I pour a cup of coffee, sharpen my pencil, and get ready to create. I've dusted off a half-conceived novel outline I abandoned three years ago, but this time I'm not waiting for my muse to intervene. Instead I hit the play button on the Creative Thinker's Toolkit, an audio lecture series from The Great Courses that I've downloaded on my computer. Gerard Puccio, a psychologist who heads the International Center for Studies in Creativity at SUNY Buffalo State, and the voice of the toolkit, tells me to engage in "forced relationships." Choose a random object, he instructs. I scan my office and settle on a bag of Skittles left over from Halloween. Next, he says, describe the object's attributes. "Sweet, round, colorful, chewy," I write. I start to draw more fruitful connections.

HONG KONG - Entrepreneur Tony Verb is on a mission to promote technology that can help make cities greener and smarter in China's Greater Bay Area, now being shaped as a low-carbon megalopolis. Hong Kong-based Verb, co-founder of the investment firm GreaterBay Ventures & Advisors, plans to back urban tech businesses working on autonomous e-vehicles, flying taxis, artificial intelligence, robotics and clean energy. Verb is betting on China's master plan to develop the Pearl River Delta into a sustainable innovation hub, which he believes will serve as "a great case study" for the world's cities. In February, Beijing announced it would foster links between nine cities in Guangdong province and the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao to forge the world's biggest urban area, with 70 million people. Under the Greater Bay Area (GBA) plan, each city has a different role, but the blueprint is centered on developing the delta in a high-tech way that also preserves its ecology.

Iranian state television published images on its website Friday morning that claimed show debris from a U.S. military surveillance drone the country shot down Thursday. The pictures appear to show the skin of the U.S. Navy RQ-4A Global Hawk, which was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. The downing of the drone came just days after the administration blamed Iran for attacks on two oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, adding to tensions in the region. The United States made a last-minute decision to call off retaliatory strikes against Iran in response to the downing Thursday of a Navy drone that Washington said was over international airspace, a source told Fox News early Friday. But few details about the aborted mission and the circumstances that led to the reversal were available.

Because the plug isn't reversible, connecting a USB device to a computer can often be a frustrating experience. Because the plug isn't reversible, connecting a USB device to a computer can often be a frustrating experience. Your files are done syncing, and you go to plug in your thumb drive. Humiliated and discouraged, you flip it and try again. How could this be possible?

Europe is gearing up to launch an Artificial Intelligence Public Private Partnership (AI PPP) that brings together AI, data, and robotics. At its core is a drive to lead the world in the development and deployment of trustworthy AI based on EU fundamental rights, principles and values. The effort is being led by two well-established associations representing over 400 European organisations from Industry and Research: the Big Data Value Association and euRobotics. A first step in this process saw the launch of a consultation document in Brussels last week entitled "Strategic Research, Innovation and Deployment Agenda for an AI PPP". The strategy document comes on the backdrop of international competition, with every country vying to take the lead in AI.

Still founder-led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Richard Fairbank, Capital One is on a mission to help our customers succeed by bringing ingenuity, simplicity, and humanity to banking. We measure our efforts by the success our customers enjoy and the advocacy they exhibit. We are succeeding because they are succeeding. Guided by our shared values, we thrive in an environment where collaboration and openness are valued. We believe that innovation is powered by perspective and that teamwork and respect for each other lead to superior results.

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have developed an interactive tool that, for the first time, lets users see and control how automated machine-learning systems work. The aim is to build confidence in these systems and find ways to improve them. Designing a machine-learning model for a certain task -- such as image classification, disease diagnoses, and stock market prediction -- is an arduous, time-consuming process. Experts first choose from among many different algorithms to build the model around. Then, they manually tweak "hyperparameters" -- which determine the model's overall structure -- before the model starts training.

Your Data is a Graph!

Another day, another deepfake: but this time they can sing. New research from Imperial College in London and Samsung's AI research center in the UK shows how a single photo and audio file can be used to generate a singing or talking video portrait. Like previous deepfake programs we've seen, the researchers uses machine learning to generate their output. And although the fakes are far from 100 percent realistic, the results are amazing considering how little data is needed. Getting a bit wackier, why not have everyone's favorite mad monk, Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, belting out the Beyoncé classic'Halo'?

DALLAS, June 21, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to a new market report published by Lucintel, the future of the global artificial intelligence market looks attractive with opportunities in the healthcare, security, retail, automotive, manufacturing, and financial technology (fintech) sectors. The global artificial intelligence market is expected to reach $71 billion by 2024 with a CAGR of 26% from 2019 to 2024. The major drivers for this market are increasing demand for virtual assistance for easy accessibility of services and growing adoption of cloud-based technology. In this market, different types of artificial intelligence such as machine learning, natural learning processing, and others are used as technology. On the basis of comprehensive research, Lucintel forecasts that the machine learning technology will remain the largest segment and it is also expected to witness the highest growth over the forecast period due to increasing adoption of this technology in the autonomous applications and growing consumer preference for IoT-enabled devices.