Imagine showing a photo taken through a storefront window to someone who has never opened her eyes before, and asking her to point to what's in the reflection and what's in the store. To her, everything in the photo would just be a big jumble. Computers can perform image separations, but to do it well, they typically require handcrafted rules or many, many explicit demonstrations: here's an image, and here are its component parts. New research finds that a machine-learning algorithm given just one image can discover patterns that allow it to separate the parts you want from the parts you don't. The multi-purpose method might someday benefit any area where computer vision is used, including forensics, wildlife observation, and artistic photo enhancement.

Sitting in a hotel lobby in Tangier, Morocco, Charity Wayua laughs as she recounts her journey to the city for a conference on technology and innovation. After starting her trip in Nairobi, Kenya, where she leads one of IBM's two research centers in Africa, she had to fly past her destination for a layover in Dubai, double back to Casablanca, and then take a three-and-a-half-hour drive to Tangier. What would have been a seven- to eight-hour direct flight was instead a nearly 24-hour odyssey. This is not unusual, she says. The hassle of traveling within the region isn't the only thing making things difficult for Africa's research community: the difficulty of traveling out of the region has often left its researchers out of the international conversation.

With images aggregated from social media platforms, dating sites, or even CCTV footage of a trip to the local coffee shop, companies could be using your face to train a sophisticated facial recognition software. As reported by the New York Times, among the sometimes massive data sets that researchers use to teach artificially intelligent software to recognize faces is a database collected by Stanford researchers called Brainwash. More than 10,000 images of customers at a cafe in San Francisco were collected in 2014 without their knowledge. OKCupid and photo-sharing platforms like Flickr are among for researchers looking to load their databases up with images that help train facial recognition software. That same database was then made available to other academics, including some in China at the National University of Defense Technology.

MANCHESTER, ENGLAND - Mathematician Alan Turing, whose cracking of a Nazi code helped the Allies to win World War II but who committed suicide after being convicted for homosexuality, will appear on the Bank of England's new £50 banknote, the central bank said Monday. "As the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, as well as war hero, Alan Turing's contributions were far-ranging and path-breaking," BoE Gov. Mark Carney, who took the final decision on the character selection, said. "Turing is a giant on whose shoulders so many now stand." Turing's electro-mechanical machine, a forerunner of modern computers, unraveled the Enigma code used by Nazi Germany and helped give the Allies an advantage in the naval struggle for control of the Atlantic. His work at Bletchley Park, Britain's wartime code-breaking center, was credited with shortening the war and saving many thousands of lives.

Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, speaks in front of the concept design for the new Bank of England fifty pound banknote, featuring mathematician and scientist Alan Turing, during the presentation at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, north-west England on July 15, 2019. Alan Turing, a mathematician and codebreaker who deciphered German World War II messages, will appear on Britain's new 50 pound note. The Bank of England made the announcement Monday that Turing, who died in 1954, would appear on the currency and some of his work would also adorn the note. The action continues the posthumous accolades for the scientist, who after the war was charged with gross indecency after admitting to having a homosexual relationship, which was illegal at the time in Britain. To avoid imprisonment, he chose chemical castration with female hormones.

Alexa-enabled devices like the Echo or Echo Dot can be used to control smart home products such as the Ring Alarm Kit. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. Our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. Prime Day is a great opportunity to find money-saving deals on smart home products that can be controlled using Amazon Alexa on your Echo device. From smart doorbells to pressure cookers, here are the best Alexa-compatible Prime Day deals of 2019.

If you want to use certain Google features, you'll get a notification urging you to turn the feature on. Billionaire investor Peter Thiel said Sunday that the FBI and the CIA should investigate if Google has been infiltrated by Chinese intelligence, according to a report from Axios. Thiel, a Facebook board member, was speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. and his speech focused on three questions that should be presented to the tech giant, Axios said. "Number one, how many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for AI (artificial intelligence)?" Thiel reportedly asked. "Number two, does Google's senior management consider itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated by Chinese intelligence?"

Identity access management is at a crossroads. Organizations want to modernize legacy identity infrastructure by implementing a more flexible, mobile-ready identity management system without disrupting security. At identity and security conference Identiverse, the gap between legacy systems and contemporary identity access management systems was apparent among guests and during the main keynote, given by Andre Durand, CEO and founder at Ping Identity in Denver. Ping Identity was a conference sponsor. In this Q&A, Durand talks about common challenges associated with identity access management, what artificial intelligence can bring to identity management and how managing identity within a workforce has changed as end users become more mobile.

As the world descends into geopolitical competition, other powers increasingly challenge European countries' ability to defend their interests and values. Russia is willing to weaponise energy supplies, cyber capabilities, and disinformation; China invests strategically and uses state capitalism to skew the market; Turkey instrumentalises migration; Saudi Arabia leverages its energy resources. And the Trump administration is willing to exploit European dependence on the transatlantic security alliance and the dollar to achieve short-term policy goals. What unites these disparate powers is their unwillingness to separate the functioning of the global economy from political and security competition. The EU has the market power, defence spending, and diplomatic heft to end this vulnerability and restore sovereignty to its member states.

One of Ayush Alag's earliest memories is of biting into a chocolate bar with cashew nuts and suddenly feeling his throat get itchy. For most of his childhood, the Santa Clara, California resident avoided eating anything with cashews and other nuts that caused irritation as best as he could. By his middle school years, he and his parents wanted to know for sure: did he have a serious food allergy, like 32 million other Americans, or was it just a food sensitivity? They sought the help of an allergist, Joseph Hernandez of Stanford University. Hernandez told them that the difference between an allergy and a food sensitivity is huge.