Wells Fargo CEO testifies, GoPro announces new drone, fast-food chain antibiotics report, and LAUSD considers starting school later. Wells Fargo CEO testifies, GoPro announces new drone, fast-food chain antibiotics report, and LAUSD considers starting school later. Warning, this video contains graphic content: Tulsa police released several police car and helicopter videos Sunday after Terence Crutcher, an unarmed 40-year-old black man, was fatally shot by a white police officer on Friday. Warning, this video contains graphic content: Tulsa police released several police car and helicopter videos Sunday after Terence Crutcher, an unarmed 40-year-old black man, was fatally shot by a white police officer on Friday.

For California state officials, the new federal guidelines on testing and deployment of driverless cars come as a bit of a relief. Until this week, the absence of U.S. government guidance had left the state Department of Motor Vehicles -- generally in charge of registering vehicles and issuing drivers' licenses -- to take the lead role in drafting regulations to ensure the safety of self-driving vehicles. Though the federal guidelines issued Tuesday are short on specifics, the Department of Transportation will take responsibility for regulating the driving hardware and software, and it has devised a model state policy that probably will take the pressure off individual state agencies. That policy, issued jointly by the Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, could result in changes to current California draft regulations on autonomous vehicles. "You can imagine how the California DMV would be struggling, with no technological background or engineers at their disposal, trying to figure out whether a particular autonomous vehicle is or is not safe enough to be deployed," said Robert Peterson, a law professor at Santa Clara University.

Bibliographic analysis considers the author's research areas, the citation network and the paper content among other things. In this paper, we combine these three in a topic model that produces a bibliographic model of authors, topics and documents, using a nonparametric extension of a combination of the Poisson mixed-topic link model and the author-topic model. This gives rise to the Citation Network Topic Model (CNTM). We propose a novel and efficient inference algorithm for the CNTM to explore subsets of research publications from CiteSeerX. The publication datasets are organised into three corpora, totalling to about 168k publications with about 62k authors. The queried datasets are made available online. In three publicly available corpora in addition to the queried datasets, our proposed model demonstrates an improved performance in both model fitting and document clustering, compared to several baselines. Moreover, our model allows extraction of additional useful knowledge from the corpora, such as the visualisation of the author-topics network. Additionally, we propose a simple method to incorporate supervision into topic modelling to achieve further improvement on the clustering task.

U.S. stocks inched higher Tuesday in another cautious day of trading as investors kept an eye on central banks in the U.S. and Japan. Healthcare and household goods companies led the way, while energy companies slipped. Major market indexes were higher all day but returned most of those gains at the close of trading. They rose just enough to cancel out Monday's small losses. Drug companies helped healthcare stocks make modest gains, while Exxon Mobil fell on reports that it's being investigated by securities regulators.

A group of self driving Uber vehicles position themselves to take journalists on rides during a media preview at Uber's Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh, (Photo: Gene J. Puskar, AP) SAN FRANCISCO - Self-driving car advocates and observers are reacting with cautious approval Tuesday to the government's 112-page directive on the transformational technology. "The devil is in the details, so we will want to take a good hard look before we comment," says David Strickland, general counsel for the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, which advocates for Ford, Google, Uber, Lyft and Volvo. Strickland is also a former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. "We see this document as evolutionary," he told reporters on a conference call. "But we appreciate their effort, and the iterative process."

Companies from the Motor City to Silicon Valley welcomed the Obama administration's new self-driving car policy this week, but there is still a long road ahead full of obstacles before robots entirely replace humans as motorists. For auto makers and technology firms, the guidelines detailed Tuesday represent an early victory that steer clear of regulations with legal force and pressure states to avoid developing conflicting rules that could frustrate rollout efforts. But the government's unwillingness for now to aggressively draft firm, prescriptive rules shows how unprepared some regulators, urban planners and insurers are for an autonomous overhaul. Questions remain about whether the federal government will ultimately need to unwind decades of safety regulations to accommodate for vehicles that don't have steering wheels, brake pedals and other features designed for human interaction. Assuming manufacturers can overcome all the technical challenges of building an autonomous car, the burgeoning field would change the fabric of everyday life in a way that hasn't occurred since automobiles replaced horse carriages.

In August, the White House's chief digital officer announced a new way to catch President Obama's ear: a Messenger bot, allowing citizens to "speak" directly to the administration through their Facebook accounts. The U.S. government hasn't historically been an early adopter of new technology, so if it's embracing bots, you know they're having a moment. Earlier this year, I predicted that 2016 would be the year of "conversational commerce," my name for businesses introducing themselves into what had previously been personal messaging channels. Brands and companies have joined social media in droves, using the platforms as easy ways to broadcast content to their followers. Until recently, it was the rare exception that you could send a company a direct message and expect a useful reply.

This article was posted by Tamis van der Laan. Tamis is a data science and machine learning specialist. In the past few decades, computer systems have achieved a whole lot. They have managed to organize and catalog the information produced by our civilization as a whole. They have relieved us from stringent cognitive tasks and increased our productivity significantly.

A group of self-driving Uber vehicles are lined up to take journalists on rides during a media preview at the company's Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh earlier this month. A group of self-driving Uber vehicles are lined up to take journalists on rides during a media preview at the company's Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh earlier this month. The U.S. government wants to help you take your hands off the wheel. The Department of Transportation on Tuesday issued its Federal Automated Vehicle Policy, which outlines how manufacturers and developers can assure safe design of driverless vehicles, tells states what responsibilities they will have and points out potential new tools for ensuring safety. Regulators say they want to prepare for the transition to self-driving vehicles, which they say will save money, time and lives.

Advanced cancer research is calling on techniques used by NASA scientists who analyze satellite imagery to find commonalities among stars, planets and galaxies in space. Scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) use complex machine learning algorithms to identify similarities among galaxies that may otherwise be overlooked, NASA officials said in a statement. Using similar techniques, medical professionals are able to analyze a lung sample for common cancer biomarkers. However, analyzing a biopsy specimen for biomarkers is not the only way in which JPL's complex machine learning algorithms can be used in the medical field. Cancer researchers can also use the space exploration tools to identify common chemical or genetic signatures related to specific cancers, which could revolutionize strategies for early cancer detection.