In 2014 I optimistically wrote for the Knight Foundation blog that libraries could reinvent themselves in the digital era, tracing my own collaborations with the Internet Archive over the prior year and drawing from my opening keynote address to the 2012 IIPC General Assembly at the Library of Congress. Yet, reflecting back three years later, looking at just how adrift and leaderless so many research libraries have become in the digital era, unsure of how to reinvent themselves and often too arrogant and insular to reach out beyond the communities they have worked with for centuries, I am no longer so certain that research libraries and the academic communities that work most closely with them can genuinely reimagine themselves on their own. Community libraries have found great success reinventing themselves to better fit into modern lifestyles, from collaborative spaces to free wifi to ebooks to and even 3D printers and virtual reality systems, but research libraries as a whole seem to be struggling to find their footing in the digital era. What might they learn from the world of the commercial cloud and indeed the broader technological future of Silicon Valley? The commercial cloud has truly transformed how we think about computing in the modern era, from the shift from hardware to services and experts, the rise of seamless security and unimaginable deep learning systems accessible by a single API call.

Uber is putting the brakes on its driverless car pilot program after one of its self-driving cars got into a high speed crash in Arizona. Sean Dowling (@seandowlingtv) has more. SAN FRANCISCO -- A self-driving car flipped on its side seems guaranteed to make humans think twice about riding with a robot. Never mind that Uber's accident last weekend in Tempe, Ariz., was the result of a human failing to yield and smacking into the autonomous Volvo. Despite the lack of serious injuries, that image alone raises questions about both our acceptance of self-driving tech as well as Uber's rabid rush to bring this new age of mobility to life.

We present a hybrid method for latent information discovery on the data sets containing both text content and connection structure based on constrained low rank approximation. The new method jointly optimizes the Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) objective function for text clustering and the Symmetric NMF (SymNMF) objective function for graph clustering. We propose an effective algorithm for the joint NMF objective function, based on a block coordinate descent (BCD) framework. The proposed hybrid method discovers content associations via latent connections found using SymNMF. The method can also be applied with a natural conversion of the problem when a hypergraph formulation is used or the content is associated with hypergraph edges. Experimental results show that by simultaneously utilizing both content and connection structure, our hybrid method produces higher quality clustering results compared to the other NMF clustering methods that uses content alone (standard NMF) or connection structure alone (SymNMF). We also present some interesting applications to several types of real world data such as citation recommendations of papers. The hybrid method proposed in this paper can also be applied to general data expressed with both feature space vectors and pairwise similarities and can be extended to the case with multiple feature spaces or multiple similarity measures.

The New York Police Department is reportedly in the process of acquiring state-of-the-art facial recognition technology that it will use to scan the faces of drivers commuting to and from New York City, according to the New York Daily News. The acquisition will be handled by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Once in place, the technology will be installed on the nine bridges and tunnels connecting New York City's five boroughs and will be used to scan 800,000 cars per day. The program was announced by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo last October as part of a "plan to reimagine New York's bridges and tunnels for the 21st century." The adoption of the technology was noted at the time to be a response to an increasing number of "threats to security" that New York City faces.

Stephen Hawking made an appearance in Hong Kong to discuss President Donald Trump and Brexit and he did it without having to travel anywhere. The Brief History of Time author, cosmologist and Cambridge professor appeared to the audience of hundreds at an "Evening with Stephen Hawking" event on Friday as a "HumaGram," or human hologram, to deliver his remarks, according to the Independent. The HumaGram is 3D interactive holographic technology developed by the company ARHT Media. The technology can be used life or can be prerecorded and is then only visible to audience members wearing a special pair of glasses. Hawking, who has ALS, used his speech aiding computer to discuss Donald Trump and Brexit saying that between the two, "we are witnessing a global revolt against experts," according to the Independent.

At the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA Ames Research Center, engineers are working on a little robot cube that will be launched to the International Space Station later this year. The one-foot-cube robot, named Astrobee, will fly around the ISS with its tiny fan-powered thrusters to help astronauts with a variety of tasks.

When my mother's mother was in her early twenties, a century ago, a suitor took her duck hunting in a rowboat on a lake near Austin, Texas, where she grew up. He steadied his shotgun by resting the barrel on her right shoulder--she was sitting in the bow--and when he fired he not only missed the duck but also permanently damaged her hearing, especially on that side. The loss became more severe as she got older, and by the time I was in college she was having serious trouble with telephones. Her deafness probably contributed to one of her many eccentricities: ending phone conversations by suddenly hanging up. I'm a grandparent myself now, and lots of people I know have hearing problems. A guy I played golf with last year came close to making a hole in one, then complained that no one in our foursome had complimented him on his shot--even though, a moment before, all three of us had complimented him on his shot. The man who cuts my wife's hair began wearing two hearing aids recently, to compensate for damage that he attributes to years of exposure to professional-quality blow-dryers. My sister has hearing aids, too. She traces her problem to repeatedly listening at maximum volume to Anne's Angry and Bitter Breakup Song Playlist, which she created while going through a divorce. My ears ring all the time--a condition called tinnitus.

"Facial recognition technology is a powerful tool law enforcement can use to protect people, their property, our borders, and our nation," said the committee chair, Jason Chaffetz. "But it can also be used by bad actors to harass or stalk individuals. It can be used in a way that chills free speech and free association by targeting people attending certain political meetings, protests, churches, or other types of places in the public." The database got its start back in 201 with the FBI's Next Generation Identification system, which was designed to supplement the agency's existing fingerprint database. The problem was that the FBI didn't bother to tell the public about the new registration or publish a required-by-law privacy impact assessment until 2015.

Police body cameras are widely seen as a way to improve law enforcement's transparency with the public. But when mixed with police use of facial-recognition tools, the prospect of continual surveillance comes with big risks to privacy. Facial-recognition technology combined with policy body cameras could "redefine the nature of public spaces," Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology, told the US House Oversight Committee at a hearing on March 22. It's not a distant reality and it threatens civil liberties, he warned. Technologists already have tools, and are developing more, that allow police to recognize people in real time. Of 38 manufacturers who make 66 different products, at least nine already have facial recognition technology capabilities or have made accommodations to build it in, according to a 2016 Johns Hopkins University report, created for the US Department of Justice, on the body-worn camera market.

President Trump's effort to keep manufacturers in the U.S. may encourage increased automation -- potentially at the expense of human workers. However, the robots are likely to be made in China unless the U.S. acts soon. The Chinese government is investing billions of dollars to take the global lead in robotics and AI. In its most recent five-year plan, the national government aimed to boost annual production of industrial robots to 100,000 by 2020 -- and is poised to exceed that target. China has also surpassed the U.S. in the number of scientific papers produced on AI and is deploying machine learning and robotics across industries as well as the military.