NASA is preparing for lift off once again. The agency is scheduled to broadcast an unpiloted Japanese cargo spacecraft that will depart the International Space Station Friday morning. The cargo spacecraft, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) H-II Transport Vehicle-6, will be released by the station's robotic arm commanded by the European Space Agency's Flight Engineer Thomas Pesquet with support from NASA's Expedition 50 Commander Shane Kimbrough. You can watch the NASA Orbital ATK launch here. Transport Vehicle-6 is expected to move underneath and in front of the International Space Station and gather data for a week using a JAXA experiment which will "measure electromagnetic forces using a tether in low-Earth orbit," a NASA statement read.

WIRE)--Virtualitics, LLC, a data analytics in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) startup, today announced the launch of its new tool that combines powerful data visualization in VR/AR and artificial intelligence to provide insights and discover actionable knowledge hidden in big and complex data. The company also announced they closed a $3 million investment seed round from angel investors. Virtualitics combines VR/AR with machine learning and natural language in a data exploration, collaborative environment suitable for both data scientists and non-expert users. The technology is the only one of its kind that can provide a simultaneous rendering of up to 10 dimensions, revealing multidimensional relationships present in the data, which may not be discoverable in any other way. The company is based on over a decade of research at Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and was founded by: professor George Djorgovski, the founding director of Caltech's Center for Data-Driven Discovery; Michael Amori, former Deutsche Bank managing director, Harvard MBA and Caltech alumnus; Dr. Ciro Donalek, computational scientist at Caltech; and Dr. Scott Davidoff, manager of the Human Interfaces Group at NASA's JPL.

Increased investor interest in AI startups – from around 10 deals in Q1'11 to over 120 in Q2'16 – can be attributed to recent advances in machine learning algorithms, particularly "deep learning" technology, a souped up version of AI. Just this week, Google integrated deep learning into its Google Translate tool; Baidu announced the launch of DeepBench, an "open source benchmarking tool for evaluating deep learning performance across different hardware platforms"; and NVIDIA introduced Xavier, a deep learning-based supercomputer for driverless cars. In the private market, Google put deep learning in the spotlight back in 2014 when it acquired 4 startups focused on this AI tech in quick succession: DeepMind, Vision Factory, Dark Blue Labs, and DNNresearch. Apple, which joined the race in 2015, most recently acquired Turi, which has developed a deep learning toolkit, among other AI-based solutions. Not to be outdone, Intel has acquired around 5 AI startups since January 2015, including deep learning startup Nervana Systems and, more recently, Movidius.

On the upcoming SpaceX CRS-10 mission, a rocket will launch carrying the next batch of cargo to the International Space Station. Inside its Dragon capsule's unpressurized trunk will be a critical Earth-facing instrument--one that maps ozone molecules and other compounds in the atmosphere. Its name is the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment III, or SAGE III. When the Dragon arrives at the ISS, a robot arm will reach into the trunk, pull out the experiment's parts, put them together, and install them on the outside of the habitat. Scientists at NASA's Langley Research Center will watch streaming video of their baby being assembled, breaths held till everything is in place.

Meanwhile the leader of Communist China rebranded his prickly protectionist power as the defender of globalisation and shared values. So after week one in this upside down new world, how stands China's bid for global leadership? A week is just a week, but when it comes to strategic focus, China is on course. It's easier to look laser sharp when the competition is in disarray. Here the internal difficulties of the US and the European Union are helpful to China.

Billionaires in the world's tech capital Silicon Valley are reportedly preparing for the apocalypse by buying underground bunkers, guns, ammo and motorcycles. Fearful that artificial intelligence will displace so many jobs that there will be a revolt against those responsible for the technology, the are entrepreneurs readying themselves for doomsday like scenarios. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of the professional social network, LinkedIn, told The New Yorker that he believes more than 50 per cent of billionaires in the Californian tech hub are preparing for the worst. "I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo.

Futurist and Stanford professor Paul Saffo looked out over a mostly male, mostly affluent-looking audience one morning this week and challenged them to identify the most significant event of 1989. "Fall of the Berlin Wall?" someone offered. Saffo shook his head and gestured at a slide showing a memo titled "Information Management: A Proposal," the first blueprint for what became the World Wide Web. "In terms of history, this did more to change the world," he said solemnly. His audience of 90 executives from finance, energy, and other sectors murmured and nodded approvingly--this is just the kind of perspective they came for.

NASA is developing technology which could enable autonomous navigation in future underwater drones to help them navigate subsurface oceans on icy moons like Jupiter's Europa. The space agency is developing AI that would allow submersibles to make their own decisions during exploration of extraterrestrial water worlds. Recent discoveries made through space exploration and astronomical observations have shown that our Solar System is rich in water and could host several subsurface liquid oceans. With the scientific community believing that water exists beneath the crust of Europa as well as on other icy moons like Saturn's Dione and Ganymede. Compelling evidence of hidden oceans on dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto have been also presented recently, according to Astrowatch.

Publishing data on Kaggle is a way organizations can reach a diverse audience of data scientists with an enthusiasm for learning, knowledge, and collaboration. For Dr. Erin Miller of START, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, making her organization's Global Terrorism Database available for analysis by Kaggle users has brought new awareness to their cause. In this Open Data Spotlight, Erin discusses how setting aside agendas and focusing on understanding this unparalleled dataset of over 150,000 attack events allows users to undertake constructive analyses that may defy common conceptions about terrorism. Read on to learn more about the Global Terrorism Database project and the ways users of open data can make valuable contributions to the organizations that make them possible. My role started out (more than 12 years ago) as a graduate assistant cleaning raw data, and now I manage the project team, workflow, resources, and interaction with end users and related research projects.

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