Barely a fifth of the way into their mission, the engineers monitoring the Scorpion's progress conceded defeat. With a remote-controlled snip of its cable, the latest robot sent into the bowels of one of Fukushima Daiichi's damaged reactors was cut loose, its progress stalled by lumps of fuel that overheated when the nuclear plant suffered a triple meltdown six years ago this week. As the 60cm-long Toshiba robot, equipped with a pair of cameras and sensors to gauge radiation levels was left to its fate last month, the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), attempted to play down the failure of yet another reconnaissance mission to determine the exact location and condition of the melted fuel. Even though its mission had been aborted, the utility said, "valuable information was obtained which will help us determine the methods to eventually remove fuel debris". The Scorpion mishap, two hours into an exploration that was supposed to last 10 hours, underlined the scale and difficulty of decommissioning Fukushima Daiichi – an unprecedented undertaking one expert has described as "almost beyond comprehension".

Maximizing battery life remains the great challenge of every smartphone manufacturer. People use their phones for everything these days, and of course they want a battery that lasts forever, and charges in minutes. Engineers have a few ways of tackling this problem beyond packing a bigger, and potentially more dangerous, lithium-ion battery inside. The most effective trick is making the chips, drivers, and other components as energy efficient as possible. The obvious targets include big screens, 4G modems, and Bluetooth.

Six years after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, recent investigations underneath the damaged reactor 2 using cameras and robots came close to identifying melted fuel rods for the first time. Experts say getting a peek inside the containment vessel of reactor 2 was an accomplishment. But it also highlighted how tough it will be to further pinpoint the exact location of the melted fuel, let alone remove it some time in the future. The biggest hurdle is the extremely lethal levels of radiation inside the containment vessel that not only prevent humans from getting near but have also crippled robots and other mechanical devices. Safely removing the melted fuel would be a best-case scenario but the risks and costs should be weighed against the option of leaving the melted fuel in the crippled reactors, some experts said.

Mumbai: As pro vice-chancellor (product and partner development) of the University of Sunderland in the UK, Prof. John MacIntyre's brief includes covering research, innovation, knowledge exchange, employer engagement and regional economy. Since 1996, MacIntyre has also been the editor-in-chief of Neural Computing and Applications--an international scientific peer- reviewed journal published by Springer Verlag. In an interview, he talks about why artificial intelligence (AI) needs to be looked at more positively and how AI can contribute to society. MacIntyre will also address EmTech India 2017--an emerging tech conference organized by Mint and MIT Technology Review--on 9 March in New Delhi. You completed your PhD in applied AI, focussing on the use of neural networks in predictive maintenance.

Can a planet be alive? Lynn Margulis, a giant of late 20th-century biology, who had an incandescent intellect that veered toward the unorthodox, thought so. She and chemist James Lovelock together theorized that life must be a planet-altering phenomenon and the distinction between the "living" and "nonliving" parts of Earth is not as clear-cut as we think. Many members of the scientific community derided their theory, called the Gaia hypothesis, as pseudoscience, and questioned their scientific integrity. But now Margulis and Lovelock may have their revenge. Recent scientific discoveries are giving us reason to take this hypothesis more seriously. At its core is an insight about the relationship between planets and life that has changed our understanding of both, and is shaping how we look for life on other worlds.

Stephen Hawking has warned that technology needs to be controlled in order to prevent it from destroying the human race. The world-renowned physicist, who has spoken out about the dangers of artificial intelligence in the past, believes we need to establish a way of identifying threats quickly, before they have a chance to escalate. "Since civilisation began, aggression has been useful inasmuch as it has definite survival advantages," he told The Times. "It is hard-wired into our genes by Darwinian evolution. Now, however, technology has advanced at such a pace that this aggression may destroy us all by nuclear or biological war. We need to control this inherited instinct by our logic and reason."

NVIDIA just announced the Jetson TX2 embedded AI supercomputer, based on the latest NVIDIA Pascal microarchitecture. It promises to offer twice the performance of the previous-generation Jetson TX1, in the same package. In this tech report, we will share with you the full details of the new Pascal-based NVIDIA Jetson TX2! Artificial intelligence is the new frontier in GPU compute technology. Whether they are used to power training or inference engines, AI research has benefited greatly from the massive amounts of compute power in modern GPUs. The market is led by NVIDIA with their Tesla accelerators that run on their proprietary CUDA platform.

Want to know where all the wind and solar power supplies in the US are for some brilliant renewable-energy project? Or plot a round-the-world trip hitting every major soccer stadium along the way? It should be possible with a new tool that lets anyone scan the globe through AI "eyes" to instantly find satellite images of matching objects. Descartes Labs, a New Mexico startup that provides AI-driven analysis of satellite images to governments, academics and industry, on Tuesday released a public demo of its GeoVisual Search, a new type of search engine that combines satellite images of Earth with machine learning on a massive scale. The idea behind GeoVisual is pretty simple.

For an autonomous agent, executing a poor policy may be costly or even dangerous. For such agents, it is desirable to determine confidence interval lower bounds on the performance of any given policy without executing said policy. Current methods for exact high confidence off-policy evaluation that use importance sampling require a substantial amount of data to achieve a tight lower bound. Existing model-based methods only address the problem in discrete state spaces. Since exact bounds are intractable for many domains we trade off strict guarantees of safety for more data-efficient approximate bounds. In this context, we propose two bootstrapping off-policy evaluation methods which use learned MDP transition models in order to estimate lower confidence bounds on policy performance with limited data in both continuous and discrete state spaces. Since direct use of a model may introduce bias, we derive a theoretical upper bound on model bias for when the model transition function is estimated with i.i.d. trajectories. This bound broadens our understanding of the conditions under which model-based methods have high bias. Finally, we empirically evaluate our proposed methods and analyze the settings in which different bootstrapping off-policy confidence interval methods succeed and fail.

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