Japan's elderly are being told to get used to being looked after by robots. With Japan's ageing society facing a predicted shortfall of 370,000 caregivers by 2025, the government wants to increase community acceptance of technology that could help fill the gap in the nursing workforce. Developers have focused their efforts on producing simple robotic devices that help frail residents get out of their bed and into a wheelchair, or that can ease senior citizens into bathtubs. But the government sees a wider range of potential applications and recently revised its list of priorities to include robots that can predict when patients might need to use the toilet. Dr Hirohisa Hirukawa, director of robot innovation research at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, said the aims included easing the burden on nursing staff and boosting the autonomy of people still living at home.

SAN FRANCISCO – Uber was either a cheating competitor willing to break the law to win the race to develop self-driving cars, or the victim of an unproven conspiracy theory stitched together by its main rival, Waymo, jurors heard in opening statements of a trade secrets trial on Monday. The first salvos were delivered to a 10-person jury in San Francisco federal court in a civil lawsuit that could help determine who emerges in the forefront of the autonomous car business nearly a year after Alphabet Inc.'s self-driving car unit Waymo sued rival Uber Technologies Inc. The case hinges on whether Uber used apparent trade secrets to advance its autonomous vehicle program. Waymo's allegation is that its former engineer, Anthony Levandowski, downloaded more than 14,000 confidential files in December 2015 containing designs for autonomous vehicles before going to work for Uber and leading its self-driving car unit in 2016. "Waymo wants you to believe that Anthony Levandowski got together with Uber as part of some grand conspiracy to cheat and take trade secrets," Uber attorney Bill Carmody said in his opening statement to the jury.

Two tech giants racing for a lead in autonomous driving clashed Monday in court as former Google car unit Waymo's lawyer argued that Uber's boss deliberately chose'to cheat' to get a leg up on competitors. The accusations flew in the opening day of a trial in which Google parent Alphabet's Waymo division is seeking at least $1 billion over the theft of trade secrets from its self-driving car program. In opening remarks before the jury in San Francisco federal court, Waymo lawyer Charles Verhoeven maintained that Uber's founder and former chief executive Travis Kalanick made the decision to use stolen trade secrets to enable the global ridesharing giant to move into autonomous driving. Google parent Alphabet's Waymo division is seeking at least $1 billion over the theft of trade secrets from its self-driving car program. 'He made a decision and the decision was to cheat,' Verhoeven said.

Every year cyber attacks are becoming more sophisticated and frequent -- and it's predicted they'll cost the world $8 trillion by 2022. But a company founded by mathematicians and ex-spies is trying to change the way organizations protect themselves from hackers. British cyber security firm Darktrace is using artificial intelligence to create a "cyber immune system." Usually, companies try to anticipate what an attack would look like and ask their computers to look for anomalies that match that description. But Darktrace says it has come up with a system that learns what is normal behavior within a company's network, and can then make intelligent judgments to spot emerging threats -- even if it experiences a new, complex attack that it's never seen before.

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are nonlinear dynamical models commonly used in the machine learning and dynamical systems literature to represent complex dynamical or sequential relationships between variables. More recently, as deep learning models have become more common, RNNs have been used to forecast increasingly complicated systems. Dynamical spatio-temporal processes represent a class of complex systems that can potentially benefit from these types of models. Although the RNN literature is expansive and highly developed, uncertainty quantification is often ignored. Even when considered, the uncertainty is generally quantified without the use of a rigorous framework, such as a fully Bayesian setting. Here we attempt to quantify uncertainty in a more formal framework while maintaining the forecast accuracy that makes these models appealing, by presenting a Bayesian RNN model for nonlinear spatio-temporal forecasting. Additionally, we make simple modifications to the basic RNN to help accommodate the unique nature of nonlinear spatio-temporal data. The proposed model is applied to a Lorenz simulation and two real-world nonlinear spatio-temporal forecasting applications.

Kurt the'CyberGuy' comments on new services and apps that do. YouTube's powerful recommendation algorithm may be "optimizing for outrageous, salacious and often fraudulent content" or easily manipulated by "bad actors, including foreign intelligence entities," a top-ranking Democrat on the Senate's intelligence committee said. Virginia Sen. Mark Warner made the statement after a Guardian investigation reported that the Google-owned video platform was consistently promoting divisive and conspiratorial videos damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign before the 2016 election. "Companies like YouTube have immense power and influence in shaping the media and content that users see," Warner told the Guardian. "I've been increasingly concerned that the recommendation engine algorithms behind platforms like YouTube are, at best, intrinsically flawed in optimizing for outrageous, salacious, and often fraudulent content."

At the tail end of 2017, a feature in Wired offered a glimpse into a new "church of artificial intelligence," set up by Silicon Valley engineer and expert in self-driving car technology, Anthony Levandowski. The aim of Levandowski's church -- called the Way of the Future -- is described in papers filed with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as "the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software." "It's not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes," Levandowski told Wired. "But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?" These words, as wobbly as they are, are painted against a backdrop of high-profile advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

A record-setting Russian spacewalk ended with a critical antenna facing the wrong way outside the International Space Station. Cosmonauts Aleksandr Misurkin, 40, and Anton Shkaplerov, 45, had to venture outside to swap out an old comms module with a new communications rod. But when they installed the antenna, designed to improve comms with Russia's Mission Control in Moscow, it was left facing 180 degrees from its intended position. The trouble arose toward the end of a spacewalk lasting more than eight hours - the longest ever by Russians and the fifth longest overall. Nasa's Mission Control has reported the antenna is still working, but Russian space officials are now assessing whether the device needs re-positioning.

Stunning concept images have revealed a glimpse of what homes of the future could look like, as preparations are made for the world's first freeform 3D-printed property. Experts will build a house called'Curve Appeal' whose structure will be made from 28 panels, which will be 3D-printed off-site before being slotted together on-site to create two exterior walls, a roof and interior core. These four main sections will then be hoisted into place and joined together, and will feature a complex blend of curved angles and glazed windows. Although 3D printed buildings have been made before, this futuristic home - to be constructed in Chattanooga, Tennessee, later this year - will be the first of its kind, as it will contain no regular shapes or angles. Designers are planning to build the world's first freeform 3D-printed house later this year, taking a competition winning idea from concept to reality.

Today, MIT President L. Rafael Reif announced that Eric Schmidt, who until January was the executive chairman of Google's parent company, Alphabet, will join MIT as a visiting innovation fellow for one year, starting in Spring. Schmidt will figure prominently in MIT's plans to bring human and machine intelligence to the next level, serving as an advisor to the newly launched MIT Intelligence Quest, an Institute-wide initiative to pursue hard problems on the horizon of intelligence research. "I am thrilled that Dr. Schmidt will be joining us," says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. "As MIT IQ seeks to shape transformative new technologies to serve society, Eric's brilliant strategic and tactical insight, organizational creativity, and exceptional technical judgment will be a tremendous asset. And for our students, his experience in driving some of the most important innovations of our time will serve as an example and an inspiration."