Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. In the world of artificial intelligence & machine learning (AI & ML), black- and white-box categorization of models and algorithms refers to their interpretability. That is, given a model trained to map data inputs to outputs (e.g. And just as the software testing dichotomy is high-level behavior vs low-level logic, only white-box AI methods can be readily interpreted to see the logic behind models' predictions. In recent years with machine learning taking over new industries and applications, where the number of users far outnumber experts that grok the models and algorithms, the conversation around interpretability has become an important one.

By embedding engineered bacteria into the fingers of a robot arm, researchers have created a biohybrid bot that can "taste" -- and they think it could lead to a future in which robots are better equipped to respond to the world around them. For their study, which was published in the journal Science Robotics on Wednesday, a team from the University of California, Davis, and Carnegie Mellon University engineered E. coli bacteria to produce a fluorescent protein when it encountered the chemical IPTG. They then placed the engineered bacteria into wells built into a robot arm's flexible grippers. Finally, they covered the wells with a porous membrane that would keep the bacteria in place while letting liquids reach the cells. To test the system, the researchers had the arm reach into a water bath that sometimes contained IPTG. If the chemical was present, the bacteria would glow, and this light would trigger electronic circuits to send a signal to the gripper's control unit, letting it know not to place an item in the bath.

A Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare expert panel has given the green light to remotely-controlled surgery using medical robots, opening the way for patients to get operations by highly-skilled doctors far away. The panel approved a draft amendment to the guidelines for online medical treatment on June 28 lifting the ban on robotic telesurgery. In response, medical societies concerned will set guidelines on detailed prerequisites for the operations, aiming for practical implementation within the coming years. Under the scheme, telesurgeries will be performed using the U.S.-made da Vinci Surgical System. The system has multiple arms equipped with endoscopes, scalpels, and other surgical necessities, and will even stitch up incisions.

Brian Wong - Kiip, CEO & Co-founder: So in 50 years I think the world will, in terms of technology, really change and really this concept I call proximity of tech - which is how close the technology is to your body. And right now where it's kind of silly, we hold things and we wear things and it's kind of at our hands, right? And we might put it on over our faces but the whole point is just getting it into our eyeballs, into our ears, into our stomachs. Ingestibles are already a thing, it's crazy, you literally ingest these pills these robot pills that can obviously see what you're eating and all these things and all your caloric intake, it's amazing. And then you know you've heard of startups like Magic Leap where they're doing AR for your world; I should just be able to load my emails then like do this, then do this, that's literally what will happen I think in 50 years, everything will just come inside and that to me is really, really exciting.

If you're a fan of Ubisoft's popular Watch Dogs video game series – a 5-year-old action-adventure franchise played out in real-world cities like Chicago and San Francisco – you'll no doubt want to get your hands on the next installment, slated for March 5, 2020, for PC, Xbox One, PS4, and Google Stadia. "Watch Dogs: Legion," which earned several "Best of Show" awards at the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo, the video game confab known as E3, looks to be the most ambitious title in the series to date. Is Facebook listening to me?: Why those ads appear after you talk about things One of the most ambitious games of 2020, Ubisoft's'Watch Dogs: Legion' takes place in a post-Brexit London, which has become an all-seeing surveillance state. The following is what you need to know about the game – based on what I saw (and played) at E3, along with some details provided by Joel Burgess, world director at Ubisoft Toronto, which is taking the reins on this title with portions of the game being developed simultaneously at Ubisoft studios in Montreal, Paris, Newcastle, England; Bucharest, Romania; and Kiev, Ukraine. One of the most ambitious games of 2020, Ubisoft's'Watch Dogs: Legion' takes place in a post-Brexit London, which has become an all-seeing surveillance state. The game takes place in a near-future London, at a time when people are being oppressed by Big Brother-esque surveillance and a corrupt private military corporation, Albion, patrolling the streets.

An Echo Dot owner claims that Amazon's Alexa assistant has started calling him a's*******' whenever he asks the personal assistant to play him music. Micheal Slade, 29, was reportedly shocked when his Echo Dot speaker began to swear at him following his cancellation of his Amazon Prime subscription. The incident has reportedly left Amazon engineers puzzled -- with the tech firm offering Mr Slade gift cards and a year of free Prime membership in compensation. Software is available for the Echo Dot speaker that can make Alexa curse -- but it is unclear whether someone might have deliberately uploaded this to the device. An Echo Dot owner claims that Amazon's Alexa assistant has started calling him a's*******' whenever he asks the personal assistant to play him music Online business owner and Cwmbran, South Wales resident Michael Slade, 29, said that the trouble began the day after called Amazon to cancel his subscription to their Prime subscription service.

Neural networks are behind technologies that are revolutionizing our daily lives, such as face recognition, web searching, and medical diagnosis. These general problem solvers reach their solutions by being adapted or "trained" to capture correlations in real-world data. Having seen the success of neural networks, physicists are asking if the tools might also be useful in areas ranging from high-energy physics to quantum computing [1]. Four research groups now report on using neural network tools to tackle one of the most computationally challenging problems in condensed-matter physics--simulating the behavior of an open many-body quantum system [2–5]. This scenario describes a collection of particles--such as the qubits in a quantum computer--that both interact with each other and exchange energy with their environment.

Jeremy Stanley is giving a talk, "How Instacart is Using AI to Create the Most Efficient Shoppers Ever," at the O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference in San Francisco, September 17-20, 2017. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Jeremy Stanley, VP of data science at Instacart, a popular grocery delivery service that is expanding rapidly. As Stanley describes it, Instacart operates a four-sided marketplace comprised of retail stores, products within the stores, shoppers assigned to the stores, and customers who order from Instacart.

Casinos in China's Macau territory have started to deploy high-tech surveillance tools to keep an eye on their customers. But they're not worried about security. Rather, the casinos use artificial intelligence and facial recognition to spot which customers are about to hand over the most money, according to The Los Angeles Times. In a bizarre real-world version of big data analytics, sophisticated algorithms can separate casual players to more heavy-duty gamblers, which the casino can then target with free perks to keep them playing. The AI system can track players who are more likely to make high-risk bets -- especially those who will continue to do so as they lose money -- as it monitors their activity in the casino.

For the first time, astrophysicists have used artificial intelligence techniques to generate complex 3-D simulations of the universe. The results are so fast, accurate and robust that even the creators aren't sure how it all works. "We can run these simulations in a few milliseconds, while other'fast' simulations take a couple of minutes," says study co-author Shirley Ho, a group leader at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City and an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University. The speed and accuracy of the project, called the Deep Density Displacement Model, or D3M for short, wasn't the biggest surprise to the researchers. The real shock was that D3M could accurately simulate how the universe would look if certain parameters were tweaked--such as how much of the cosmos is dark matter--even though the model had never received any training data where those parameters varied.