A security, crime-fighting robot allegedly hit a 16-month boy on the head and ran over him at a shopping mall in Palo Alto. Tiffany Teng told KGO-TV that she and her family were visiting the Stanford Shopping Center on Thursday when the robot, also known as an autonomous data machine, suddenly hit her son's head and caused him to fall to the ground. While still on the ground, the robot ran over his right foot, which became swollen, she told the news station. "He was crying like crazy and he never cries. He seldom cries," Teng told KGO-TV, pointing out her son also suffered a scrape. A security guard told her the same thing apparently happened to another child.

Eye in the Sky Superbly acted, this nail-biter starring Helen Mirren, the late Alan Rickman and Aaron Paul is a fully involving war drama about the new rules of engagement. Hunt for the Wilderpeople This wonderful New Zealand film has a gently absurdist quality, a simultaneously sweet and subversive sensibility all its own, mixing warmth, adventure and comedy in ways that consistently surprise. The Innocents Anne Fontaine's post-World War II drama involving a Polish convent and a French female doctor proves yet again that though moral and spiritual questions may not sound spellbinding, they often provide the most absorbing movie experiences. The Jungle Book By turns sweetly amusing and scarily unnerving, crammed with story, song and computer-generated visual splendors, this revisiting of the old Rudyard Kipling tales aims to be a model of modern crowd-pleasing entertainment. Life, Animated A remarkable documentary about how Disney animated features changed the life of a young autistic boy in a deep and profound way.

The second season of the beloved Mr. Robot is here, and Willa Paskin wonders how long the "aesthetically polished and intellectually incensed" show can continue to critique capitalism. "[Showrunner Sam] Esmail, having created a cult TV show, is expressing some skepticism about television, a medium that, for much of its life, existed to sell audiences soap," Paskin observes. Robot is like an iPhone with an'I hate Apple' ring-tone: both are beautifully designed, powerful products that are superficially conflicted about being beautifully designed, powerful products."

This guest post was written by Daniel Emaasit, a Ph.D Student of Transportation Engineering at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Daniel's research interests include the development of probabilistic machine learning methods for high-dimensional data, with applications to urban mobility, transport planning, highway safety, & traffic operations. Don't miss Daniel's webinar on Model-Based Machine Learning and Probabilistic Programming using RStan, scheduled for July 20, 2016 at 11:00 AM PST. This blog post follows my journey from traditional statistical modeling to Machine Learning (ML) and introduces a new paradigm of ML called Model-Based Machine Learning (Bishop, 2013). Model-Based Machine Learning may be of particular interest to statisticians, engineers, or related professionals looking to implement machine learning in their research or practice. During my Masters in Transportation Engineering (2011-2013), I used traditional statistical modeling in my research to study transportation related problems such as highway crashes.

Artificial intelligence is on the lips of every influencer in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg is building his own artificially intelligent butler, and Elon Musk recently launched an AI company. But AI is on the rise, and it's already driving change in retail and consumer businesses. Several aspects of AI have advanced significantly in recent years, particularly speech recognition and text understanding. Speech recognition, also known as voice understanding, interprets spoken words and matches them with concepts, tasks, and people.

Japan is famously wary of immigration, fearing that foreign workers will undermine job security and upset familiar ways of life. But there is one kind of industrious interloper that is greeted more enthusiastically in Japan than in any other country. Robots or "immigrants from the future", as my colleague Oliver Morton calls them, are unusually well assimilated into Japanese society. Japan's obsession with robots is well documented. Foreign journalists seem to like Japan's affection for robots almost as much as Japan likes robots.

With the general availability of the "Knights Landing" Xeon Phi many core processors from Intel last month, some of the largest supercomputing labs on the planet are getting their first taste of what the future style of high performance computing could look like for the rest of us. We are not suggesting that the Xeon Phi processor will be the only compute engine that will be deployed to run traditional simulation and modeling applications as well as data analytics, graph processing, and deep learning algorithms. But we are suggesting that this style of compute engine – it is more than a processor since it includes high bandwidth memory and fabric interconnect adapters on a single package – is what the future looks like. And that goes for Knights family processors and co-processors as well as the "Pascal" and "Volta" accelerators made by Nvidia, the Sparc64-XIfx and ARM chips that will be used in the used in the Post-K system in Japan made by Fujitsu, the Matrix2000 DSP accelerator being created by China for one of its pre-exascale systems, or the CPU-GPU hybrids based on its "Zen" Opterons that AMD is cooking up for supercomputing systems in the United States and, with licensing partners, in China. During the recent ISC16 supercomputing conference in Frankfurt, Germany, Intel gathered up the executives in charge of some of the largest supercomputing facilities on the planet who are also – not coincidentally, but absolutely intentionally – also early adopters of the Knights Landing Xeon Phi and, in some cases, the Omni-Path interconnect that is a kicker to Intel's True Scale InfiniBand networking.

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a form of artificial intelligence that adds more fuel to the chatbot fire. When users engage in a conversation powered by NLU, the results are generally better. You can change your mind about an original request or even interrupt yourself mid-sentence, and you can use unusual words or phrases. The NLU engine is more like a neural network that understands true intent and meaning, and it can understand meaning from natural words and phrases. Now, a company called Pat is ready to show the world how users can benefit.

Dyson has been teasing a robot vacuum for more than a decade. Two years ago, it finally unveiled one--but it wasn't available in the U.S. Today in New York, Dyson introduced the 360 Eye robot vacuum cleaner to Americans. Already on sale in Japan, the Eye will finally be available to U.S consumers on August 1 at an initial price of 999. With that kind of a price tag, Dyson is showing how confident it is in the 360 Eye's engineering. We've been following this automatic floor cleaner since IFA Berlin 2014.

A mall security robot has effectively redefined the term artificial intelligence after it barreled into a toddler last week at a northern California shopping center, running him over and leaving him with various bumps and bruises. The robot, weighing in at 300 pounds and standing at 5 feet, is typically an attraction for patrons at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto. But this time around it was more of an attractive nuisance, the 16-month-old boy's mother told KGO-TV, the local ABC affiliate. "The robot hit my son's head and he fell down facing down on the floor and the robot did not stop and it kept moving forward," said Tiffany Teng said. The runaway robot caused the young boy to experience a sore head, swelling in a foot and bruising on a leg.