The social media company has been embroiled in a number of content moderation controversies this year, from facing international outcry after removing an iconic Vietnam War photo due to nudity, to allowing the spread of fake news on its site. Facebook has historically relied mostly on users to report offensive posts, which are then checked by Facebook employees against company "community standards." Decisions on especially thorny content issues that might require policy changes are made by top executives at the company. Candela told reporters that Facebook increasingly was using artificial intelligence to find offensive material. It is "an algorithm that detects nudity, violence, or any of the things that are not according to our policies," he said.

I think there are three things that are going to affect the world in incredibly significant ways over the next decade and they are 1) Climate change 2) CRISPR and 3) artificial intelligence. I wanted to work in one of those and be helpful. Because of my background, AI made the most sense. Along with conducting fundamental research, OpenAI can also help increase the level of knowledge that's available on how to use, regulate and evaluate this technology. NIPS is probably the single largest AI conference in the field and it's happening in Barcelona right now. There's a joke among researchers that NIPS is where people get together to discuss papers that came out four months ago. That's because the paper deadline was then, and the pace of modern AI research is so fast that much of the industry has subsequently moved onto new techniques and new papers.

'Tis the season for the public relations exercise known as "here's what we think (or hope) will happen in the tech sector next year," flooding my inbox with predictions for 2017. No one knows what will happen tomorrow, let alone over the next 12 months, but the exercise yields interesting insights into what's hot (and what's not) in technology today. Artificial intelligence (and machine/deep learning) is the hottest trend, eclipsing, but building on, the accumulated hype for the previous "new big thing," big data. The new catalyst for the data explosion is the Internet of Things, bringing with it new cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The rapid fluctuations in the relative temperature of these trends also create new dislocations and opportunities in the tech job market.

WASHINGTON – A coalition drone strike in Syria killed three Islamic State group leaders involved in plotting foreign attacks, including two men who helped facilitate last year's attacks in Paris, the Pentagon said Tuesday. "The three were working together to plot and facilitate attacks against Western targets at the time of the strike," Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said in a statement. They were killed in a Dec. 4 airstrike in Raqqa, an IS group stronghold in Syria. Two of those killed -- Salah-Eddine Gourmat and Sammy Djedou -- were involved in facilitating the Nov. 13, 2015, Paris attacks, in which 130 people died, Cook said. Gourmat was a French national and Djedou, Belgian.

LOS ANGELES – Engineers are troubleshooting a snag on NASA's Curiosity that's preventing the rover from moving its robotic arm and driving to another spot on Mars, the space agency said Tuesday. The problem involves a motor in the rover's drill that is used to bore into rocks. Curiosity has been taking pictures and tracking the weather, but doing little else for the past two weeks. "We're keeping busy with using the other instruments on the rover while they do these tests," said Ashwin Vasavada, project scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission. The team gave a health update on Curiosity while discussing research findings at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

"…humans--through our ingenuity, our commitment to fact and reason, and ultimately our faith in each other--can science the heck out of just about any problem," wrote President Barack Obama in the November 2016 issue of WIRED magazine, which he guest edited. That dynamic is readily apparent in supply chain management, where many of those humans President Obama mentions are eagerly exploring how new technology can revolutionize the way we solve some of our thorniest business problems. Articles on how disruptive technology will reshape supply chain management as we know it usually focus on a few key topics. Drones, big data analytics, 3D printing, IoT, robotics, and artificial intelligence frequently appear at the top of the list. Artificial intelligence in particular landed on President Obama's radar, and he expressed a positive attitude toward the potential it holds.

Curiosity in crisis: NASA reveals rover's drill has crippled its robotic arm and stranded it on the red planet Bug is preventing the rover from moving its robotic arm and driving Problem involves a motor in the rover's drill that is used to bore into rocks Curiosity has been taking pictures and tracking the weather Problem involves a motor in the rover's drill that is used to bore into rocks This Dec. 2, 2016 image taken by NASA's Curiosity rover shows rocky ground on the lower flank of Mount Sharp, a mountain on Mars. Curiosity landed on the red planet in 2012 and uncovered geologic evidence of an ancient environment that could have supported primitive life early in the red planet's history. The highest wave in history: UN confirms six-storey-high... Facebook launches'Parents Portal' to help adults keep their... Christmas comes to the space station! Japanese'white stork'... Using a hands-free kit while driving is just as distracting... The highest wave in history: UN confirms six-storey-high... Facebook launches'Parents Portal' to help adults keep their... Christmas comes to the space station!

Objective: The advent of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) with large electronic imaging databases along with advances in deep neural networks with machine learning has provided a unique opportunity to achieve milestones in automated image analysis. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is the most commonly obtained imaging modality in ophthalmology and represents a dense and rich dataset when combined with labels derived from the EMR. We sought to determine if deep learning could be utilized to distinguish normal OCT images from images from patients with Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD). Methods: Automated extraction of an OCT imaging database was performed and linked to clinical endpoints from the EMR. OCT macula scans were obtained by Heidelberg Spectralis, and each OCT scan was linked to EMR clinical endpoints extracted from EPIC. The central 11 images were selected from each OCT scan of two cohorts of patients: normal and AMD. Cross-validation was performed using a random subset of patients. Area under receiver operator curves (auROC) were constructed at an independent image level, macular OCT level, and patient level. Results: Of an extraction of 2.6 million OCT images linked to clinical datapoints from the EMR, 52,690 normal and 48,312 AMD macular OCT images were selected. A deep neural network was trained to categorize images as either normal or AMD. At the image level, we achieved an auROC of 92.78% with an accuracy of 87.63%. At the macula level, we achieved an auROC of 93.83% with an accuracy of 88.98%. At a patient level, we achieved an auROC of 97.45% with an accuracy of 93.45%. Peak sensitivity and specificity with optimal cutoffs were 92.64% and 93.69% respectively. Conclusions: Deep learning techniques are effective for classifying OCT images. These findings have important implications in utilizing OCT in automated screening and computer aided diagnosis tools.

CANAVERAL FLORIDA – Japan's unmanned cargo spaceship loaded with supplies docked at the International Space Station at an altitude of about 400 km early Wednesday, the country's space agency said. Japan time after astronauts at the ISS caught the cargo transporter with a robotic arm. An H-IIB rocket carrying the cargo spaceship blasted off from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture on Friday. After the launch, the Kounotori6 was controlled by the Tsukuba Space Center of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in Ibaraki Prefecture, JAXA said. The cargo spaceship was carrying 5.9 tons of supplies including food, drinking water and other daily necessities for astronauts aboard the ISS, seven ultrasmall satellites developed by some universities and firms, and Japanese-made lithium-ion batteries for use on the space station, according to JAXA.

Not long ago, news of a massive asteroid hurtling toward Earth would be a death sentence that humans, like the dinosaurs before us, would simply have to accept. But as near-Earth object detection has gotten more sophisticated, a new field called Planetary Defense has risen to meet the challenge of defending Earth from asteroids. However, speaking at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, Joseph Nuth, a researcher with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, warned that while asteroids and comets capable of resulting in mass extinctions are rare – as in, every-60-million-years rare – even small objects from space can cause a great deal of damage and the planet's scientists are are still woefully unprepared to deal with the threat. "It is really imperative that we reduce our reaction time," Dr. Nuth said at the meeting. "The biggest problem, basically, is there's not ... a lot we can do about it at the moment."