Public debates are a common platform for presenting and juxtaposing diverging views on important issues. In this work we propose a methodology for tracking how ideas flow between participants throughout a debate. We use this approach in a case study of Oxford-style debates---a competitive format where the winner is determined by audience votes---and show how the outcome of a debate depends on aspects of conversational flow. In particular, we find that winners tend to make better use of a debate's interactive component than losers, by actively pursuing their opponents' points rather than promoting their own ideas over the course of the conversation.

Formal grammars are a popular class of knowledge representation that is traditionally confined to the modeling of natural and computer languages. However, several extensions of grammars have been proposed over time to model other types of data such as images [1, 2, 3] and events [4, 5, 6]. One prominent type of extension is stochastic And-Or grammars (AOG) [2]. A stochastic AOG simultaneously models compositions (i.e., a large pattern is the composition of several small patterns arranged according to a certain configuration) and reconfigurations (i.e., a pattern may have several alternative configurations), and in this way it can compactly represent a probabilistic distribution over a large number of patterns. Stochastic AOGs can be used to parse data samples into their compositional structures, which help solve multiple tasks (such as classification, annotation, and segmentation of the data samples) in a unified manner. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61503248).

If the St. Louis Cardinals need motivation beyond the pomp and circumstance of the home opener, they'll be getting it from one of their on-the-mend Hall of Famers. Speedster Lou Brock, whose left leg was amputated just below the knee in the offseason, will throw out the ceremonial first pitch before Monday's sold-out game against the Milwaukee Brewers. The 76-year-old Brock has been practicing wearing a new prosthesis and supported by braces. When he learned an infection related to diabetes necessitated the operation, the former base stealing record holder had been pointing to the home opener. Brock stole a National League-record 938 bases, including 118 in 1974, and was known as the Base Burglar.

As it turns out, we may have to wait a few years before the imminent robot takeover of our workforce, as a few kinks still need to be worked out. Several restaurants in the Southern Chinese city of Guangzhou ditched their robot servers because they were simply too unreliable to actually be worth the hassle. "The robots weren't able to carry soup or other food steady and they would frequently break down. The boss has decided never to use them again," an employee at one of the restaurants told the Worker's Daily through a translator. The humanoid robots cost approximately cost 7,700 USD each and required constant maintenance and repairs to keep in proper working order, which adds up to more than just a normal server's salary.

CAPE, CANAVERAL – SpaceX has made good on a high-priority delivery: the world's first inflatable room for astronauts. A SpaceX Dragon cargo ship arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, two days after launching from Cape Canaveral. Station astronauts used a robot arm to capture the Dragon, orbiting 250 miles (400 km) above Earth. The Dragon holds 7,000 pounds (3,175 kg) of freight, including the soft-sided compartment built by Bigelow Aerospace. The pioneering pod -- packed tightly for launch -- should swell to the size of a small bedroom once filled with air next month.

For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth. The impulse to ingest more data is our first and most powerful instinct. Born with billions of neurons, as babies we begin developing complex synaptic networks by taking in massive amounts of data - sounds, smells, tastes, textures, pictures. It's not always graceful, but it is an effective way to learn. As data scientists, the trick is to encode similar learning instincts into applications, banking more on the volume of data that will flow through the system than on the elegance of the solution (see also these discussions of the Netflix prize and the "unreasonable effectiveness of data").

Domino's Australia is independent from the U.S. based pizza chain, but pays a royalty to use the name, logo and recipes. Domino's Australia is independent from the U.S. based pizza chain, but pays a royalty to use the name, logo and recipes. NEW YORK -- Ding dong, there's a robot at your door and it's got your extra large pizza. This could be a future Saturday night scenario if Domino's Australia gets its way. Domino's Australia is independent from the U.S. based pizza chain, but pays a royalty to use the name, logo and recipes.

The multibillion-dollar business plans being hatched by global automakers and technology companies for self-driving vehicles depend on a sensor that's less than 1 inch wide and costs all of 92 cents. And a company you've probably never heard of, Nippon Ceramic Co., controls about half of that market. Its stock is up more than 40 percent over the past three years and analysts expect profits to nearly double by 2018. In other words, it's good to be Nippon Ceramic right now. The Japanese maker of ultrasonic sensors, which help autonomous vehicles avoid crashes and fit into tight parking spaces, expects demand to double in the next five years and is expanding its production lines to keep up, President Shinichi Taniguchi said in an interview.

The machine also reflects a lot of lessons learned from its predecessor and beyond. For instance, it knows to slow down near corners so that it won't smack into someone. It identifies people asking for help, too, and will approach on its own. Its biggest drawback is simply that it's not as personable as Pepper (you're just looking at a pair of expressionless eyes), and doesn't have a built-in display to show information. It's going to be a while before you see EMIEW3 in service, as Hitachi doesn't expect it to be ready until 2018. However, Hitachi has grand ambitions for its third-generation hardware.

On the 10th day of every month, Junsuke Senoguchi has just one thing on his mind -- the closing level of the Nikkei 225 Stock Average. That's because Mr Senoguchi, an unassuming man in his late forties, has built a machine that's been predicting the direction of Japanese shares, and once a month he gets a progress report on its success. The model makes a simple call -- whether the equity index will be higher or lower after 30 days -- and over almost four years it's been right 68% of the time. "I'm so happy when it works", said Mr Senoguchi, a senior equity strategist at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities in Tokyo. "It's because I feel I can predict the future." Algorithms have invaded global share markets, used by everyone from high-frequency traders closing bets in fractions of a second, to specialist asset managers whose strategies are determined by complex quantitative analysis.