The Science Council of Japan, the nation's largest and most powerful group of scientists, has launched a panel to discuss whether the group should drop its long-standing vow that scientists will not take part in defense-related research. That policy is an important principle that Japan's scientists have upheld for decades in view of the history of academic institutions cooperating with the military during the nation's past wars and the massive damage the wars brought to the people of Japan and other countries. The group should not tinker with the principle. Doing so would lead to a change in the basic nature of scientific research in this country. The SCJ decided last month to set up the 15-member panel following heated discussions at a plenary meeting.

The Viacom saga continues: National Amusements, the holding company through which Sumner Redstone controls Viacom, is looking for new Viacom board members. This isn't a shocker--speculation of a board shake-up began after George Abrams and Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman were removed from National Amusements' board a few weeks ago. On the list of potential board replacements, reports the Wall Street Journal, are former Time Warner exec Kenneth Lerer, ex-Sony Entertainment President Nicole Seligman, and former Discovery Communications CEO Judith McHale. Don't mess with Texas (drivers): Former Lyft and Uber drivers in Austin, TX say Uber and Lyft broke federal law when they abruptly stopped operations in the city. Drivers filed a suit in San Francisco (where the companies are based) saying the two ride-sharing services violated a law stating they needed to give sixty days' notice to employees before a'mass layoff'.

Although no one is sure whether the AI devices of the future are going to kill us, take our jobs or just help us with mundane tasks, one thing we can agree on is that they will need power and lots of it. That's why a number of companies have developed processors designed with processing tasks in mind, like ex-NASA engineer Daniel Goldin, who's created a 256-core chip that's helped him raise over 100 million in funding. Goldin knows his way around running a company too, since he holds the record as the longest running NASA administrator, with his tenure extending through much of the Shuttle era, between 1992 and 2001. He has brought that expertise and engineering background to bear on KnuPath, his monstrous chip design. This chip is being combined with another product known as KnuVerse, which we're told is a neural computing system capable of "military grade" voice recognition: no matter how loud the environment you're in, it will be able to understand you.

"The emerging threat is: It is not the guy sitting in Bangalore but the robot next door which is going to take your job, and this creates enormous anxiety among the middle class. You can see this in the political dialogue that is taking place in the US as well as in the run-up to Brexit in Britain." What will happen to countries like Vietnam, the Philippines and India if that ladder for steady growth is removed, when its export-driven aspect is just taken away because industrialized countries can produce things just as cheaply? The worry is that if a large segment of the middle-class becomes disempowered and is looking for easy solutions in country after country, could it create conditions for more political turmoil? " asked Rajan. Rajan's statement is being taken seriously in India as well, because despite growing at a pace of almost 7.6% in 2015-16, the Labour Bureau reported that job growth had slumped to a six year low: only 100,100 million in 2015. Siri also tells 17.9 million jobless people in India.. How to address them!! https://t.co/PhzLxP3GWZ However, Secretary of Economic Affairs Shaktikanta Das told Sputnik, "I will not go into the numbers, but when the manufacturing, industry and services sectors are growing then I think it's a positive development.

In this March 23, 2010, file photo, the Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels. SAN FRANCISCO – Google defended itself against charges of political bias in its search algorithm after a video alleged it distorted display results for Hillary Clinton. Creators of the video on the YouTube channel SourceFed, which had accumulated over 15 million views on Facebook and nearly 300,000 on YouTube by Friday evening, alleged Google's search engine Autocomplete feature suppresses searches pairing the presumptive Democratic nominee with criminal activity. If someone types "Hillary Clinton cri," Google's search suggests phrases like "Hillary Clinton crime reform" and "Hillary Clinton crisis", said Matt Lieberman, host and writer for SourceFed, in the video. Yet after typing the same phrase on Yahoo or Bing search, suggestions on crimes and criminal activity are among the first suggestions, he notes.

LifeBEAM is Infusing Wearables with Artificial Intelligence The New York-based LifeBEAM started out making biosensing wearables for NASA and the US Air Force, and now their technology is powering the likes of Under Armour and Samsung. The company is trying to evolve the wearable market beyond statistics and into more meaningful territory. The product they believe will do this is their Awareable line. The Awareable product combines highly accurate biometrics and a personal training agent, giving consumers an intelligent and interactive training experience for fitness and everyday well-being. And now, on Kickstarter, the company is looking for funding for the first artificial intelligence personal trainer they call Vi.

It was an historic week as Hillary Clinton secured enough delegates to be the first woman to become the presumptive nominee of a major political party for the highest office of the most powerful country on Earth. Meanwhile, we're reviewing another debate about where Seattle's startup ecosystem ranks nationally; new data on urban startup clusters; a 15 million funding round for BitTitan; Bill Gates' poultry program; news of artificial intelligence watching and writing sci-fi films; and a good read on how "Silicon Valley" delivers such an accurate satire of the real Silicon Valley. It doesn't rank as high as NYC, LA, or Boston in the number of startups funded or capital invested. So on a dollars in/dollars [out], Seattle outperforms. The perennial debate about who's No. 2 (always behind Silicon Valley) is tiresome, but look, here I am writing about it. One really good thing to come out of this is Tren Griffin's essay at GeekWire on what it takes for a city to develop a top-tier tech and startup ecosystem.

A key goal of computational personalized medicine is to systematically utilize genomic and other molecular features of samples to predict drug responses for a previously unseen sample. Such predictions are valuable for developing hypotheses for selecting therapies tailored for individual patients. This is especially valuable in oncology, where molecular and genetic heterogeneity of the cells has a major impact on the response. However, the prediction task is extremely challenging, raising the need for methods that can effectively model and predict drug responses. In this study, we propose a novel formulation of multi-task matrix factorization that allows selective data integration for predicting drug responses. To solve the modeling task, we extend the state-of-the-art kernelized Bayesian matrix factorization (KBMF) method with component-wise multiple kernel learning. In addition, our approach exploits the known pathway information in a novel and biologically meaningful fashion to learn the drug response associations. Our method quantitatively outperforms the state of the art on predicting drug responses in two publicly available cancer data sets as well as on a synthetic data set. In addition, we validated our model predictions with lab experiments using an in-house cancer cell line panel. We finally show the practical applicability of the proposed method by utilizing prior knowledge to infer pathway-drug response associations, opening up the opportunity for elucidating drug action mechanisms. We demonstrate that pathway-response associations can be learned by the proposed model for the well known EGFR and MEK inhibitors.

The Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud computing are three technologies that are converging to disrupt nearly every industry. IoT refers to a connected network of objects embedded with technology that enables the collection and exchange of data. Cloud computing is the storing and retrieval of data, and accessing application programs via the Internet. Artificial Intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence by machines. We are currently in the midst of the rise of the first wave of this technological convergence.

U.S. drone operators had been stalking the baby-faced British terrorist for days with infrared cameras and other sensors before the order came to kill him. As night fell on April 25, a U.S. warplane dropped a guided-bomb that obliterated the SUV occupied by 23-year-old Raphael Saihou Hostey near Mosul, Islamic State's stronghold in Iraq. Hostey, a recruiter for the militants, was targeted by a U.S. military campaign that has singled out and killed more than 120 Islamic State leaders, commanders, propagandists, recruiters and other so-called high-value individuals so far this year, officials said. The leadership attacks have picked up recently due to intelligence collected by special operations teams on night raids, from captured militants, and from intercepts of emails, cellphones and other communications. The focus on Islamic State's command and control structure, including its recruitment and funding systems, has helped weaken the Sunni extremist group as Iraqi, Syrian and Kurdish forces press the militants on the battlefield.