Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Organisations are beginning to'listen' to unstructured data found in texts which was previously deemed boring or irrelevant to provide insights, says Evan Harridge, founder of Immersive. Immersive uses text analytics via machine learning to uncover new insights from unstructured data and has developed a'sentiment index' which allows companies to discern how happy or unhappy customers are based on the content of their emails. "In a lot of cases we are looking at opportunities that don't exist, because we can now store and analyse all of this information which was just seen as useless or not valuable," Harridge told Which-50 during The Hadoop Summit in Melbourne last week. "Customers are starting to realise all the conversations and all the email communications we have potentially generate value. Rather than just the summarised information or the headings or the information inside the cost table, we take everything and use it as context."

Mark Palmer is senior vice president and general manager of engineering at TIBCO. Much has been made about the business implications of recent, rapid advancements in cognitive computing -- that is, the possibility of advanced analytics tools to help human knowledge workers glean actionable insight from vast and deep lakes of historical, transactional and machine-generated information. When utilized well, cognitive tools help humans identify patterns and surface previously undetected cyberattack patterns on your company, customer buying behavior or predictive signals of catastrophic equipment failure based on readings from sensor-enabled devices. But as your business inevitably becomes more algorithmic, you're faced with the next problem: Many algorithms, once discovered, have a remarkably short shelf-life. Algorithmic excellence in analytics requires more than just great math; you must also become as agile at killing off weak or vanquished algorithms as a NASCAR pit crew changing worn tires -- you need to be replacing them with promising new ones.

You are sat in a café thinking about a last minute birthday present for a friend or relative who you will be meeting later that day. Using your smartphone, you find something suitable via Amazon or similar web-based retailer. You place the order, paying a slight premium for instant delivery. Twenty minutes later you receive a notification that a drone will be arriving shortly at a delivery-port close to the café. You make the five minutes' walk to the designated meeting point.

Work on a new project by Deakin University and Melbourne-based software company Ytek has begun, aimed to develop skills of those training in the emergency response, defence, and aerospace sectors using machine learning algorithms. Dr James Zhang, a researcher from Deakin University's Institute for Intelligent Systems Research and Innovation, is working with Ytek to develop simulation solutions used to train surgeons, emergency workers, soldiers, and pilots. As part of the project, Zhang and Ytek will research how machine learning algorithms can help monitor and evaluate a trainee's conduct in mission-critical simulations by using sensors on training tools, such as manikins, to evaluate how trainers can assess students in practical training. Ytek CEO Richard Yanieri said the desired outcome of the project is to improve the practical training for students. "We've been working with Deakin's School of Medicine to understand their needs so that we can tailor a solution that works for this industry," he said.

What can software designers and ICT specialists learn from maggots? Quite a lot, it would appear. Through understanding how complex learning processes in simple organisms work, EU-funded scientists hope to usher in an era of self-learning robots and predictive computing. Even with limited brain power, an organism can choose the right thing to do in response to external stimuli, which is something that current computational learning theory cannot fully account for. Learning from maggots The EU-funded MINIMAL project, launched in 2014, has focused on the learning processes in a relatively simple animal, the fruit fly larva (maggots).

Auto accidents kill more than 33,000 Americans each year, more than homicide or prescription drug overdoses. Companies working on self-driving cars, such as Alphabet and Ford, say their technology can slash that number by removing human liabilities such as texting, drunkenness, and fatigue. But Christopher Hart, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, says his agency's experience investigating accidents involving autopilot systems used in trains and planes suggests that humans can't be fully removed from control. He told MIT Technology Review that future autos will be much safer, but that they will still need humans as copilots. What follows is a condensed transcript.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Knowledge graph construction consists of two tasks: extracting information from external resources (knowledge population) and inferring missing information through a statistical analysis on the extracted information (knowledge completion). In many cases, insufficient external resources in the knowledge population hinder the subsequent statistical inference. The gap between these two processes can be reduced by an incremental population approach. We propose a new probabilistic knowledge graph factorisation method that benefits from the path structure of existing knowledge (e.g. syllogism) and enables a common modelling approach to be used for both incremental population and knowledge completion tasks. More specifically, the probabilistic formulation allows us to develop an incremental population algorithm that trades off exploitation-exploration. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that the balanced exploitation-exploration helps the incremental population, and the additional path structure helps to predict missing information in knowledge completion.

DARPA wants to exploit the power of the internet of things to help the U.S. dominate battlefields. The Defense Advance Research Projects Agency will fund the development of sensors and artificial intelligence systems that could help break into, extract, and analyze information from enemy devices and communication systems. The components and systems will arm the U.S. with more data to analyze enemy moves and strategy. Information is king in wars, and DARPA wants to develop technology that can break into enemy systems. "They are talking about going into any situation and extracting information at any time, [with] artificial intelligence systems that can attack and hack any network," said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.