There are few processes in life as nerve-wracking and tedious as going through security at an airport. Whether it's adhering to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) rules of removing laptops from bags, or navigating the seemingly endless, winding queue, getting screened before a flight is time-consuming. But with the help of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), researchers are working on integrating video surveillance with artificial intelligence (AI) to make this vital security process much smoother. The development new technology to streamline airport security has stagnated in recent decades. A lack of innovation, coupled with a need for increased screening in the wake of events like the 9/11 attacks, have only made the process worse.

In 2018, the shifting emphasis to IoT, Artificial Intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and automation seem to overshadow cloud; yet, I believe it is just the opposite. A recently published industry survey shows that by 2020, the use of public cloud will grow dramatically. Business goals related to actively adopting AI, IoT and machine learning strategies are prompting IT teams to consider outsourced cloud and cloud experts to move faster than competitors. The formats and pilots incorporating these technologies can be seen across multiple markets and segments including government, retail, and industrial bases. The use of AI, VR, and IoT is also driving the technology, compliance and cybersecurity markets necessary to support these innnovations.

That would enable bystanders to use their smartphones to report misbehaving UAVs, Ford stated in a blog post, noting that they used this method to reliably identify drones up to 80 feet away during testing. While that's not far at all for surveillance drones, it might be close enough for drones endangering airports or driving paths -- though it's unclear how quickly the app could identify fast-moving aircraft. That range could be extended by up to 20 times using commonly-available DSLR lenses, Ford pointed out in the proposal's white paper (PDF). Light-based identification has its own problems, but at least it would be easier to implement than broadcasting by radio, an approach that could require industry standardization. It's a potentially cheap, efficient solution using equipment people already have (like smartphones), and given that consumers once again have to register their drones with the FAA, those 10-digit ID numbers will be more available.

President Trump is set to pit the video game industry against some of its harshest critics at a White House meeting on Thursday that's designed to explore the link between violent games, guns and tragedies such as last month's shooting in Parkland, Fla. Following the attack at Marjory Stoneman High School, which left 17 students dead, Trump has said violent games are "shaping young people's thoughts." The president has proposed that "we have to do something about maybe what they're seeing and how they're seeing it." Trump has invited video game executives like Robert Altman, the CEO of ZeniMax, the parent company for games such as Fallout; Strauss Zelnick, the chief executive of Take Two Interactive, which is known for Grand Theft Auto, and Michael Gallagher, the leader of the Entertainment Software Association, a Washington-focused lobbying organization for the industry. Three people familiar with the White House's planning, but not authorized to speak on the record, confirmed those invitees.

Latent feature modeling allows capturing the latent structure responsible for generating the observed properties of a set of objects. It is often used to make predictions either for new values of interest or missing information in the original data, as well as to perform data exploratory analysis. However, although there is an extensive literature on latent feature models for homogeneous datasets, where all the attributes that describe each object are of the same (continuous or discrete) nature, there is a lack of work on latent feature modeling for heterogeneous databases. In this paper, we introduce a general Bayesian nonparametric latent feature model suitable for heterogeneous datasets, where the attributes describing each object can be either discrete, continuous or mixed variables. The proposed model presents several important properties. First, it accounts for heterogeneous data while keeping the properties of conjugate models, which allow us to infer the model in linear time with respect to the number of objects and attributes. Second, its Bayesian nonparametric nature allows us to automatically infer the model complexity from the data, i.e., the number of features necessary to capture the latent structure in the data. Third, the latent features in the model are binary-valued variables, easing the interpretability of the obtained latent features in data exploratory analysis. We show the flexibility of the proposed model by solving both prediction and data analysis tasks on several real-world datasets. Moreover, a software package of the GLFM is publicly available for other researcher to use and improve it.

The ticket kiosks at Shanghai's frenetic subway station have a mind of their own. Walk up to one and state your destination, and it'll automatically recommend a route before issuing a ticket. In the interest of reducing the rush-hour stampede, the system is set up to let you find information and buy tickets without pushing a button or talking to a person. More impressive still, all this happens successfully in the middle of a crowded, noisy station. Each kiosk has to figure out who is speaking to it; zero in on that person's voice within the crowd; transcribe the incoming speech; parse its meaning; and compare the person's face against a massive database of photos--all within a few seconds.

Retired astronaut Scott Kelly and chemical engineer Jayshree Seth address the shocking statistic that almost 40 percent of people believe science doesn't impact their lives. Former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly says that he owes his storied space career to Tom Wolfe's book "The Right Stuff," which he read when he was 18. Kelly, who read the novel while studying at State University of New York Maritime College in the Bronx, admits that he was a poor student until finding inspiration in the famous book about the early U.S. space program. "It inspired me to become a fighter pilot in the Navy and, later, a test pilot, and, after that, an astronaut," he told Fox News. "It just shows that with some inspiration and some hard work you can later achieve some pretty significant things." After his selection by NASA in 1996, and over the next 20 years, Kelly served as a Space Shuttle pilot and commander and spent two stints on the International Space Station.

Video games do not cause violent behavior. There is no scientific, consensus-backed research supporting the idea that playing video games -- even bloody, realistic shooters -- leads to real-life acts of brutality. However, this misguided theory prevails. After a shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, left 17 people dead on February 14th, a handful of politicians decried video games for corrupting young minds and inciting violent behavior. Days later, President Donald Trump said during a meeting about safety in schools, "I'm hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people's thoughts." Tomorrow, video game industry leaders are scheduled to meet with Trump to discuss the (non-existent, completely imaginary) problem.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has obtained documents showing that the FBI and Best Buy's Geek Squad have maintained a rather cozy relationship over the past decade. Memos and other records released through FOIA requests confirm reports from last year of Geek Squad members serving as paid FBI informants. They also reveal new details about how closely federal agents and Geeks communicated with one another. We first learned of a possible working relationship between the two groups last April during the child pornography trial of a gynecological oncologist named Mark Rettenmaier in California, who had taken his computer in for a repair at Best Buy. The customer service representatives there sent the computer to the main Geek Squad City facility in Brooks, Kentucky, where technicians discovered evidence of child porn and reported it to the FBI.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Were you among the many Facebook users who received a notification introducing the platform's facial-recognition features last week? That's because, after years of using the software, lawsuits have finally pressured the social network into being more transparent about how it collects and employs this biometric data. Slate's Jaime Dunaway explains what the features mean for you and your privacy. For centuries, creators promised earlier versions of the tech (bertillonage anyone?) would bring about a golden era of accuracy and objectivity in identification.