Illinois Structured Learning Package (Illinois-SL) is a general purpose JAVA library for performing structured learning. It houses learning algorithms like averaged Structured Perceptron and Structured SVM with L2-Loss, and provides a minimal interface for your structured learning needs. The training algorithm employed for training SSVM is dual coordinate descent(DCD), which has been proven to have very good convergence properties. Illinois-SL comes with an efficient implementation of DCD with support for multi-threading. Illinois-SL provides a simple and neat framework for developing applications using structured prediction models.

Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi plans to enter the artificial intelligence (AI) market by becoming an AI component provider for traditional electronics manufacturers looking to make their products intelligent, according to a top executive. "Our artificial intelligence technology will be everywhere," co-founder and vice-president Wong Kong Kat told the South China Morning Post on Wednesday. He expects the company's thrust to result in a wider adoption of intelligent devices in the future. "Even a chair can be smart enough to understand you and move to where you would be seated," said Wong, who now leads the company's efforts in AI and virtual reality. They are the twin focuses of the recently established Xiaomi Exploration Lab, a department in Xiaomi similar to Google's X (formerly known as Google X) that develops products using advanced technologies.

Ubisoft has promised to fix a fault with its blockbuster video game Tom Clancy's The Division that caused hundreds of players' characters to vanish. Gamers develop their agents over time in the online game, so many feared they had lost weeks of progress. The problem appears to have affected only people using the Xbox One version of the title. The publisher, Ubisoft, said it would soon restore the missing data. "The issue was caused by a malfunctioning server that couldn't synchronise character data correctly and corrupted them instead," Ubisoft told the BBC.

In a world first, a quadriplegic man can once again move his fingers after a chip was implanted in his brain. Ian Burkhart from Ohio in the US can even move individual fingers to play a guitar-based computer game. The chip reads brain signals, which are interpreted by a computer. It then precisely stimulates his muscles with electricity to restore movement. The researchers hope the technology will eventually help millions of people with paralysis, stroke or brain damage.

You are probably familiar with films such as Armageddon, telling stories of the human race nearly being wiped out by impacts from asteroids. But a project funded by Nasa is developing a way to turn such asteroids from a threat into something useful, namely spaceships that can help defend the planet. The project, named Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata (RAMA), aims at working out a way to turn the rocks into basic spacecraft using robots. A new project, named Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata (RAMA), aims to develop a way to turn the rocks into basic spacecraft using robots. The idea is that a set of technically simple robotic processes will be developed that can convert asteroid elements into very basic versions of spacecraft subsystems.

U.S. bank regulators struck a major blow against some of the largest banks in the country Wednesday, rejecting the so-called living wills of JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America, Wells Fargo, State Street and Bank of New York Mellon. The banks' resolution plans, which outline how systemically important financial institutions would navigate a bankruptcy without splintering the financial system or costing taxpayers, have become a central focus of bank reformers since the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act authorized regulators to judge the submissions. The failing grades at five of the nation's eight largest banks reveal newfound consensus between the two regulators responsible for the assessments, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission, which had diverged in previous rounds of analysis. The stricter judgments released Wednesday are likely to add momentum to advocates of big-bank breakups, such as presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. "No firm yet shows itself capable of being resolved in an orderly fashion through bankruptcy," said FDIC Vice Chairman Thomas Hoenig in a statement.

An iPhone is connected to a 2016 Chevrolet Malibu equipped with Apple CarPlay apps, displayed on the car's MyLink screen. With 220 million Internet connected cars expected to be on the roads within five years, a national security expert on Tuesday, April 12, 2016, urged automakers to be mindful of the growing cyber-security threats posed by terrorists, information crooks and spies who could potentially try to hack into wired vehicles. DETROIT -- In its quest to build connected and self-driving cars, the automotive industry is facing a daunting task that national security experts say is a must: Design a car that's terrorist-proof -- or at least try. With 220 million Internet connected cars expected to be on the roads within five years, a national security expert visited Detroit on Tuesday and urged automakers to be mindful of the growing cyber-security threats posed by terrorists, information crooks and spies who could potentially try to hack into wired vehicles and cause mayhem of all sorts. " 'What are the bad buys thinking?' We've seen them be creative before," said John Carlin, assistant attorney general for national security, who met with auto executives and law enforcement personnel at Cobo Center at a presentation titled, "Emerging National Security Cyber Threats and Their Implications for the C-Suite."

David Marcus, who heads Facebook's Messenger platform, tells Jefferson Graham how automated chat bots can improve the shopping and customer service experience, on #TalkingTech. SAN FRANCISCO - Clicking a buy button on a website is so 20th century. Now the next big thing is conversing with a computerized robot. Used by 900 million people, Messenger has a major new look and mission, thanks to former PayPal chief David Marcus, who left the payment giant in 2014 to transform Facebook's hugely popular Messenger app into a commerce engine. This week, Marcus did a major overhaul of Messenger.

The fledgling sport of drone racing is about to fly onto more screens. In drone racing, competitors maneuver small flying drones around a course and wear goggles that show the drone's perspective of the track. At home, viewers will see a version of that perspective. The 2016 National Drone Racing Championships, held in New York City in August, and the 2016 World Drone Racing Championships, set for Kualoa Ranch, Hawaii, in October, will be streamed live on ESPN3, the network's online streaming service. Imagine careening through the forest chasing Stormtroopers on speeder bikes as Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia did in a famous scene from "Star Wars," flying around trees and ducking under branches.

Even someone who possesses no painting skills whatsoever could create a giant, wall-size mural with a bit of robotic assistance, using a system of "smart" spray cans. A team of researchers has designed a prototype for a robotic, computer-assisted method that reproduces photographs as large-scale works of art, spray painting the results onto huge canvases (or building walls). The system combines physical gestures and computer-controlled paint dispersal, with a picture rapidly emerging as the user waves a spray can in front of a surface. It produces a lower resolution version of the original that is still a remarkably accurate reproduction -- even if the user didn't know what image he or she was painting. Tests were conducted on large sheets of paper, as the study authors encountered some difficulty in obtaining permission to unleash an army of computer-controlled graffiti artists on university buildings at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where the study took place.