Reconstruction of structure and parameters of an Ising model from binary samples is a problem of practical importance in a variety of disciplines, ranging from statistical physics and computational biology to image processing and machine learning. The focus of the research community shifted towards developing universal reconstruction algorithms which are both computationally efficient and require the minimal amount of expensive data. We introduce a new method, Interaction Screening, which accurately estimates the model parameters using local optimization problems. The algorithm provably achieves perfect graph structure recovery with an information-theoretically optimal number of samples, notably in the low-temperature regime which is known to be the hardest for learning. The efficacy of Interaction Screening is assessed through extensive numerical tests on synthetic Ising models of various topologies with different types of interactions, as well as on a real data produced by a D-Wave quantum computer. This study shows that the Interaction Screening method is an exact, tractable and optimal technique universally solving the inverse Ising problem.

The British Government is spending unprecedented amounts of money on encouraging the development of cars that drive themselves. But the UK is little prepared for the disruptive and potentially devastating changes that such cars could bring to our streets, experts have warned. While huge amounts of work is being done in the UK and elsewhere on such technology, towns and cities are continuing to work largely as they have with private, driven vehicles – by both governments and private car and tech companies – little is being done to change the cities they will drive around. That could become a problem if autonomous vehicles truly take over, as the government has both predicted and supported. That's because little is being done by either the Government or other bodies to ensure that the country is ready to embrace the challenges brought by such technology.

WASHINGTON – U.S.-European cooperation on economic issues is at a low ebb. Efforts to rekindle interest in mutually advantageous policies such as the revival of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership are not likely to succeed for the time being. Under the prevailing circumstances, trans-Atlantic disillusionment has settled in. A better approach than letting mutual acrimony languish would be to focus on a joint challenge -- how to meet the resolute Chinese challenge to the industrial economies of the West. Chinese President Xi Jinping's growing consolidation of power is giving ever more momentum to the ambitious Chinese plan to gain dominance of high-tech industries.

At the 2017 HR Technology Expo and Conference, Aberdeen witnessed something startling: Human Capital Management (HCM) technology vendors were downplaying AI as they described how they were catapulting their solution agenda further ahead into the 21st century. While one of the reasons for this is that the technology is not yet living up to the visions over which Wall Street is hopelessly salivating, the reality is that HCM vendors are not on board with the elimination of people from the workforce. It simply doesn't jibe with their goals and the way they see the market. While themes related to machine learning and AI came up in conversations with these technologists, HCM vendors seemed more excited about the way advanced-stage analytics and predictive capabilities rooted in trend analyses were helping people use technology more effectively. In other words, technologists are more interested in how their creations are finally improving labor productivity.

It's tempting to say that the only technology that will matter in 2018 is Bitcoin. It's taken hold of our collective consciousness in these waning days of 2017 and will play a major role next year, but there will, naturally, be many other equally and even more important technology stories in 2018. If you remember what the rollout of 4G LTE was like almost a decade ago, get ready to start reliving those good times with 5G in 2018. Like 4G before it, 5G is a slightly amorphous idea. No one agrees on exactly how fast 5G will be, but it's likely to be 10-to-12-times faster than the best LTE has to offer.

Our solar system now is tied for most number of planets around a single star, with the recent discovery of an eighth planet circling Kepler-90, a Sun-like star 2,545 light-years from Earth. The planet was discovered in data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. With the discovery of an eighth planet, the Kepler-90 system is the first to tie with our solar system in number of planets. The newly-discovered Kepler-90i – a sizzling hot, rocky planet that orbits its star once every 14.4 days – was found using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence in which computers "learn."

The publisher of Kojien, the most authoritative dictionary in Japan, has been stuck between a rock and a hard place over its definition of Taiwan as a province of China, prompting a request for a correction from the self-ruled island. Since its first publication in 1955, the dictionary has become a household name. The media and other organizations often use it to get the final say on a word's meaning. The seventh edition is slated to be released next month. On Friday, Iwanami Shoten, the publisher, said Kojien's entry on Taiwan is in line with the 1972 Japan-China Joint Communique, in which Japan recognized the People's Republic of China as the sole legal government of China and "fully understands and respects" the PRC's stance that Taiwan is an inalienable part of its territory.

The Army wants unmanned vehicles to reduce the burden on soldiers by carrying heavy ammunition and supplies into combat. The Portland Press Herald reports that the Army is expected to order thousands of the units by 2020.

When Britain leaves the European Union, many immigrants will be forced out of the country. But many of those people provide much-needed labor, and calls to automate the jobs they leave behind are impractical. Eighteen months after the U.K. voted to leave the EU, many details of the exit remain unnegotiated. But the process is broadly expected to have one big impact: a clampdown on immigration from EU countries. In fact, immigration has already declined since the vote, with the U.K.'s Office of National Statistics reporting that net migration into the U.K. is down from 336,000 in the 12 months preceding June 2016 to 230,000 in the 12 months preceding June 2017.

Since Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci system earned the FDA nod in 2000, the company has enjoyed a sizable head start in the minimally invasive robotic surgery field. Competition has been brewing for years, from players large and small, but 2018 could be the year the market finally sees a shake-up. North Carolina's TransEnterix scored an FDA nod for its Senhance system in October, triggering a 75% bump in its stock price. The device, a rare new entrant to the robotic abdominal surgery market, is designed to make it easier to perform laparoscopic surgery. It is cleared for colorectal and gynecological surgery and features haptic feedback, so the surgeon can "feel" the tissue that the robotic arm is touching.