Implanting a microchip inside the brain to augment its mental powers has long been a science fiction trope. Now, brain computer interface is suddenly the hot new thing in tech. This spring, Elon Musk started a new company, Neuralink, to do it. Facebook, at its F8 developer's conference, showed a video of an ALS patient typing with her brain. But earlier to the game was Bryan Johnson, an entrepreneur who in 2013 made a bundle by selling his company, Braintree, to Paypal for $800 million.

In Constraint Programming (CP) a portfolio solver combines a variety of different constraint solvers for solving a given problem. This fairly recent approach enables to significantly boost the performance of single solvers, especially when multicore architectures are exploited. In this work we give a brief overview of the portfolio solver sunny-cp, and we discuss its performance in the MiniZinc Challenge---the annual international competition for CP solvers---where it won two gold medals in 2015 and 2016. Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)

Snapchat's controversial new feature allows other people to see exactly where you are in real time, and parents are being advised to take steps to protect their children's privacy. Snap Map uses data such as your location, speed of travel and phone usage to work out where you are and what you're doing, and shares this information with your friends on an interactive map. The map, which you can launch by pinching the Snapchat camera home screen, is precise enough to show not only what street you're on, but also whereabouts on that street you are. Parents are being urged to read up on it, and to ensure their children are aware of the risks that can come with sharing too much information through social media. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

During a book tour stop in Portland, Oregon earlier this year, author Jeff VanderMeer (Borne, the Southern Reach Trilogy) met up with two speculative-fiction contemporaries: Omar El Akkad and Lidia Yuknavitch. Like VanderMeer, both had recently published dystopian-ish novels set against a backdrop of climate change. El Akkad's American War chronicles a fossil-fuel civil war in the U.S.; in Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan, a new Joan of Arc for a global-warming era battles fascist forces. Given the obvious real-world resonances of the three books (the admittedly more fantastical Borne tackles out-of-control capitalism via a futuristic desert city terrorized by a giant flying psychotic bear), VanderMeer organized a three-way conversation to examine what he calls their "parallel evolution"--as well as dicuss how to take on a troubling present reality in an meaningful and productive way. They feel like boundaries that mean less and less, attempts at containment or to say "this couldn't possibly happen to anyone reading this now."

Oi, AI – what do you think you're looking at? Understanding why machine learning algorithms can be tricked into seeing things that aren't there is becoming more important with the advent of things like driverless cars. Now we can glimpse inside the mind of a machine thanks to a test that reveals which parts of an image an AI is looking at. Artificial intelligences don't make decisions in the same way that humans do. Even the best image recognition algorithms can be tricked into seeing a robin or cheetah in images that are just white noise, for example.

Stephen Hawking predicted the Earth would turn into a hothouse planet like Venus as a result of President Donald Trump's decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate change agreement. In an interview with BBC on Sunday, the Cambridge University professor and physicist said Trump's action could lead to irreversible climate change, pushing "Earth over the brink." "We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible," Hawking told BBC News. "Trump's action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees, and raining sulphuric acid." The world's most famous scientist said the best hope of survival for mankind was to live on other planets.

Going to television once meant your film career was over. Now, it can mean you will be bestowed one of the highest honors in Hollywood: an invitation to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In a move to diversify the 90-year-old organization's mainly white, mainly male ranks, and perhaps render the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag obsolete, the academy invited an unprecedented 774 new members to join last Wednesday. And television, it appears, provided many of those names. Robot"), Debbie Allen ("Grey's Anatomy"), Priyanka Chopra ("Quantico"), Sharon Gless ("Cagney & Lacey") and Lou Ferrigno (yes, you read that right -- the TV "Hulk" of 1970s fame) and TV legend Betty White, are among this year's class of invitees. Who was invited to join the film academy's largest class of all? Sure, they've all done work in major motion pictures, but that's not where their success or notoriety lives. Just try to name an indelible Betty White film role without turning to Google.

This work facilitates ensuring fairness of machine learning in the real world by decoupling fairness considerations in compound decisions. In particular, this work studies how fairness propagates through a compound decision-making processes, which we call a pipeline. Prior work in algorithmic fairness only focuses on fairness with respect to one decision. However, many decision-making processes require more than one decision. For instance, hiring is at least a two stage model: deciding who to interview from the applicant pool and then deciding who to hire from the interview pool. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that the composition of fair components may not guarantee a fair pipeline under a $(1+\varepsilon)$-equal opportunity definition of fair. However, we identify circumstances that do provide that guarantee. We also propose numerous directions for future work on more general compound machine learning decisions.

The Order of Canada marks its 50th anniversary this year with 99 new appointments on its Canada Day honours list, including renowned figures from the fields of law, government, entertainment and sport, as well as Canadians whose contributions are less widely known. The list includes soccer star Christine Sinclair, television host Alex Trebek, actor Catherine O'Hara and Globe and Mail editorial cartoonist Brian Gable. Three people were named to the highest rank, Companion of the Order of Canada: former Supreme Court Justice Marshall Rothstein, National Arts Centre president Peter Herrndorf and The Prince of Wales. Nineeteen people were named Officers of the Order of Canada, including former spymaster Richard Fadden, hockey player Mark Messier and actor Michael Myers. There were 77 people named as members of the Order, including opera singer Tracy Dahl, historian Bill Waiser, public health nurse Cathy Crowe and Indigenous leader Terrance Paul.

The financial industry has been all over artificial intelligence (AI) supporting front-end trading processes, leaving much of the rest of the business in the last century. That won't be true for much longer if Bikram Singh, founder and CEO of EZOPS, has his way. I caught up with Singh during the recent kick-off of the SAP Next-Gen Innovation Community for Financial Services at the SAP Leonardo Center in New York City. "A lot of functions in the middle and back office typically have been neglected in the AI revolution, and we see a tremendous opportunity here to radically transform the landscape," said Singh. "We are specializing in applying AI and machine learning to address use cases in the back office, including data reconciliation."