Traffic jams that clog up roads and slow down travel are the biggest problems many cities face. Rising incomes and growing aspirations convince many middle-income households to yearn for cars, which adds to the problem. Hangzhou, one of the most connected cities in China, intends to solve traffic woes with the help of artificial intelligence. The city is teaming up with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, to install a new smart-traffic management system. Using its AI and big data analytics capabilities, Alibaba Cloud is able to provide real-time traffic recommendations and travel routes based on video and image recognition technologies.

MOSUL, IRAQ – Iraqi forces said Monday that they have taken more territory from jihadists and were searching for militants and bombs on the edge of the Old City as they press an offensive in west Mosul. They are also striking IS with armed drones as part of a renewed push launched on March 5 that has forced the jihadis out of several neighborhoods and key sites, including the famed Mosul museum. West Mosul is the most-populated urban area still held by the jihadis, followed by Syria's Raqa, which is also a key target in the U.S.-led anti-IS campaign. Iraq's Joint Operations Command announced additional gains on Monday, saying that forces from the elite Counter-Terrorism Service had recaptured the Al-Nafat and Mosul al-Jadida neighborhoods. Lt. Gen. Raed Shakir Jawdat said that forces from the Rapid Response Division, another special forces unit, and the federal police were working to search and clear territory on the edge of Mosul's Old City.

It is a truism that the knowledge of groups of people, particularly experts, outperforms that of individuals [43] and there is increasing call to use the dispersed judgments of the crowd in policy making [42]. There is a large literature spanning multiple disciplines on methods for aggregating beliefs (for reviews see [9, 6, 7]), and previous applications have included political and economic forecasting [3, 27], evaluating nuclear safety [10] and public policy [28], and assessing the quality of chemical probes [31]. However, previous approaches to aggregating beliefs have implicitly assumed'kind' (as opposed to'wicked') environments [16]. In a previous paper, [35] we proposed an algorithm for aggregating beliefs using not only respondent's answers but also their prediction of the answer distribution, and proved that for an infinite number of non-noisy Bayesian respondents, it would always determine the correct answer if sufficient evidence was available in the world. 1 Here, we build on this approach but treat the aggregation problem as one of statistical inference. We propose a model of how people formulate their own judgments and predict the distribution of the judgments of others, and use this model to infer the most probable world state giving rise to the observed data from people. The model can be applied at the level of a single question but also across multiple questions, to infer the domain expertise of respondents. The model is thus broader in scope than other machine learning models for aggregation in that it accepts unique questions, but can also be compared to their performance across multiple questions. We do not assume that the aggregation model has access to correct answers or to historical data about the performance of respondents on similar questions. By using a simple model of how people make such judgments, we are able to increase the accuracy of the group's aggregate answer in domains ranging from estimating art prices to diagnosing skin lesions.

This paper investigates three different technologies for solving a planning and scheduling problem of deploying multiple robots in a retirement home environment to assist elderly residents. The models proposed make use of standard techniques and solvers developed in AI planning and scheduling, with two primary motivations. First, to find a planning and scheduling solution that we can deploy in our real-world application. Second, to evaluate planning and scheduling technology in terms of the ``model-and-solve'' functionality that forms a major research goal in both domain-independent planning and constraint programming. Seven variations of our application are studied using the following three technologies: PDDL-based planning, time-line planning and scheduling, and constraint-based scheduling. The variations address specific aspects of the problem that we believe can impact the performance of the technologies while also representing reasonable abstractions of the real world application. We evaluate the capabilities of each technology and conclude that a constraint-based scheduling approach, specifically a decomposition using constraint programming, provides the most promising results for our application. PDDL-based planning is able to find mostly low quality solutions while the timeline approach was unable to model the full problem without alterations to the solver code, thus moving away from the model-and-solve paradigm. It would be misleading to conclude that constraint programming is ``better'' than PDDL-based planning in a general sense, both because we have examined a single application and because the approaches make different assumptions about the knowledge one is allowed to embed in a model. Nonetheless, we believe our investigation is valuable for AI planning and scheduling researchers as it highlights these different modelling assumptions and provides insight into avenues for the application of AI planning and scheduling for similar robotics problems. In particular, as constraint programming has not been widely applied to robot planning and scheduling in the literature, our results suggest significant untapped potential in doing so.

