Paying attention to the "rise of the machines" increasingly means scanning the skies for things other than conventional aircraft or birds. But what if the line between the two begins to blur and autonomous planes can somehow be taught to mimic nature? That's the hope of researchers from Microsoft who are using artificial intelligence to keep a sailplane aloft without the help of a motor. The researchers have found that through a complex set of AI algorithms, they can get their 16 1/2-foot, 12 1/2-pound aircraft to soar much like a hawk would, by identifying things like air temperature and wind direction to locate thermals -- invisible columns of air that rise due to heat. "Birds do this seamlessly, and all they're doing is harnessing nature. And they do it with a peanut-sized brain," Ashish Kapoor, a principal researcher at Microsoft, said in the report.

Solutions that can generate accurate estimates of counts are in demand, whether it is for tallying the number of people in a video frame, counting the number of animals of an endangered species, estimating the number of objects or shapes in a picture, or for a variety of similar industry applications. Traditional crowd counting methods and models that use detection or regression-based approaches have been plagued by challenges such as occlusion, non-uniform distribution, perspective distortion, camera angles and background clutter. They are not robust and often fail with even simple changes to the planned scenarios. Deep learning based crowd counting solutions offer an excellent recourse to such problems. Cascaded CNN's use density-based estimations to preserve the spatial information and can localize the count, in addition to estimating the overall tally.

Leaders at companies and governmental organizations around the world have accurately identified that artificial intelligence (AI) ethics issues can cause concern. In June 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai posted seven objectives for AI applications, which included statements that asserted that "we believe AI should avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias" and "we believe AI should be accountable to people." Several companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, Apple, and others, have joined the Partnership on AI. The MIT Media Lab and Harvard Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society launched the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative in 2017. Facebook backed a new Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence at the Technical University of Munich in early 2019.

Thanks to 4D knitting, cuddly soft toys are getting a robotic upgrade. Lea Albaugh at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA and colleagues have used knitting machines to create moving children's toys and other objects. The knitted items include a toy rabbit that gives hugs when pressed in the stomach, a jumper with a self-moving sleeve, and a lampshade that changes shape. Silk strands are knitted into the fabric as part of the process. The strands function as tendons, enabling the objects to move in certain ways when they are pulled, such as curving or forming an S-shaped bend.

Clever men are more fertile and have more children than others, research has found. The findings suggest that those with higher IQs are considered more attractive by women. In addition, being intelligent leads to status in society and more wealth - extra factors as to why eggheads are considered'a catch'. The research overturns previous findings - that larger families are the preserve of people who are not blessed with higher IQs. Clever men are more fertile and have more children than others, research has found.

One of the most radioactive places on Earth has been mapped in unprecedented detail, thanks to a team of British scientists equipped with the latest in drone technology. Chernobyl's Red Forest remains highly irradiated 33 years on from the catastrophic accident at the number-4 nuclear reactor. Experts led by the UK's National Centre for Nuclear Robotics and the University of Bristol used drones fitted with custom-built radiation detectors to create 3D maps of the area, some of which lies just 1,600ft (500m) from the power plant. Their efforts revealed previously undetected radiation'hotspots', where radioactive material from the fallout has gathered over the years. Around 70,000 tourists visited the Chernobyl exclusion zone last year, which stretches over 1,000 square miles (2,600 sq km).

Use of robots in construction will rapidly expand in the coming years with increasing speed, efficiency, safety, and profits, a new report claims. The industry is'ripe for disruption' after relying on manual labour for so long, according to AI consulting firm Tractica. It cited the recent adoption of robotic technology by a number of companies as the beginning of a growth curve. Projections place the value of the construction robotics industry in the region of $226 million (£173m) by 2025, a 10 fold increase compared to 2018. Wile the majority of demand is likely to come from construction sites such as demolition, a number of more specialised functions such as 3D printing, also face mass automation.

The U.S. says it will have the world's fastest supercomputer ready in just two years. The U.S. Department of Energy says it has signed a contract with Cray Inc. and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to build a machine called Frontier, capable of computing at 1.5 exaflops -- a level 50 times faster than current supercomputers. The department says its endeavor, which entails a $600 million investment for the development of technology and systems, will help yield new advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and more. Frontier will take computers U.S. computers into the exascale, and will be as powerful as the next 160 fastest supercomputers combined'Frontier's record-breaking performance will ensure our country's ability to lead the world in science that improves the lives and economic prosperity of all Americans and the entire world,' said U.S. Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry. 'Frontier will accelerate innovation in AI by giving American researchers world-class data and computing resources to ensure the next great inventions are made in the United States.' According to the U.S. Department of Energy, Frontier, which will be housed at a laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, will be able to exceed one quintillion calculations per second, as reported by The Verge -- that's as much processing power as the next 160 fastest supercomputer combined, said AMD.

A MailOnline investigation into how much personal information Alexa is recording and storing on its users has revealed the smart assistant eavesdrops on housemates' gossip, private conversations about insurance policies - and even the family dog. Amazon insists Alexa can only be activated when the allocated'wake word' is uttered - being Alexa, Computer or Echo. The tech giant - along with Apple's Siri and, until recently, Google's Assistant - says it saves every single interaction a person has with the device to improve the service - with some'unintentional' snippets also being recorded if it mistakes another noise for a'wake word'. However, evidence seen by MailOnline shows this cannot be the case, or the process is fundamentally flawed, as a host of sounds and conversations were recorded without a clear or legitimate wake word being uttered - some when there was not even a human nearby. A MailOnline investigation into these'secret' archives has revealed an eerie snippets of users' friends, families and children being recorded while they were completely unaware - and without a clear or legitimate wake word being uttered.

During the last decade, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become the de facto standard for various Computer Vision and Machine Learning operations. CNNs are feed-forward Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) with alternating convolutional and subsampling layers. Deep 2D CNNs with many hidden layers and millions of parameters have the ability to learn complex objects and patterns providing that they can be trained on a massive size visual database with ground-truth labels. With a proper training, this unique ability makes them the primary tool for various engineering applications for 2D signals such as images and video frames. Yet, this may not be a viable option in numerous applications over 1D signals especially when the training data is scarce or application-specific. To address this issue, 1D CNNs have recently been proposed and immediately achieved the state-of-the-art performance levels in several applications such as personalized biomedical data classification and early diagnosis, structural health monitoring, anomaly detection and identification in power electronics and motor-fault detection. Another major advantage is that a real-time and low-cost hardware implementation is feasible due to the simple and compact configuration of 1D CNNs that perform only 1D convolutions (scalar multiplications and additions). This paper presents a comprehensive review of the general architecture and principals of 1D CNNs along with their major engineering applications, especially focused on the recent progress in this field. Their state-of-the-art performance is highlighted concluding with their unique properties. The benchmark datasets and the principal 1D CNN software used in those applications are also publically shared in a dedicated website.