"Can the brain do back-propagation?" Speaker Abstract and Bio can be found here: http://ee380.stanford.edu/Abstracts/1... Colloquium on Computer Systems Seminar Series (EE380) presents the current research in design, implementation, analysis, and use of computer systems. Topics range from integrated circuits to operating systems and programming languages. It is free and open to the public, with new lectures each week.

A few months ago, Elon Musk and a few other big players in Silicon Valley announced their creation of OpenAI, a non-profit research firm that would provide an open platform for researchers to share and compare algorithms for artificial intelligence. "Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return," the team wrote in their introductory blog post. Now, the creators of OpenAI have announced a new platform for the organization, called OpenAI Gym. It's "a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms," as stated on the website. Interestingly, OpenAI Gym won't include leaderboards or competitions based on who can create the top scoring algorithm.

Amazon Inc. (AMZN) is on a roll. The world's biggest online retailer blew away analyst expecations Thursday with a 513 million profit, its fourth straight profitable quarter, sending its stock up nearly 12 percent after hours on the Nasdaq. The profit number for the first quarter of 2016 swung from a net loss of 57 million in the same quarter last year and nearly doubled an estimate of 272.6 million, according to analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. The e-commerce giant posted 29.13 billion in revenue, up by 28 percent from 22.7 billion a year ago, driven by growth in its product sales and cloud computing businesses. Those figures beat analyst expectations of 27.9 billion in revenue.

Spencer Greenberg holds a B.S. Magna Cum Laude in Applied Mathematics & Computer Science, from Columbia University, and a Ph D. in Machine Learning, from NYU. Prior to Rebellion Research, he was Software Developer, Neuberger Berman, LLC and Engineer in The Investigative Project for Terrorism. Spencer has been interviewed on CNBC, Bloomberg News, Canada's BNN, and in the Wall Street Journal. He has also lectured at Columbia School of Business, and the NYU Stern School of Business. What type of machine learning do you use for Rebellion Research's AI system? A. We apply our own proprietary machine learning approach, which performs a form of Bayesian probabilistic modeling. We have found that off the shelf machine learning solutions usually do not work very well in our problem domain.

Google's self-driving car just got a boost from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. SAN FRANCISCO -- Federal auto safety and standards regulators should set rules governing self-driving cars -- not state agencies that may not have the technological know-how to assess the rapidly evolving technology. That was the message delivered to federal administrators Wednesday by Chris Urmson, the chief architect of Google's seven-year-old autonomous car program. Urmson was one of a variety of auto experts speaking at a Stanford University forum organized by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is soliciting comments as it aims to establish guidelines later this summer for companies developing autonomous cars. The event took place the day after Google announced it was part of the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, a lobbying group of autonomous-car focused companies that also includes Ford, Lyft, Uber and Volvo.

Understanding what motivates serial killers to murder many times over can be difficult to grasp. Over the past few decades, scientists have begun building a clearer picture of the minds behind some of the most shocking crimes. According to the largest forensic neuroscience library in the world, there are surprising similarities between the abnormal brains structures of mass murderers. Pictured left is James Eagan Holmes, who was convicted on 24 counts of murder and 140 counts of attempted murder forr the 2012 Aurora shooting a movie theater. What's more, the differences are'at least 50 percent caused by genetics', raising the disturbing possibility that people can be born killers.

Beyond being the founder of Sci-Hub, the world's largest pirate site for academic papers, and risking arrest as a result, Alexandra Elbakyan is a typical science graduate student: idealistic, hard-working, and relatively poor. After becoming hooked on science at an early age, she discovered a knack for computer hacking when she went to university in Kazakhstan, where she was born. After a stint in Germany working on brain-computer interfaces, she returned home, where frustrations with journal paywalls led her to create Sci-Hub. She is now enrolled in a history of science master's program.

French officials have unveiled a humanoid diving robot that they hope will give a big artificial hand to the practice of underwater archaeology. Ocean One, which looks like something out of a scuba-diving sequel to "Transformers," is the work of a team of roboticists, including Oussama Khatib of Stanford University. It is intended to help researchers explore underwater archaeological sites that are too deep to be explored by human divers. It was unveiled by culture officials on Thursday in the French city of Marseille following a trial sifting through the wreckage of "The Moon," a 17th century warship, where it had managed to collect a delicate ceramic pot and bring it back to the surface. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

As anyone who can operate a personal computer knows, the way to make the machine perform some desired task is to open the appropriate program stored in the computer's memory. Life was not always so simple. The earliest large-scale electronic digital computers, the British Colossus (1944) and the American ENIAC (1945), did not store programs in memory. To set up these computers for a fresh task, it was necessary to modify some of the machine's wiring, re-routing cables by hand and setting switches. The basic principle of the modern computer--the idea of controlling the machine's operations by means of a program of coded instructions stored in the computer's memory--was conceived by Alan Turing.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai touts the company's AI efforts. It's a given that the most important thing to Google -- the company/verb/website that's synonymous with finding things using the Internet -- is its search business. Now, as the company lays out its master plan for the future, Google is making sure that business is injected with a healthy dose of artificial intelligence. At least that's the big takeaway from Google's annual letter, published Thursday, and penned for the first time by CEO Sundar Pichai rather than Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Instead of users having to type words into a search box on a computer or phone, Google wants to fetch info and do stuff for you without you having to ask.