Government
ISIS fighters surrender in Syria, others killed in Afghanistan
Smoke rises near a stadium where some Islamic State militants are holed up after an air strike by coalition forces, in Raqqa, Syria, Oct. 12, 2017. Around 100 fighters from the Islamic State group have surrendered since Friday in Raqqa, with the Syrian city said to be on the brink of falling to a U.S.-led coalition. Meanwhile, a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan's eastern Kunar province on Thursday killed 14 ISIS militants, Afghan officials said Saturday. In Raqqa, all of the combatants were "removed from the city," a spokesman for the U.S-led coalition against ISIS told Reuters on Saturday. ISIS was said to be on the verge of defeat in Raqqa, the report said.
Jeremy Corbyn: Let workers control robots
Robots in the workplace should be owned and controlled by workers rather than bosses, Jeremy Corbyn will suggest. The Labour leader, who has previously warned of the risk to jobs of automation, will say new technology has led to "a more rapacious and exploitative form of capitalism". He will also suggest "gig economy" firms like Uber could be replaced by co-operatives. Drivers would collectively agree their own pay and conditions, he will say. Earlier this year, a study by accountancy firm PwC said robotics and artificial intelligence could affect almost a third of UK jobs by the 2030s, with "more manual, routine jobs" which "can effectively be programmed" the most at risk.
Learning Infinite RBMs with Frank-Wolfe
Ping, Wei, Liu, Qiang, Ihler, Alexander
In this work, we propose an infinite restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), whose maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) corresponds to a constrained convex optimization. We consider the Frank-Wolfe algorithm to solve the program, which provides a sparse solution that can be interpreted as inserting a hidden unit at each iteration, so that the optimization process takes the form of a sequence of finite models of increasing complexity. As a side benefit, this can be used to easily and efficiently identify an appropriate number of hidden units during the optimization. The resulting model can also be used as an initialization for typical state-of-the-art RBM training algorithms such as contrastive divergence, leading to models with consistently higher test likelihood than random initialization.
AUSA 2017: 4 amazing land vehicles at this year's show
Fox Firepower: Defense Specialist Allison Barrie shares her top picks of high-tech military vehicles on display at AUSA 2017 including a fuel-cell powered Chevy truck and a self-driving Polaris MRZR. Armored vehicles with laser weapons, silent motorcycles that can run on jet fuel, self-driving ATVs and futuristic Chevy trucks - there were a lot of eye-popping vehicles in the nation's capital this week. At the annual Association of the United States Army (AUSA) exhibition, US Army Soldiers and their families get the chance to explore innovation from around the world created for future combat. Many vehicles from giant tanks through to tiny rolling surveillance robots were on display this year. Here are four of the most popular draws throughout the week.
General's Intelligence Vs Artificial Intelligence – Can Military Strategy become an Algorithm?
Besides being exactly a year before India conducted its second nuclear tests, it is the day that IBM's Deep Blue computer made Gary Kasparov, the human world champion, concede defeat in less than 20 moves in the 6th Game of Chess that they played together. Kasparov reflect today, 20 years later, in his book "Deep Thinking – where machine intelligence ends and human creativity begins", even if he would have won, it was just a matter of time when computers would have started winning. The supporters of Artificial Intelligence – called the hard AI – were delighted then – proclaiming a day, not in too far in future ahead, when machines will be able to replicate the human decision-making process. In contrast, soft AI proponents believe that intelligence cannot be created artificially. It can at best be simulated at an appropriate level of detail to create solutions for some of human decision-making problems.
General Motors' New Lidar, the Postal Service's Self-Driving Van, and More Car News From This Week
This week we saw a bunch of schemes to get self-driving cars on the road. The state of California released the latest draft of its regulations to make it easier for driverless cars to be on public roads by 2018. Those are vehicles with no one at the controls--not even a "safety human." The University of Michigan is building a semiautonomous delivery vehicle for the US Postal Service. And a VC firm really wants to make a lane of I-5 in Seattle robots-only.
Oracle leverages machine learning to manage, secure enterprise systems
Oracle is not the first company that comes to mind when you think of enterprise security, but the company announced at its recent OpenWorld conference new products with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities to quickly identify security threats. The company introduced two new sets of integrated suites called Oracle Identity Security Operations Center (SOC) and Oracle Management Cloud. It claims they will help enterprises forecast, reduce, detect and resolve cybersecurity threats in minutes rather than days and assist remediation of application and infrastructure performance issues. It makes sense for Oracle to jump into this field even if it is full of established players like Symantec, Sophos, Tripwire and far more. Since Oracle's databases are often a target of hacker attacks, who better to secure an Oracle database than Oracle?
We Almost Gave Up On Building Artificial Brains - The Crux
Today artificial neural networks are making art, writing speeches, identifying faces and even driving cars. It feels as if we're riding the wave of a novel technological era, but the current rise in neural networks is actually a renaissance of sorts. It may be hard to believe, but artificial intelligence researchers were already beginning to see the promise in neural networks during World War II in their mathematical models. But by the 1970s, the field was ready to give up on them entirely. "[T]here were no impressive results until computers grew up, that is until the past 10 years," Patrick Henry Winston, a professor at MIT who specializes in artificial intelligence, says.
WATCH: North California Fire Doesn't Deter USPS Mailman From Delivering Post
A drone video captured by professional drone operator and photographer Douglas Thron, reportedly before the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a no-fly restriction, showed fire-wrecked Santa Rosa, California on Wednesday where a Postal Services worker was seen dutifully delivering mail to addresses- the delivery van winding its way through rubbles of houses, blackened trees and wrecked remains of cars. The video garnered over 500,000 views on YouTube at the time of publishing this story. According to Mercury News, aerial photographer Thron was shooting a video footage of Coffey Park, a neighborhood that had been ripped apart by the recent fires starting Sunday, when he was surprised to notice the clean, white USPS truck. "It was a trippy thing – he was actually delivering the mail," Thron told the paper. "I was shocked to see him because most of the roads were blocked off, but he obviously had access."