A capsule carrying 5,300 pounds of food, clothing, spare parts, lab equipment, and science experiments arrived at the International Space Station Sunday morning. Astronauts grabbed the vehicle, called Cygnus, with a robotic arm and pulled it to the station for docking. Over the next month the crew will unload its contents while Cygnus remains tethered to the station. Ultimately, the space station crew will reload the empty vessel with about 4,000 pounds of trash and release it to burn up in the atmosphere in mid-November. But before the vehicle destroys itself, an onboard experiment called Spacecraft Fire Experiment-II, or Saffire-II, will intentionally start a small fire to test how zero gravity and limited oxygen affect flame size and the spread of fire.

While he may be better known as a self driving car enthusiast, a new video has given a glimpse of Google co-founder Larry Page's secretive self flying car project. Earlier this year it was revealed Page appeared to be privately investing in two separate flying car firms, providing them with 100m. Now, of of the prototype craft has been spotted at a remote airfield in California - and locals say they have even seen it hovering above the ground. The zee.aero prototype has been spotted at the firm's secretive test lab in Hollister, and was spotted because of its strange shape and ability to hover. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, he has personally provided 70 million ( 100 million) to two startups developing the technology, and now one of the first prototypes has been spotted. He has reportedly been funding Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk, two rival companies based in California's Silicon Valley.

The White House has recently released its Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence report. The report reviews the history of AI, outlines a few applications, surveys current efforts by federal agencies, and makes some policy recommendations. Like most such government reports, it is more about the present than the future. The federal government has funded significant research in AI through programs like the DARPA Grand Challenge to develop autonomous vehicles. The report recognizes agencies, such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), as being at the forefront of the AI movement.

Michelle Moore, head of digital banking for Bank of America, said in an interview on Monday that Erica will be smarter than a robot because she will bring up topics on her own, using predictive analytics as opposed to only answering questions customers ask. For example, Erica may recommend taking steps to lift a sagging credit rating she noticed. Or, she may propose a customer make higher monthly payments on an outstanding credit card balance to reduce interest expenses. "Erica has your back and she's looking out for you," said Moore. The bank plucked the name Erica from the last five characters of its own name, said Moore, who introduced the tool on Monday at the Money 20/20 financial industry conference in Las Vegas.

The Microsoft Emotion API is based on state of the art research from Microsoft Research in computer vision and is based on a Deep Convolutional Neural Network model trained to classify the facial expressions of people in videos and images. This is an attempt to explain how to apply the API for data-driven reporting. Let's be honest, the last and final debate was depressing. The negativity, the personal allegations, and Trump's Belzebub-like facial expressions made it difficult to stay up to 3:30am and watch this combat with my American wife, which resembled an old feisty couple close to divorce. However, the debate was a gold mine for computer assisted reporting. One of the APIs I recently stumbled across when talking to the research lab from Microsoft is a neat emotion video API.

Temperament has been a key issue in the 2016 presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and an issue highlighted in the series of three debates that concluded this week. Quantifying "temperament" isn't an easy task, but The Economist used the Microsoft Emotion API to chart the anger, contempt, sadness and surprised expressed in the faces of the candidates during key sequences of the debates, like this from the third debate: Economist Data Journalist Ben Heubl explains how you can analyze emotions in a video file using Python and R. The Emotion API provides scores for eight attributes of emotion as expressed by a face in a still image or video clip. For example, this expression by Donald Trump expresses mostly anger, with a touch of disgust and a soupçon of contempt. Ben provides Python code for passing a video clip into the Emotion API and retriving frame-by-frame emotion scores. He then uses R to analyze and chart the scores: mostly happiness for Clinton; mostly sadness for Trump.

Above the Trend Line: machine learning industry rumor central, is a recurring feature of insideBIGDATA. In this column, we present a variety of short time-critical news items such as people movements, funding news, financial results, industry alignments, rumors and general scuttlebutt floating around the big data, data science and machine learning industries including behind-the-scenes anecdotes and curious buzz. Our intent is to provide our readers a one-stop source of late-breaking news to help keep you abreast of this fast-paced ecosystem. We're working hard on your behalf with our extensive vendor network to give you all the latest happenings. Be sure to Tweet Above the Trend Line articles using the hashtag: #abovethetrendline.

Scientists have heard hugely unusual messages from deep in space that they think are coming from aliens. A new analysis of strange modulations in a tiny set of stars appears to indicate that it could be coming from extraterrestrial intelligence that is looking to alert us to their existence. The new study reports the finding of specific modulations in just 234 out of the 2.5 million stars that have been observed during a survey of the sky. The work found that a tiny fraction of them seemed to be behaving strangely. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater.

When is it appropriate for police to conduct a face recognition search? To figure out who's who in a crowd of protesters? To monitor foot traffic in a high-crime neighborhood? To confirm the identity of a suspect -- or a witness -- caught on tape? According to a new report by Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy & Technology, these are questions very few police departments asked before widely deploying face recognition systems.

Advances in robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) hold the potential to fundamentally reshape the way we live and work, yet the government does not yet have a strategy for developing skills, a report by the Science and Technology Committee has concluded. The report states that AI systems are starting to have transformational impacts on everyday life: from driverless cars and supercomputers that can assist doctors with medical diagnoses, to intelligent tutoring systems that can tailor lessons to meet a student's individual cognitive needs. Such breakthroughs raise a host of questions for society, including ethical issues about the transparency of AI decision-making as well as privacy and safety. The Committee is calling for a Commission on Artificial Intelligence to be established at the Alan Turing Institute to examine the social, ethical and legal implications of recent and potential developments in AI. The UK is well-placed to provide this type of intellectual leadership, it adds.