Amazon on Friday announced it has agreed to acquire the vacuum cleaner maker iRobot for approximately $1.7 billion, scooping up another company to add to its collection of smart home appliances amid broader concerns about its market power. The move is part of Amazon's bid to own part of the home space through services and accelerate its growth beyond retail, said Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData Retail. A slew of home-cleaning robots adds to the company's tech arsenal, making it more involved in consumer's lives beyond static things like voice control. Amazon's Astro robot, which helps with tasks like setting an alarm, was unveiled last year at an introductory price of $1,000. But its rollout has been limited and has received a lackluster response.

Amazon announced it has agreed to acquire the vacuum cleaner maker iRobot for approximately $1.7bn, scooping up another company to add to its collection of smart home appliances amid broader concerns about its market power. The acquisition, announced on Friday, is part of Amazon's bid to own part of the home space through services and accelerate its growth beyond retail, said Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData Retail. The appliance would join the voice assistant Alexa, the Astro robot and Ring security cameras and others in the list of smart home features offered by the Seattle-based e-commerce and tech giant. So far, Amazon has not had much success with household robots. The company's Astro robot, which helps with tasks like setting an alarm, was unveiled last year at an introductory price of $1,000.

Healthcare AI has seen rapid growth and uptake over the last few years, outpacing efforts to ensure that the algorithms in use truly prioritize fair and equitable patient care. Algorithms inform and sometimes guide clinical decision-making, but many organizations fail to accurately train, deploy, and audit their algorithms for equitable outcomes. Our research has shown both the dangers inherent in healthcare AI and practical steps we can take to make progress, but our work alone is not enough. We need the insights and recommendations of a diverse group of stakeholders to effect lasting change. The event brought together healthcare experts and leaders across academia, industry, and policy to explore responsible AI in healthcare more deeply, all with the goal of finding effective ways to mitigate algorithmic bias to improve health outcomes.

How to do digital marketing in the age of privacy? Industry 4.0: Why thousands of small businesses continue to view digital transition with scepticism The timeline for public consultations on the new data bill may be announced by the end of August as the ministry of electronics and IT (MeitY) is at an "advanced stage with the draft of the comprehensive framework," a senior official told ET. The government withdrew the previous version of the bill on Wednesday. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) sought day-to-day hearing of its appeals in the Delhi High Court against the acquittal of former telecom minister A Raja and other accused in the 2G spectrum case. India dropped its target of establishing 500 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030, giving itself the flexibility of 50% power from non-fossil fuel sources by then in its commitments to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

An iRobot Terra lawn mower is shown in Bedford, Mass., on Jan. 16, 2019. Amazon on Friday announced an agreement to acquire iRobot for approximately $1.7 billion. An iRobot Terra lawn mower is shown in Bedford, Mass., on Jan. 16, 2019. Amazon on Friday announced an agreement to acquire iRobot for approximately $1.7 billion. NEW YORK -- Amazon on Friday announced it has agreed to acquire the vacuum cleaner maker iRobot for approximately $1.7 billion, scooping up another company to add to its collection of smart home appliances amid broader concerns about its market power.

The UK government may soon start using facial recognition smartwatches to monitor migrants who have been convicted of crimes. The offenders would need to scan their faces up to five times per day, according to The Guardian. The measures may come into effect as soon as this fall. Those subject to the conditions would need to take photos of themselves throughout the day and have their locations tracked around the clock, according to documents obtained by The Guardian. The photos will be compared with ones the Home Office has on file.

AudioEye, Inc., the industry-leading digital accessibility provider, announced a joint effort with Localogy, the leading non-profit trade association supporting local businesses, to provide Localogy members with access to digital accessibility resources and learning opportunities through the association's knowledge center. "Over the years, Localogy has built a powerful network of organizations with a shared goal of helping local businesses navigate challenges and thrive. One of the key challenges for businesses today is making their websites accessible to people with diverse needs and being discoverable online," said Bill Dinan, President at Localogy. "We're excited to team up with AudioEye and provide our members, and the more than 30 million local businesses they serve, with opportunities to learn about AudioEye's digital accessibility solution and ways to ensure ongoing accessibility on their sites." Based on a recent analysis of 3,500 randomly websites across 22 industries, including healthcare, e-commerce, and employment, AudioEye found that 83% of e-commerce sites, 78% of healthcare sites, and 77% of jobs and career sites had accessibility issues that blocked a screen reader user's ability to complete key tasks, such as viewing product descriptions, completing a purchase, filling out an application, or booking an appointment.

As the modern world evolves, more threats arise. Knowledge of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence (AI) has become crucial to a successful business. Businesses everywhere need true expertise to protect their data to avoid their competitors getting ahead. In this Help Net Security video, Taylor Hersom, CEO at Eden Data, discusses why we need AI and how it helps minimize human error, as well as cybersecurity threats such as ransomware.

Sharjah Taxi, a subsidiary of Sharjah Asset Management Company, investment arm of the government of Sharjah, has launched the first-of-its-kind smart taxi in the Middle East, with the chief goal being to employ artificial intelligence services to be utilised in vehicle operations and safety. The smart vehicles have been fitted with sensors, cameras, a mobile data unit and other devices connected to an'integrated system for control mechanisms'. Intelligent transport systems use contemporary technology in the areas of surveillance, data collection, control and means of communication. The arrangement helps regulate the flow of traffic, simplify access to key places, oversee driver behaviour, lessen wrong practices, and reduce metre manipulations. As a result, the number of trips and total squandered kilometres are reduced, ultimately decreasing the rate of road accidents and pollution, whilst raising operational competence.

Abstract-- Deep learning based latent representations have been widely used for numerous scientific visualization applications such as isosurface similarity analysis, volume rendering, flow field synthesis, and data reduction, just to name a few. However, existing latent representations are mostly generated from raw data in an unsupervised manner, which makes it difficult to incorporate domain interest to control the size of the latent representations and the quality of the reconstructed data. In this paper, we present a novel importance-driven latent representation to facilitate domain-interest-guided scientific data visualization and analysis. We utilize spatial importance maps to represent various scientific interests and take them as the input to a feature transformation network to guide latent generation. We further reduced the latent size by a lossless entropy encoding algorithm trained together with the autoencoder, improving the storage and memory efficiency. We qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of latent representations generated by our method with data from multiple scientific visualization applications. First, to incorporate domain by autoencoders have attracted great attentions of researchers in recent interests into latent representations, we extend the basic autoencoder years. Latent representations have been successfully demonstrated to with a feature transformation network that takes domain interest as an retain essential information in the original data, and can be used for input to guide the mapping from scientific data to latent representations. Every been applied to multivariate volumetric data [28], streamlines and element in the importance map is a real value indicating how vital this stream surfaces [18], isosurfaces [12], and particles [25]. The importance Although latent representations for large-scale scientific data have values can be derived mathematically based on the domain or been used extensively, there are still several challenges. First, domain heuristically based on distances, distributions, locations, etc., depending scientists have diverse interests in different data portions, but latent on the underlying scientific applications.