Golan Levin, an associate professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University, suggested. I was looking at a satellite image of the school's campus in Pittsburgh, embedded in the home page of Levin's latest online project, Terrapattern. "What you should immediately see are all the most tennis-court-ish patches of Allegheny County," he said. With gratifying speed, the right-hand side of my screen filled with dozens and dozens of tennis courts--solo or in pairs or in clusters of six, white on green, purple on green, green on red. A confusingly painted parking lot ended up in the mix, too.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office found that federal agencies waste money by maintaining rather than updating outdated computer systems. WASHINGTON -- The government is squandering its technology budget maintaining museum-ready computer systems in critical areas from nuclear weapons to Social Security. In a report released Wednesday, nonpartisan congressional investigators found that about three-fourths of the 80 billion budget goes to keep aging technology running, and the increasing cost is shortchanging modernization. The White House has been pushing to replace workhorse systems that date back more than 50 years in some cases. But the government is expected to spend 7 billion less on modernization in 2017 than in 2010, said the Government Accountability Office.

The way you drive is surprisingly unique. And in an era when automobiles have become data-harvesting, multi-ton mobile computers, the data collected by your car--or one you rent or borrow--can probably identify you based on that driving style after as little as a few minutes behind the wheel. In a study they plan to present at the Privacy Enhancing Technology Symposium in Germany this July, a group of researchers from the University of Washington and the University of California at San Diego found that they could "fingerprint" drivers based only on data they collected from internal computer network of the vehicle their test subjects were driving, what's known as a car's CAN bus. In fact, they found that the data collected from a car's brake pedal alone could let them correctly distinguish the correct driver out of 15 individuals about nine times out of ten, after just 15 minutes of driving. With 90 minutes driving data or monitoring more car components, they could pick out the correct driver fully 100 percent of the time. "With very limited amounts of driving data we can enable very powerful and accurate inferences about the driver's identity," says Miro Enev, a former University of Washington researcher who worked on the study before taking a job as a machine-learning engineer at Belkin.

Humanity's got itself a problem. As Homo sapiens balloons as a species--to perhaps nearly 10 billion by 2050--the planet stubbornly stays the same size, meaning the same amount of land must support way, way more people. Add the volatility of global warming and consequent water shortages, and the human race is going to have some serious trouble feeding itself. Perhaps it's serendipitous, then, that the machines have finally arrived. Truly smart, truly impressive robots and machine learning algorithms that may help usher in a new Green Revolution to keep humans fed on an increasingly mercurial planet.

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has announced its first drone, pricing it significantly lower than a comparable model by the market leader DJI. The Mi Drone can stay airborne for nearly half an hour and will be sold with a choice of stabilised cameras. The move gives Xiaomi the chance to target a fast-growing market, at a time when it has failed to meet its own sales targets. One expert said the firm now had to win over potential buyers' trust. "The feature set between the Mi Drone and DJI's Phantom 3 is almost identical - they can both be made to return home and circle around a point of interest - but Xiaomi's product is so competitively priced you have to wonder if it can make much profit," Engadget's Chinese editor-in-chief Richard Lai told the BBC. "So, the new drone will probably appeal to beginners.

"Given an example of presence and absence of a specific concept, computers would use storage to memorize examples exactly as they appear from a shallow learning concept – classic memorization," Dreyer said. Humans adjust neural weighting to solve for current and future examples, so we don't have to see a future example to know what something is. If you show a computer a picture of a bunch of oranges and then show it an apple, the computer wouldn't know what the apple was because it hadn't seen it before. Humans exploit deep learning by classifying new objects, recognizing faces, and recognizing language, Dreyer said. We see examples every day of facial recognition technology (for example, used by Facebook and Twitter).

There is a difference between knowledge and understanding. Knowledge typically comes down to knowing facts while understanding is the application of knowledge to the mastery of systems. You can know a lot while understanding very little. Just as an example, IBM's Watson artificial intelligence system that defeated the TV Jeopardy champs a few years ago knew all there was to know about Jeopardy questions but didn't really understand anything. Ask Watson to apply to removing your appendix its knowledge of hundreds of medical questions and you'd be disappointed and probably dead.

The news was the big surprise saved for the end of a two-hour keynote at the search giant's annual Google IO event in the heart of Silicon Valley. "We have started building tensor processing units…TPUs are an order of magnitude higher performance per Watt than commercial FPGAs and GPUs, they powered the AlphaGo system," said Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, citing the Google computer that beat a human Go champion. The accelerators have been running in Google's data centers for more than a year, according to a blog by Norm Jouppi, a distinguished hardware engineer at Google. "TPUs already power many applications at Google, including RankBrain, used to improve the relevancy of search results and Street View, to improve the accuracy and quality of our maps and navigation," he said. The chips ride a module that plugs into a hard drive slot on server racks.

IMAGE: Dr. Ben Choi, associate professor of computer science at Louisiana Tech University, will present his research on a groundbreaking new technology that has the potential to revolutionize the computing industry... view more RUSTON, La. - Dr. Ben Choi, associate professor of computer science at Louisiana Tech University, will present his research on a groundbreaking new technology that has the potential to revolutionize the computing industry during a keynote speech next month at the International Conference on Measurement Instrumentation and Electronics. Choi will present on a foundational architecture for designing and building computers, which will utilize multiple values rather than binary as used by current computers. The many-valued logic computers should provide faster computation by increasing the speed of processing for microprocessors and the speed of data transfer between the processors and the memory as well as increasing the capacity of the memory. This technology has the potential to redefine the computing industry, which is constantly trying to increase the speed of computation and, in recent years, has run short of options. By providing a new hardware approach, the technology will push the speed limit of computing using a progressive approach which will move from two values to four values, then to eight values, then to 16 values, and so on. Future computers could be built using this many-valued approach.

Every day now there's a new announcement of a major media or technology player betting big on the future of chatbots powered by artificial intelligence, that will do everything from helping us book trips to controlling our ever-smarter homes. Our natural language is, well, the most natural way for humans to communicate. Getting what we want through a conversation with an intelligent agent is bound to feel simpler than using a click-based interface, especially in a world where mobile rules. It feels like a new horizon is opening up, but also like a bit of déjà vu. In the early 2000s I worked as a copywriter on one of the first IM-based chatbots, named VaVaVirgil, who was built to help the Virginia Tobacco Settlement Foundation educate teens on the dangers of smoking.