Waymo's lawsuit against Uber for allegedly stealing technology for self-driving cars hasn't gone to trial yet, because the judge received a letter from the Department of Justice suggesting Uber withheld crucial evidence. That letter, with some redactions, is now available for all to read and it's not good news for Uber. It was written by the attorney of a former employee, Richard Jacobs, and it contains claims that the company routinely tried to hack its competitors to gain an edge, used a team of spies to steal secrets or surveil political figures and even bugged meetings between transport regulators -- with some of this information delivered directly to former CEO Travis Kalanick. Alphabet's self-driving arm Waymo is making the case that Anthony Levandowski created the autonomous trucking company Otto as a scheme to steal its trade secrets and sell them to Uber. In the letter, it says that members of the Uber SSG team Jacobs worked on traveled to Pittsburgh after it acquired the company to instruct Otto employees on how to use burner phones and ephemeral communications apps to avoid discovery in an expected lawsuit. Jacobs has since testified that his attorney was mistaken about the allegations pertaining to Waymo, but now the case has been delayed until next year as a result of these claims unearthed during the ongoing criminal investigation.

But that job is suddenly looking iffy as A.I. gets better at reading scans. A start-up called Arterys, to cite just one example, already has a program that can perform a magnetic-resonance imaging analysis of blood flow through a heart in just 15 seconds, compared with the 45 minutes required by humans. Maybe she wants to be a surgeon, but that job may not be safe, either. Robots already assist surgeons in removing damaged organs and cancerous tissue, according to Scientific American. Last year, a prototype robotic surgeon called STAR (Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot) outperformed human surgeons in a test in which both had to repair the severed intestine of a live pig.

When it comes to disruptive technologies that will drive businesses in the coming years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is touted as the most promising and Indian enterprises across the spectrum began embracing it to enhance real-time user experiences. Picking up the pace globally, AI gradually cemented its position as the technology is quite transverse and perceived as less gimmicky, impacting several functions to improve productivity and business results, says Thomas Husson, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Forrester. From flushing out fake and terror-related content to making sense of humongous data for self-driving cars, from helping identify when someone might be expressing thoughts of suicide on Facebook to empower NASA explore space communications, AI-based tools gained a definite momentum. Microsoft pledged $50 million over the next five years to put AI technology in the hands of those who are working to mitigate climate change. When it comes to India, AI started playing a significant role in not just developing smart devices but in improving engagement with end-consumers -- be it government or corporates.

"Critical component" Some 91 percent of cybersecurity professionals are worried that next-generation cyberattacks will be based around AI, a study from Webroot found. As TechRepublic reports, most of the experts surveyed said they will defend against AI-based attacks using more AI. Almost all the businesses (99%) intending to use AI are optimistic it will improve their cybersecurity responses. The technology is being used in three key ways to augment existing anti-malware solutions. Companies in the U.S. are leading the trend towards defensive AI solutions, with 95 percent agreeing it's a "critical component" in a modern cybersecurity strategy.

There is a war a-brewin', but this war will be fought with wits and not brute strength. Ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin's declaration that "the nation that leads in AI (Artificial Intelligence) will be the ruler of the world," the press and analysts have created hysteria regarding the ramifications of artificial intelligence on everything from public education to unemployment to healthcare to Skynet. Note: artificial intelligence (AI) endows applications with the ability to automatically learn and adapt from experience via interacting with the surroundings / environment. See the blog "Artificial Intelligence is not Fake Intelligence" for a more detailed explanation on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The Fast Company article "How to Stop Worrying and Love the Great AI War of 2018," projected that the AI battle would ultimately boil down between the "AI Big 6": Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft.

This paper proposes a new approach to construct high quality space-filling sample designs. First, we propose a novel technique to quantify the space-filling property and optimally trade-off uniformity and randomness in sample designs in arbitrary dimensions. Second, we connect the proposed metric (defined in the spatial domain) to the objective measure of the design performance (defined in the spectral domain). This connection serves as an analytic framework for evaluating the qualitative properties of space-filling designs in general. Using the theoretical insights provided by this spatial-spectral analysis, we derive the notion of optimal space-filling designs, which we refer to as space-filling spectral designs. Third, we propose an efficient estimator to evaluate the space-filling properties of sample designs in arbitrary dimensions and use it to develop an optimization framework to generate high quality space-filling designs. Finally, we carry out a detailed performance comparison on two different applications in 2 to 6 dimensions: a) image reconstruction and b) surrogate modeling on several benchmark optimization functions and an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) simulation code. We demonstrate that the propose spectral designs significantly outperform existing approaches especially in high dimensions.

Only a handful of known star systems have more than a single planet. With eight worlds, our solar system has long taken the prize for the biggest lineup. Our corner of the galaxy now shares the record with another system, Kepler 90, NASA and Google researchers announced Thursday. A Google algorithm uncovered a scorcher of a planet, a rock 30 percent larger than Earth, orbiting a star a few thousand light-years away. This planet, Kepler 90i, brought the total number of planets circling its star to eight -- just like our solar system's octuplets.

In every federal agency, critical insights are hidden within the massive data sets collected over the years. But because of a shortage of data scientists in the federal government, extracting value from this data is time consuming, if it happens at all.

Can a computer tell if you're going to be a productive member of society? Can it tell if you're a terrorist? The Department of Homeland Security is trying to answer these questions. The agency hopes to build a computer system to help determine who gets to visit or immigrate to the U.S., but that idea has some techies worried.

U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone in Philadelphia issued a preliminary injunction preventing enforcement of rules the administration announced in October that allowed businesses or non-profits to obtain exemptions on moral or religious grounds.