Appearing as a giant saucer, the Silicon Valley site near the 280 Highway will be home to 13,000 Apple employees. There will be jogging and cycling trails, with more than a thousand bikes kept on site at all times, which staff can use to make their way around. The Spaceship will have 360-degree curved glass fronted walls and central courtyard as well as a 1,000-seater auditorium, a gym and 300,000 square feet of'research' space. Apple Campus 2 will additionally have underground parking hidden from view, meaning 80 per cent of the site can be covered in trees. The site was previously owned by Hewlett Packard and the majority of the area is currently covered in asphalt.

Security researchers have been accumulating a trove of breakthrough discoveries on Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) vulnerabilities and releasing them at the Black Hat Briefings over the last few years - which has certainly helped raise awareness of dangerous flaws in critical infrastructure like power grids and gas pipeline control systems. Next month at Black Hat USA in Las Vegas, a group of researchers will help broaden enterprise security horizons by showing a new use case of how attackers can bridge the cyber world with the physical world by creatively targeting IIoT systems. This time they shifted gears and focused on the factory floor. In the talk, Breaking the Laws of Robotics: Attacking Industrial Robots, a group of researchers from the Politecnico di Milano in Italy stress-tested the cyber and physical security of computer-controlled robotic arms used worldwide in factories throughout a range of manufacturing scenarios. The idea was to move beyond the question of whether or not an IIoT device like a robotic arm could be hacked, and instead start looking at scenarios of what could be done with these devices once they're hacked, says Stefano Zanero, one of the researchers.

Callaghan Innovation will establish the Digital Energy Hub, an initiative to encourage early adoption and commercialisation by the energy sector of the next wave of digital technologies – namely Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, Blockchain, Cloud Analytics and Internet of Things. The scale and speed of the disruption from such technologies presents challenge and opportunity for many businesses in the energy sector – from start up to established – and for those in adjacent sectors such as Information Technology, transport and manufacturing. More to on this to follow. In an interview with Idealog, Stu Christie explains that he sees the biggest opportunities for Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies being in agriculture, manufacturing, infrastructure and transportation. Stu is investment manager at NZ Venture Investment Fund and now Chair of the recently launched AI Forum.

After decades of isolation, the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar is roaring ahead with the fasting growing economy in Asia in 2016, according to the Asian Development Bank's Asian Development Outlook 2016. Natural gas exports slightly increased as well. Tourism was also a major driver of the economy with 4.7 million arrivals in 2015 with about 70% of visitors entering overland from neighboring countries. Spending by tourists rose by 19% to $2.1 billion in 2015.

Networks capture pairwise interactions between entities and are frequently used in applications such as social networks, food networks, and protein interaction networks, to name a few. Communities, cohesive groups of nodes, often form in these applications, and identifying them gives insight into the overall organization of the network. One common quality function used to identify community structure is modularity. In Hu et al. [SIAM J. App. Math., 73(6), 2013], it was shown that modularity optimization is equivalent to minimizing a particular nonconvex total variation (TV) based functional over a discrete domain. They solve this problem---assuming the number of communities is known---using a Merriman, Bence, Osher (MBO) scheme. We show that modularity optimization is equivalent to minimizing a convex TV-based functional over a discrete domain---again, assuming the number of communities is known. Furthermore, we show that modularity has no convex relaxation satisfying certain natural conditions. Despite this, we partially relax the discrete constraint using a Ginzburg Landau functional, yielding an optimization problem that is more nearly convex. We then derive an MBO algorithm with fewer parameters than in Hu et al. and which is 7 times faster at solving the associated diffusion equation due to the fact that the underlying discretization is unconditionally stable. Our numerical tests include a hyperspectral video whose associated graph has 29 million edges, which is roughly 37 times larger than was handled in the paper of Hu et al.

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory are working with machines that may make future prediction of earthquakes possible. By listening to the acoustic signal emitted by a laboratory-created earthquake, a computer science approach using machine learning can predict the time remaining before the fault fails. "At any given instant, the noise coming from the lab fault zone provides quantitative information on when the fault will slip," said Paul Johnson, LANL fellow and lead investigator on the research, which was published Wednesday in Geophysical Research Letters. "The novelty of our work is the use of machine learning to discover and understand new physics of failure, through examination of the recorded auditory signal from the experimental setup. I think the future of earthquake physics will rely heavily on machine learning to process massive amounts of raw seismic data.

Researchers have discovered another clear indicator that life once existed on Mars. NASA's Curiosity rover has found evidence of boron on the red planet's surface. It is a key ingredient for life, and scientists say the find is a huge boost in the hunt for life. RNA (ribonucleic acid) is a nucleic acid present in all modern life, but scientists have long hypothesized an'RNA World,' where the first proto-life was made of individual RNA strands that both contained genetic information and could copy itself. A key ingredient of RNA is a sugar called ribose.

In this image, the simulator is viewed through a polarized camera lens, photo-elastic plates reveal discrete points of stress buildup along both sides of the modeled fault as the far (upper) plate is moved laterally along the fault. Researchers at LANL are using Machine Learning to predict earthquakes. By listening to the acoustic signal emitted by a laboratory-created earthquake, a computer science approach using machine learning can predict the time remaining before the fault fails. At any given instant, the noise coming from the lab fault zone provides quantitative information on when the fault will slip," said Paul Johnson, a Los Alamos National Laboratory fellow and lead investigator on the research, which was published today in Geophysical Research Letters. "The novelty of our work is the use of machine learning to discover and understand new physics of failure, through examination of the recorded auditory signal from the experimental setup.

Vehicle climate control systems aim to keep passengers thermally comfortable. However, current systems control temperature rather than thermal comfort and tend to be energy hungry, which is of particular concern when considering electric vehicles. This paper poses energy-efficient vehicle comfort control as a Markov Decision Process, which is then solved numerically using Sarsa({\lambda}) and an empirically validated, single-zone, 1D thermal model of the cabin. The resulting controller was tested in simulation using 200 randomly selected scenarios and found to exceed the performance of bang-bang, proportional, simple fuzzy logic, and commercial controllers with 23%, 43%, 40%, 56% increase, respectively. Compared to the next best performing controller, energy consumption is reduced by 13% while the proportion of time spent thermally comfortable is increased by 23%. These results indicate that this is a viable approach that promises to translate into substantial comfort and energy improvements in the car.