lab animals by tinkering with the length of a dynamic signal in their brains--a signal that has fascinated neuroscientists like Frank for decades. The feat is exciting in its own right, with the potential to enhance recall in people someday, too. But it also points to a more comprehensive way of thinking about memory, and it identifies an important clue, rooted in the duration of a neural event, that could pave the way to a greater understanding of how memory works. Since the 1980s, scientists have been tuning in to short bursts of synchronized neural activity in the brain area called the hippocampus.

Esports athlete Epitácio "Taco" de Melo used a prototype of the Razer Viper gaming mouse in tournament matches over the past year. The new lightweight mouse is available for $79.99 (Photo: Razer USA) More Americans are playing video games than ever, and more are tuning in to watch live esports competitions, too. While you may not be a pro, you can certainly step up your game accessory-wise. Sales of video game accessories such as controllers, headsets, steering wheels and other products hit $2.3 billion in 2018, up 28% from the year before, according to The NPD Group Retail Tracking Service. That's the highest sales totals since 2010 ($2.4 billion), driven by sales of Microsoft's Kinect motion controller for Xbox 360 in November that year.

Deep learning is a subset of machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence that configures computers to perform tasks through experience. Deep learning, an advanced artificial intelligence technique, has become increasingly popular in the past few years, thanks to abundant data and increased computing power. It's the main technology behind many of the applications we use every day, including online language translation and automated face-tagging in social media. This technology has also proved useful in healthcare: Earlier this year, computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used deep learning to create a new computer program for detecting breast cancer. Classic models had required engineers to manually define the rules and logic for detecting cancer, but for this new model, the scientists gave a deep-learning algorithm 90,000 full-resolution mammogram scans from 60,000 patients and let it find the common patterns between scans of patients who ended up with breast cancer and those who didn't. It's able to predict breast cancer up to five years in advance, a considerable improvement over previous risk-prediction models.

Machine Learning, a recurrent and obvious topic in Science and Technology, will also radically change the way research is carried out in the Social Sciences and the Humanities in a near future. A close cooperation between SSH scholars and computer scientists could have a huge impact on both SSH and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) related research topics. On the one hand, social scientists and humanities scholars may not be able to design and implement themselves the machine learning algorithms they need for their research. The role of a linguist, a historian or a social scientist should be thus to help computer scientists outperform current machine learning models by offering them theoretical approaches both could adapt together to improve their accuracy. This conference, organised by the Social Sciences and Humanities Working Group of the Coimbra Group, will explore the practical possibilities Machine Learning offers to selected research fields within SSH, particularly linguistics, literature, musicology, and sociology.

Machine Learning is so pervasive today that you probably use it dozens of times a day without knowing it. In this class, you will learn about the most effective Machine Learning techniques, and gain practice implementing them and getting them to work for yourself. More importantly, you'll learn about not only the theoretical underpinnings of learning, but also gain the practical know-how needed to quickly and powerfully apply these techniques to new problems.

As the journey towards self-driving cars gathers pace the first facility in the UK to develop self-parking cars is under construction in Warwickshire. 'Trusted Autonomous Parking' (Park-IT) is being created by Nuneaton-based global engineering firm, HORIBA MIRA, in partnership with Coventry University. The project will see the creation of a multi-storey car park, on-road parking bays and parking lot environments at the MIRA Proving Ground. Once complete the facility will provide real-world parking situations to support the development of self-parking cars. The parking areas will be co-located in the HORIBA MIRA City Circuit, a safe, comprehensible and fully controllable purpose-built'cityscape' test track environment.

The AI Lab will bring together the industry's best academics, specialists and technology companies to work on some of the biggest challenges in health and care, including earlier cancer detection, new dementia treatments and more personalised care. AI is already being developed in some hospitals, successfully predicting cancer survival rates and cutting the number of missed appointments. The lab will sit within NHSX, the new organisation that will oversee the digitisation of the health and care system, in partnership with the Accelerated Access Collaborative. The investment will support the ambitions in the NHS Long Term Plan, which includes pledges to use AI to help clinicians eliminate variations in care. The NHS is revered for the world-class care it provides every day – a treasured institution that showcases the very best of Britain.

Indian cab aggregator Ola on Tuesday said it had acquihired Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence startup Pikup.ai. As part of the deal, the team at Pikup.ai will join Ola. Speaking on the acqui-hiring, Inder Singh, Co-founder, Pikup.ai, said, By bringing deep domain expertise to Ola, this acquihire will also deliver innovations that continue to improve safety and transform customer experience. The cab aggregator also said it was increasing its focus on using advanced analytics and deep technology to build on its mobility solutions. With the availability of rich data, the application of machine learning and AI will enable the ride-hailing giant to identify deep insights that can lead to improved mobility outcomes.