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Microsoft opts out of Gamescom 2016 press conference in favour of small fan event

The Independent - Tech

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


Billionaire Mike Lynch explains why he's putting his money into a Cambridge cybersecurity startup that's full of spies

#artificialintelligence

This week, a relatively young cybersecurity company called Darktrace announced that it has raised an additional 65 million ( 50 million) at a suspected valuation of over 400 million ( 308 million). No other UK tech startup has announced a funding round anywhere near that size since the UK voted for Brexit. We caught up with Mike Lynch -- the billionaire founder of enterprise software firm Autonomy and Darktrace's first big name investor -- to find out why he decided to put his money into the company. "The reason I liked it was that it was a completely new approach," said Lynch during a phone call with Business Insider on Wednesday. "Most of what's out there in cybersecurity is based on knowing what you're looking. So things like anti-virus and that sort of stuff or trying to build a big wall around the outside of your company, a boundary. "The problem is that the world's moved on and the attacks no longer have signatures.


FAA compromise bill drops key drone privacy provisions

PCWorld

A Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill that was passed by the Senate on Wednesday has excluded key privacy provisions, including a requirement that commercial and government users of drones must disclose if they collect personally identifiable information of a person. The bill, which is a compromise short-term extension to ensure continued funding at current levels to the FAA, was passed by the Senate and goes to President Barack Obama to be signed into law, two days before the current authorization is to expire. It was earlier passed by the House of Representatives. But Senator Edward J. Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts and a member of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, on Wednesday said that the new bill, called the FAA Extension, Safety, and Security Act of 2016, was "a missed opportunity." It does not include drone privacy provisions that he authored and were included in the Senate version of the FAA reauthorization bill that passed in April this year, the senator said in a statement.


Google's new NHS deal is start of machine learning marketplace

#artificialintelligence

DEEPMIND, Google's London-based artificial intelligence company, has started training neural networks to recognise the signs of eye disease in medical images. A partnership with Moorfields Eye Hospital in London has given the company access to about a million anonymised retinal scans, which DeepMind will feed into its artificial intelligence software. The project will target two of the most common eye diseases โ€“ age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy. More than 100 million people around the world have these conditions. Moorfields is providing scans of the back of people's eyes, as well as more detailed scans known as optical coherence tomography (OCT). The idea is that the images will let DeepMind's neural networks learn to recognise subtle signs of degenerating eye conditions that even trained clinicians have trouble spotting.


U.S. Congress passes aviation bill to close airport security gaps

The Japan Times

WASHINGTON โ€“ Congress passed an aviation bill Wednesday that attempts to close gaps in airport security and shorten screening lines, but leaves thornier issues unresolved. The bill also extends the Federal Aviation Administration's programs for 14 months at current funding levels. It was approved in the Senate by a vote of 89 to 4. The House had passed the measure earlier in the week and it now goes to President Barack Obama, who must sign the bill by Friday when the FAA's current operating authority expires to avoid a partial agency shutdown. Responding to attacks by violent extremists associated with the Islamic State group on airports in Brussels and Istanbul, the bill includes an array of provisions aimed at protecting "soft targets" outside security perimeters. Other provisions designed to address potential "insider threats" would toughen vetting of airport workers and other employees with access to secure areas, expand random employee inspections and require reviews of perimeter security.


Experts: Use of robot to kill suspect opens door for others

Associated Press

Dallas police respond after shots were fired during a protest over recent fatal shootings by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, Thursday, July 7, 2016, in Dallas. Snipers opened fire on police officers during protests; several officers were killed, police said. Dallas police respond after shots were fired during a protest over recent fatal shootings by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, Thursday, July 7, 2016, in Dallas. Snipers opened fire on police officers during protests; several officers were killed, police said. CHICAGO (AP) -- Police in Dallas were the first in the nation to use a robot to deliver and detonate a bomb to kill a suspect, but other law enforcement agencies are willing and able to follow suit, including some that even have trained for the day when they'd have to do so.


World reaction to Johnson appointment

BBC News

Newspapers and politicians around the world have been reacting to Boris Johnson's appointment as UK foreign secretary. Many were surprised, citing his history of faux pas including insulting the president of Turkey and commenting on the US president's ancestry. Here we take a look at the response in countries where Mr Johnson will now represent the UK. The Washington Post publishes a round-up of "undiplomatic" things Mr Johnson has said during his time in public life. Washington Post writer Ishaan Tharoor also writes that Mr Johnson "has controversially bucked the Western trend and praised Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for battling the Islamic State, no matter its parallel campaign of violence on Syria's civilian population".


Ex-Google Engineer Launches Blockchain-Based System For Banks - Slashdot

#artificialintelligence

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A former Google engineer, whose speech recognition software is used in more than a billion Android smartphones, has launched a company that uses blockchain technology to build a new operating system for banks. Paul Taylor, a Cambridge University academic with an expertise in artificial intelligence, speech synthesis and machine learning, started working on the system, called Vault OS, two years ago in a basement in London's Shoreditch district, known for being a tech start-up hub. The technology, which underpins the digital currency bitcoin, creates a shared database in which participants can trace every transaction ever made. The ledger is tamper-proof and transparent, meaning that transactions can be processed without the need for third-party verification. The system also negates the need for costly in-house data centers, as it uses cloud-based systems, which banks can use on a "pay-as-you-go" basis, which means that there is no single point of failure.


Dynamic Question Ordering in Online Surveys

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Online surveys have the potential to support adaptive questions, where later questions depend on earlier responses. Past work has taken a rule-based approach, uniformly across all respondents. We envision a richer interpretation of adaptive questions, which we call dynamic question ordering (DQO), where question order is personalized. Such an approach could increase engagement, and therefore response rate, as well as imputation quality. We present a DQO framework to improve survey completion and imputation. In the general survey-taking setting, we want to maximize survey completion, and so we focus on ordering questions to engage the respondent and collect hopefully all information, or at least the information that most characterizes the respondent, for accurate imputations. In another scenario, our goal is to provide a personalized prediction. Since it is possible to give reasonable predictions with only a subset of questions, we are not concerned with motivating users to answer all questions. Instead, we want to order questions to get information that reduces prediction uncertainty, while not being too burdensome. We illustrate this framework with an example of providing energy estimates to prospective tenants. We also discuss DQO for national surveys and consider connections between our statistics-based question-ordering approach and cognitive survey methodology.


The Angle: Small Donations Edition

Slate

The second season of the beloved Mr. Robot is here, and Willa Paskin wonders how long the "aesthetically polished and intellectually incensed" show can continue to critique capitalism. "[Showrunner Sam] Esmail, having created a cult TV show, is expressing some skepticism about television, a medium that, for much of its life, existed to sell audiences soap," Paskin observes. Robot is like an iPhone with an'I hate Apple' ring-tone: both are beautifully designed, powerful products that are superficially conflicted about being beautifully designed, powerful products."