It can be easy to lose sight of the innovation in the cybersecurity industry amidst the frequent news about breaches and increasingly sophisticated hackers. Among all the chaos, there are also many promising innovations are gaining traction and could change the way enterprises conduct business. So far this year, there have been three key cybersecurity developments including blockchain, cloud security, and machine learning/artificial intelligence (AI). Michael Whitener, VLP Partner, sat down with Inside Counsel to discuss the new cybersecurity developments of 2017 and how they will affect the future of the industry.

You're awake, you're sentient, you might even be upright. You're not comatose or dead, and it's reasonable to assume that if you were on some kind of powerful mind-altering drug then you wouldn't be reading this. The point is, you're here, and you're alive, so therefore you're conscious. OK then, since you're conscious and I'm conscious and everyone else is conscious, go ahead. Does it belong to the mind or the body, or does it exist outside both? Is consciousness part of our souls, or does it live in the things we create – our art, our music, our cities and wars? Could it be mechanical or electronic, and, if so, what makes it operate? Most pressingly of all, is it possible we have now made for ourselves a new kind of consciousness, one which exists independently? If so, then what the hell have we got ourselves into? The search for a definition of consciousness must lay claim to be the world's longest-running detective story. We've had our best minds on it ever since we developed brains big enough to ask questions and, still, we seem to be stumped. Plato and Aristotle couldn't fix it; Kant, Hume and Locke tried different angles; Schroedinger, Heisenberg and Einstein remained in awe before it. None of them came up with the final formula, the definitive, nailed-it for ever, silences-all-critics answer. Lately though, the hunt seems to have changed gear. Despite big differences about how best to conduct the search and where to look, several of the most persistent sleuths have found themselves disconcertingly close to agreement. No-one is yet at the stage when they are ready to call a press conference and announce to the world they have finally apprehended the suspect, but they have at least begun to converge on these two leads: the Omega Point and the Singularity. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is an improbable prophet, partly because he's dead, and partly because he's still associated with a famous palaeontological fraud.

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Army is permanently stationing an attack drone system and its support personnel in South Korea amid ongoing tensions with the North, a Pentagon spokesman said Monday. Officials said the deployment, due by next year, was not unique to South Korea and was being conducted across the Army to provide infantry divisions with better intelligence. But the announcement comes just one week after Pyongyang launched four ballistic missiles in its latest provocative test. "The U.S. Army, after coordination with the Republic of Korea Armed Forces and the U.S. Air Force, has begun the process to permanently station a Gray Eagle Unmanned Aerial Systems company at Kunsan Air Base, Republic of Korea," Pentagon spokesman Navy Capt. The sensor-rich MQ-1C Gray Eagle is capable of carrying Stinger and Hellfire missiles, as well as other armaments.

We now know that artificial intelligence (AI) can play a winning game of poker. But, alas, poker is a game of deceit, where one needs to remain calm and hold back any traces of emotions. In today's workplaces, it also helps to remain calm and hold back on emotions -- to an extent. But how many successful business leaders go through their days with constant poker faces? Alas, AI can't bring any of that good stuff to the table as of yet, and that is making it a hard sell.

This isn't the first initiative intended to beef up jobs for qualified drone pilots, either. Last year, the Air Force started paying bonuses to keep pilots in the job, offering $10,000 more per year if they renewed their active duty status for five years. The military has also been increasing its use of drones like the MQ-9 Reaper for reconnaissance and missile strikes. More jobs means more reliance on these unmanned aircraft, with the Air Force moving to an all-Reaper drone fleet in the next year or two. The military branch intends to retire the older MQ-1 Predator next year, along with plans for eight potential bases to host new drone units in the near future.

From televisions to toasters, all kinds of devices are getting hooked up to the Internet. That's bringing convenience, like air conditioning systems that can be activated remotely while you're on your way home from work. But it's also bringing new privacy concerns, as anything connected to the Internet tends to attract the attention of hackers. Case in point: Documents recently released by Wikileaks suggest the Central Intelligence Agency can use spying targets' TVs against them, turning the sets into always-listening microphones. Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump, also recently claimed that microwaves could also be used as spying devices, though she has since walked back those comments.