Robot" begins a second season on USA on Wednesday night with a two-part opener broadcast back to back. A conspiracy thriller set in the present day – it's still 2015 on the series' clock – it's science fiction in the sense that it involves technology, but not in the quasi-supernatural manner of flying saucers, Godzillas, time travel or synthetic human or mutant superheroes and such. Still, it shares with much sci-fi a sense of the ordinary world pushed a click toward the uncanny. Into every generation a confused and disaffected hero is born. Robot" it's Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), a cyberwhiz who was recruited – Season 1 spoilers ahead – to the underground hacking collective fsociety by a person (Christian Slater) who turned out to be his father, who turned out to be dead, a figment of his imagination projected wholly into his world, though invisible to everyone else – a "Sixth Sense" move, dramatically. Robot' season premiere hit online three days early, then got pulled back » Of course, imaginary characters have as much substance in fiction as "actual" ones, so things do get muddled, and I would not be surprised to learn that I have got things in this show upside-down or backward.

Swagbot can herd cows, tow heavy trailers, and traverse rugged terrain and has been designed to manage livestock on Australia's vast sheep and cattle stations, which are often remote and difficult to access. A trial which began last month has confirmed that SwagBot is able to herd cattle, and can navigate its way around ditches, logs, swamps, and other features of a typical farm landscape. The next step will be to teach the robot how to identify animals that are sick or injured, says Salah Sukkarieh of the University of Sydney, who is leading the trial. "The trial has been very successful so far, so it's given us the confidence to move to the next phase," he says. His team is planning to fit the robot with temperature and motion sensors to detect changes in body temperature and walking gait, as well as colour and shape sensors to make sure the animals have enough pasture to graze on.

Our next meetup will be a series of presentations on hyperparameter optimization and how to use various software packages to find a set of optimal hyperparameters for your machine learning model. Model selection via hyperparameter optimization is an important part of machine learning and we will discuss both the very basic and sophisticated methods for tuning models. Speaker: Erin Craig Title: Hyperparameter Optimization: Grid Search and Bayesian Optimization Abstract: When building a model, how do you select its hyperparameters? Grid search and bayesian optimization are two common methods for hyperparameter optimization; each with its own set of strengths and drawbacks. We begin this talk with a brief overview of these two methods, and then look at a case study to compare results of manual tuning, grid search and Bayesian optimization when predicting 30-day readmission from electronic health records.

Although financial terms of the deal were not revealed, it's said that an undisclosed number of SalesPredict employees will be joining eBay's team, working out of the Israeli development center in Netanya, including SalesPredict chief executive Yaron Zakai-Or, who will be director of product management for technology, and chief technology officer Kira Radinsky, who's been named director of data science and the chief scientist for eBay in Israel. Founded in 2012, SalesPredict specializes in helping businesses grow revenue through analytics that identify ideal potential prospects, thereby improving conversion to actual customers. It follows similar moves, including its pickup of AI startup ExpertMaker in May. In a statement, Zakai-Or explained that by being a part of eBay, "we will help arm eBay sellers with more information about the value of items, ultimately helping to increase customer sales conversions." The inclusion of SalesPredict seems to match the second part of this strategic effort.

A 300-pound security robot at at the Stanford Shopping Center knocked down and ran over a 16-month-old boy. The parents of the injured boy are understandably pissed, claiming the autonomous machine is dangerous. "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," noted the boy's mom, Tiffany Teng, in an ABC7 News report. "He was crying like crazy and he never cries. The toddler, named Harwin, was allegedly assaulted by the shopping mall's security robot, which stands five-feet-tall and weighs 300 pounds.

AlphaGo's uncanny success at the game of Go was taken by many as a death knell for the dominance of the human intellect, but Google researcher David Silver doesn't see it that way. Instead, he sees a world of potential benefits. As one of the lead architects behind Google DeepMind's AlphaGo system, which defeated South Korean Go champion Lee Se-dol 4 games to 1 in March, Silver believes the technology's next role should be to help advance human health. "We'd like to use these technologies to have a positive impact in the real world," he told an audience of AI researchers Tuesday at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in New York. With more possible board combinations than there are atoms in the universe, Go has long been considered the ultimate challenge for AI researchers.

We've previously reported how AI is developing rapidly and gaining the ability to do things like defeat human champions at the game of Go, describe photos in words for vision-impaired users, detect cyber attacks and even write novels and financial reports. That's old hat – there's now an AI that can write screenplays. It's named itself Benjamin and its first film, a sci-fi short, has just been released on YouTube for the world to enjoy. Our new event for New York is focused on quality, not quantity. 'Sunspring' was directed by Oscar Sharp and stars Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry. The more I think about the recent breakthroughs in machine learning and deep learning algorithms, the more I think we are finally heading toward a smarter software future. Our smartphones are really not that smart when it comes to the intelligence equation. That is about to change. For years, I had been writing about the need for better predictive intelligence in our software.

In the pixelated cube world of "Minecraft," players can create almost anything their hearts desire. Now, Microsoft is using the popular world-building game to build and test artificial intelligence in the fictional environment. Microsoft has made a platform for artificial intelligence (AI) research using a modified version of "Minecraft" that will become available to the public following a limited release to select researchers. Project Malmo (formerly known as Project AIX) allows anyone from ambitious amateur coders to advanced computer scientists to build and test artificial intelligence in the "Minecraft" environment. "We?re trying to put out the tools that will allow people to make progress on those really, really hard research questions," Katja Hofmann, the project's lead researcher, said in a Microsoft blog post announcing the release.

Tesla boss Elon Musk said the electric car maker has no plans to disable its Autopilot feature in the wake of a fatal accident in which the driver of a Model S car was using the technology. Instead, the company is planning an'explanatory blog post' to educate customers on how the feature works. 'A lot of people don't understand what it is and how you turn it on,' Musk told the Wall Street Journal in an interview. Elon Musk told the Wall Street Journal he had pushed hard to launch the Autopilot feature as soon as possible because'we knew we had a system that on balance would save lives.' Head of Tesla Motors, Elon Musk, has taken to Twitter to slam reporters who claimed the firm delayed making details of a fatal crash public.