Audi's Formula E race driver Lucas Di Grassi warned fans of impending doom to motorsport if autonomous cars become commonplace, at the FIA Sports Conference in Turin, Italy. "The threat we face in motorsport is autonomous vehicles," said Di Grassi.

Amounts shown in italicized text are for items listed in currency other than U.S. dollars and are approximate conversions to U.S. dollars based upon Bloomberg's conversion rates. This page was last updated: Jul-09 16:15. Number of bids and bid amounts may be slightly out of date. See each listing for international shipping options and costs.

When in 2012 a computer learned to recognize cats in YouTube videos and just last month another correctly captioned a photo of "a group of young people playing a game of Frisbee," artificial intelligence researchers hailed yet more triumphs in "deep learning," the wildly successful set of algorithms loosely modeled on the way brains grow sensitive to features of the real world simply through exposure. Using the latest deep-learning protocols, computer models consisting of networks of artificial neurons are becoming increasingly adept at image, speech and pattern recognition -- core technologies in robotic personal assistants, complex data analysis and self-driving cars. But for all their progress training computers to pick out salient features from other, irrelevant bits of data, researchers have never fully understood why the algorithms or biological learning work. Now, two physicists have shown that one form of deep learning works exactly like one of the most important and ubiquitous mathematical techniques in physics, a procedure for calculating the large-scale behavior of physical systems such as elementary particles, fluids and the cosmos. The new work, completed by Pankaj Mehta of Boston University and David Schwab of Northwestern University, demonstrates that a statistical technique called "renormalization," which allows physicists to accurately describe systems without knowing the exact state of all their component parts, also enables the artificial neural networks to categorize data as, say, "a cat" regardless of its color, size or posture in a given video.

Havoc broke out at a peaceful protest against police violence and racism in Dallas on Thursday evening when a sniper opened fire, shooting 12 officers and 2 civilians. Police cornered the suspect, now known to be Micah Johnson, in a downtown parking garage around 11 p.m. As negotiators tried to talk him out of the parking deck over a series of hours, news came out that five of the officers had died. Negotiations broke down; gunfire was exchanged between police and Mr. Johnson. Then, around 3 a.m., police reported that the sniper was dead.

This isn't to say that the NTSB is thinking about banning or limiting self-driving car tech, assuming it calls for any changes once its investigation is over. As Bloomberg notes, the board has long asked for more automation, since it can prevent collisions that humans would make. However, there's a real chance that it might ask for widespread use of advanced sensors (such as lidar), stricter testing methods or other approaches that could minimize the chances of a crash.

The Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, will not only make you fall in love with her timeless charms and classic beauty. Her sense of humor and fun personality would make you understand why Prince William fell in love with her. Middleton showed the crowd her funny side during a gala event by one of their friends held on June 22. An interesting reason behind her humor might shock most of the people. People Magazine reported how Kate Middleton kid around the chefs of the said event saying Prince William is patient enough to put up with her cooking.

"Nature hath made men so equal, in the faculties of the body, and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend as well as he." This peculiar thought--that, in the most important respects, and despite their manifest differences, all men are equal--has laid the intellectual foundation for democracy's unlikely triumph. But will society retain its belief in equality when it is no longer just man against man? Can democracy thrive when more and more benefits accrue to machines that are stronger in body, and quicker in mind, than any mere mortal? And will the machines' owners remain willing to honor the claims of their social inferiors when they no longer need them to make their food, or to staff their companies, or to fight their wars?

April Blackburn, CIO of the Florida Department of Transportation, discussed the opportunities for cognitive analytics and connected devices across the state's IT systems. The agency is already plotting the course for a tech-centric strategic plan and is involved in data sharing with private industry to improve transit in the state. Eyragon Eidam is the assistant news editor for Government Technology magazine, and covers legislation, social media and public safety. He can be reached at eeidam@erepublic.com.

A great disparity in women in leadership positions continues. The women in technology debate has heated up again as major tech companies have more women in leadership, than they do in technology positions themselves. Which, doesn't really make sense? Since, we are in an unprecedented age of customer-centricity, where product design, user interactive content marketing, brands that are emotionally intelligent, teamwork of software engineers and customer success is now more important than ever. Now there are a number of indications that in the post-automation world, it's women who will be hardest hit in job losses.

In March, Microsoft revealed that it was using the open-world game Minecraft to train AI agents to learn how to do things like climbing a hill. The company also promised to make it available to the public so they could work on their own artificial intelligence projects and research, and it's finally available today. Project Malmo (formerly known as Project AIX) is a Minecraft mod that works on Windows, Mac and Linux, and supports just about any programming language you might want to use. So yes, that means you will need to know how to code – but Microsoft says that even novice programmers can get in on the action. You can learn more about Project Malmo here and grab the mod from this GitHub repository to try it for yourself.