Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a topic of intense research recently due to their powerful capability in high-dimensional classification and regression tasks for graph-structured data. However, as GNNs typically define the graph convolution by the orthonormal basis for the graph Laplacian, they suffer from high computational cost when the graph size is large. This paper introduces the Haar basis, a sparse and localized orthonormal system for graph, constructed from a coarse-grained chain on the graph. The graph convolution under Haar basis --- the Haar convolution can be defined accordingly for GNNs. The sparsity and locality of the Haar basis allow Fast Haar Transforms (FHTs) on graph, by which a fast evaluation of Haar convolution between the graph signals and the filters can be achieved. We conduct preliminary experiments on GNNs equipped with Haar convolution, which can obtain state-of-the-art results for a variety of geometric deep learning tasks.

Google is potentially creating a search engine for toddlers, despite recent privacy scandals. The tech giant has filed a European patent, entitled Gamifying Voice Search Experience for Children, which gives it exclusive rights to develop the concept. Aimed at nursery-age youngsters, the prospective product would use a child-friendly bubble-interface to engage with infants. This would be separate to Google Assistant, which already allows people to conduct voice-activated searches on their devices. However, education experts have raised concerns over the risk of potential privacy violations, such as those associated with Amazon's Echo Device, plus the dangers of making children addicted to technology.

LOS ANGELES - Microsoft on Monday announced a $1 billion investment in an OpenAI ethical artificial intelligence project backed by Tesla's Elon Musk and Amazon. The partnership will be devoted to developing advanced AI models on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform while adhering to "shared principles on ethics and trust," the companies said in a joint release. OpenAI and Microsoft expressed a vision of "artificial general intelligence" (AGI) working with people to help solve daunting problems such as climate change. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said the goal of the effort is to allow artificial intelligence to be "deployed safely and securely and that its economic benefits are widely distributed." Microsoft will become the preferred partner for commercializing new "supercomputing" artificial intelligence technologies developed as part of the initiative.

My engineer friend George is taking a break to work on himself. Personally, I've always liked him the way he is, but he insists that he could and should be better. Did I mention he's an engineer? So he spends his time taking esoteric self-help classes and sitting around New York, watching his fellow humans help themselves to the joys of summer life. Occasionally, people come up to him and chat.

Personal relationships have always been the lifeblood of wealth management, but the pressure to intensify personalization has increased dramatically, according to Capgemini's most recent World Wealth Report. In fact, there is a "measurable correlation linking high-net-worth clients' personal connection to their firm and advisor and the financial performance of firms," according to the report. Despite a dip in investment performance last year, 88% of wealthy clients in the U.S. and Canada with investable assets of $1 million or more said they still had faith in their advisors, Capgemini found. "Personal connections are still the differentiating factor," says Chirag Thakral, an analyst with Capgemini. What do wealth managers need to do to strengthen their ties to clients in the digital age?

Cloud-native architectures help businesses reduce application development time and increase agility, at a lower cost. Although flexibility and portability are key drivers for adoption, a cloud-native structure brings with it a new challenge: managing security and performance at scale. They have a dissolved perimeter, meaning that once a traditional perimeter is breached, lateral movement of attacks (such as malware or ransomware) often goes undetected across data centers and/or cloud environments. Sorting through interconnected data from thousands of services across millions of short-lived containers to understand a specific security or compliance violation in time is akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Developers are failing to bake security in early, opting instead to add it on at the end, and ultimately, they are increasing the chance of potential exposures in the infrastructure.

Neuromorphic computing has received less fanfare of late than quantum computing whose mystery has captured public attention and which seems to have generated more efforts (academic, government, and commercial) but whose payoff also seems more distant. Intel's introduction this week of Pohoiki Beach – an 8-million-neuron, neuromorphic system using 64 Loihi research chips – brings some (needed) attention back to neuromorphic technology. The newest system will be available to Intel's roughly 60 neuromorphic ecosystem partners and represents a significant scaling up of its development platform with more to come; Intel reportedly plans to introduce a 768-chip, 100-million-neuron system (Pohoiki Springs) near the end of 2019. "Researchers can now efficiently scale up novel neural-inspired algorithms – such as sparse coding, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and path planning – that can learn and adapt based on data inputs. Pohoiki Beach represents a major milestone in Intel's neuromorphic research, laying the foundation for Intel Labs to scale the architecture to 100 million neurons later this year," according to the official announcement.

The UK is planning to harness AI to help determine the condition of roads and where investment should be prioritised. British drivers are well-accustomed to poor road conditions, especially potholes and the long delays in getting them fixed (one ingenious man has even come up with an innovative way of getting the council to fix them faster...) To be fair to councils, keeping all the roads in top condition is expensive. Factors like minimising disruption along busy routes, and planning diversions, must also be considered. Fortunately, AI is beginning to help automate this automotive dilemma. The Department for Transport (DfT) has awarded £2m in funding to a project using AI to examine the condition of roads, forming part of a wider £350 million funding package.

Today's AI systems make weighty decisions regarding loans, medical diagnoses, parole, and more. They're also opaque systems, which makes them susceptible to bias. In the absence of transparency, we will never know why a 41-year-old white male and an 18-year-old black woman who commit similar crimes are assessed as "low risk" versus "high risk" by AI software. Oren Etzioni is CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and a professor in the Allen School of Computer Science at the University of Washington. Tianhui Michael Li is founder and president of Pragmatic Data, a data science and AI training company.

Few things reveal the limits of someone's problem-solving skills faster than a Rubik's Cube, the multicolored, three-dimensional puzzle that has befuddled so many since the 1970s. Though the cube has furrowed countless human brows over the years, it's not much of a challenge for an emerging group of hyper-intelligent machines, as it turns out. This week, the University of California at Irvine announced that an artificial intelligence system solved the puzzle in just over a second, besting the current human world record by more than two seconds. The system, known as DeepCubeA -- a reinforcement-learning algorithm programmed by UCI computer scientists and mathematicians -- solved the puzzle without prior knowledge of the game or coaching from its human handlers, according to the university. The feat is even more impressive considering that there are billions of potential moves available to a Rubik's Cube player, with the puzzle's six sides and nine sections, but only one goal: each of the cube's six sides displaying a solid color.