After six months of competition, Unity Technologies has named the top winners for the Obstacle Tower Challenge, a contest dedicated to making artificial intelligence for games. The winners are Alex Nichols, the Compscience.org And Unity, the maker of the Unity3D game engine, has also announced it has open-sourced Obstacle Tower for the research community to extend for their own needs. The challenge started in February as a way to help foster research in the AI community by providing a challenging new benchmark built in Unity. The benchmark, called Obstacle Tower, was developed to be difficult for current machine learning algorithms to solve.

New York's first-ever commercial driverless cars got off to a slow start in the Big Apple. Boston-based tech company Optimus Ride's fleet of six autonomous vehicles officially opened to the public Wednesday, transporting passengers along a one-mile loop around the Brooklyn Navy Yard. But the demand for the free robo-shuttle service between the NYC Ferry stop at Dock 72 and Cumberland Gate at Flushing Avenue proved sparse during Wednesday's morning rush. Wednesday, The Post observed roughly 15 people hitch a ride in the driverless vehicles, which can hold six passengers, over the hour. One user, 46-year-old Carey Booth who commutes by ferry from her home in Astoria to her job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard every day, took a ride in the shuttle while on her way to work.

The increasing use of Artificial intelligence, Big Data and IoT devices are changing the pattern of the healthcare business. Neha Rastogi, co-founder and COO of Agatsa, in an email interview with Zee Business online, talked about various aspects of healthcare business and innovations in this space. Do you think Budget 2019 was successful in addressing problems faced by startups? The Budget did address some major areas including simplification of tax compliances and income tax scrutiny. Further, the provision of expanding PMKY by including cutting-edge skills like AI, analytics and 3D printing, etc. are welcome steps.

Discover the hidden side of everything with Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Freakonomics Radio tells you things you always thought you knew (but didn't) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) -- from the economics of sleep to how to become great at just about anything. Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers. Special features include series like "The Secret Life of a C.E.O." as well as a live game show, "Tell Me Something I Don't Know."

What happens when injustices are propagated not by individuals or organizations but by a collection of machines? Lately, there's been increased attention on the downsides of artificial intelligence and the harms it may produce in our society, from unequitable access to opportunities to the escalation of polarization in our communities. Not surprisingly, there's been a corresponding rise in discussion around how to regulate AI. Do we need new laws and rules from governmental authorities to police companies and their conduct when designing and deploying AI into the world? Part of the conversation arises from the fact that the public questions -- and rightly so -- the ethical restraints that organizations voluntarily choose to comply with. According to Edelman's 2019 Trust Barometer global survey, only 56% of the general public has overall trust in the business community.

The journal Physics of Life Reviews, which has one of the highest impact factors in the categories "Biology" and "Biophysics", has published an article entitled "Symphony of high-dimensional brain". The authors of the article, world-famous scientists of Russian origin, including the chief researcher at the laboratory for advanced methods of multidimensional data analysis at Lobachevsky University, professor at the University of Leicester (UK) Alexander Gorban, the leading researcher at the laboratory for advanced methods of multidimensional data analysis at Lobachevsky University, professor at University of Leicester (UK) Ivan Tyukin, and the senior researcher at the laboratory of neural network technologies at Lobachevsky University, professor at the Complutense University (Madrid, Spain) Valery Makarov, sum up a broad discussion in the journal Physics of Life Reviews. A unified approach to these problems was proposed in the article by the same authors, "The unreasonable effectiveness of small neural ensembles in high-dimensional brain", which was published earlier in the same journal and triggered a wide discussion. According to the authors, the heart of the matter is in the geometry of multidimensional spaces. One of the discussion participants, the famous expert in neuroscience R. Quian Quiroga, proposed to call the new approach using the authors' initials: the GMT approach.

Electricity can be designed to kill (the electric chair) or save lives (a home on the grid in an inhospitable climate). The same is true for artificial intelligence (AI), which is an enabling layer of technology much like electricity. AI systems have already been designed to help or hurt humans. A group at UCSF recently built an algorithm to save lives through improved suicide prevention, while China has deployed facial recognition AI systems to subjugate ethnic minorities and political dissenters. Therefore, it's impossible to assign valence to AI broadly.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp has designs on making robot helpers for your home, and has enlisted a Japanese startup that specializes in artificial intelligence to jump-start its plan. Japan's biggest automaker and Tokyo-based Preferred Networks Inc will carry out joint research to develop so-called service robots that are "capable of learning in typical living environments", the companies said in statements on Wednesday. The two firms have already been collaborating on driverless vehicles since 2014. Eighty-year-old manufacturing giant Toyota is trying to transform itself and adapt to technology, such as ride-hailing and automated driving, that is disrupting the auto industry. Toyota sees robots as part of that effort, particularly in Japan, where it aims to have them in homes and hospitals to support one of the world's fastest ageing populations.

A team of scientists is heading to the Arctic on a research mission deemed too dangerous for humans to go alone. The team will use an underwater robotic vehicle (AUV) to help them understand the extent of melting from glaciers. The Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) in Oban, will send the AUV to one of the most hostile environments on the planet. The robot will gather data and take measurements such as temperature and salinity from as deep as 100m (330ft). It will help scientists learn more about the effect of meltwater on a process known as "calving", which can cause large pieces of ice to break off the glacier edge.

Over the weekend a Saildrone -- a 23-foot long uncrewed marine robot -- withstood the tempestuous seas around Antarctica to complete the first-ever circumnavigation of the continent by a drone. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists collaborated with autonomous vehicle specialists, Saildrone, to test whether the seafaring robot could survive the rough waters, and make successful scientific observations. NOAA needs to gauge how much carbon dioxide -- the potent greenhouse gas now amassing in the atmosphere -- the southern seas are absorbing from the air, and it hopes Saildrones can help. Overall, the oceans soak up a huge amount of the CO2 that humanity emits into the atmosphere (some 30 percent), which has substantially curbed Earth's accelerating temperature rise. Now, understanding how much carbon the oceans will likely soak up in the future is critical to grasping how Earth's increasingly disrupted climate will transform society and the natural world.