Technicians of Tianjin Deepfar Ocean Technology Co., Ltd., tests a new developed Underwater Unmanned Vehicle which is named'White Shark Max' in water on March 28, 2016 in Tianjin, China. For the next three years, China will be ramping up the development of its artificial intelligence (AI) sector as it aims to establish a lucrative market that could be more than 100 billion yuan ( 15.26 billion). This, according to a statement released by the National Development and Reform Commission through its website last Monday. Based on the Central Government's three-year implementation plan for its "Internet Plus" artificial intelligence program, China will create platforms for fundamental AI resources and innovation, and work towards achieving breakthroughs on basic core technology, The plan is a collaborative effort of the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Cyberspace Administration of China. Through these efforts, China's artificial intelligence sector seeks to be at par with its global competitors by 2018.

Just how worried should we be about killer robots? To go by the opinions of a highly regarded group of scholars, including Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, Franz Wilczek and Stuart Russell, we should be wary of the prospect of artificial intelligence rebelling against its makers. "One can imagine (AI) outsmarting financial markets, outinventing human researchers, outmanipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand," Hawking wrote in a 2014 article for The Independent. "Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all." The fear that our irresponsible creations might bring about the end of humanity is a common one.

Who says artificial intelligence doesn't involve humans? Try telling that to Silicon Valley startup Unanimous AI. After recently achieving the rare "superfecta" -- picking the top four finishers in the Kentucky Derby -- using UNU, a new form of human-based AI using algorithms, the company is ready to share its formula with the public. After more than a year of testing, the online platform is now available in open beta. UNU relies on an artificial "swarm" of human group intelligence that come together in real time to make predictions, said Louis Rosenberg, its creator.

Researchers disagree on when artificial intelligence that displays something like human understanding might arrive. But the Obama administration isn't waiting to find out. The White House says the government needs to start thinking about how to regulate and use the powerful technology while it is still dependent on humans. "The public should have an accurate mental model of what we mean when we say artificial intelligence," says Ryan Calo, who teaches law at University of Washington. Calo spoke last week at the first of four workshops the White House hosts this summer to examine how to address an increasingly AI-powered world. Although scholars and policymakers agree that Washington has a role to play here, it isn't clear what the path to that policy looks like--even as pressing questions accumulate.

Historians discovered a code machine used by Adolf Hitler to swap top secret messages with his generals when they saw it advertised on eBay for 9.50. Volunteers from the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park tracked down the extremely rare Lorenz keyboard after seeing it on the online bidding site. It was being advertised as a telegram machine and the historians found that it had been left in a shed in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, with'rubbish all over it'. Historians discovered a code machine used by Adolf Hitler to swap top secret messages with his generals when they noticed it was being sold on eBay. John Wetter, a volunteer at the museum, said: 'My colleague was scanning eBay and he saw a photograph of what seemed to be the teleprinter.

QUETTA, PAKISTAN – The family of a driver who was killed alongside Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Mansour in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan has filed a case against U.S. officials, seeking to press murder charges, police said Sunday. Mansour had entered Pakistan from Iran using a false name and fake Pakistani identity documents on May 21, when his car was targeted by a U.S. drone. The driver, who was also killed, was later identified as Mohammed Azam. The police filed a case on behalf of Azam's family, police official Abdul Wakil Mengal said. It was not immediately clear what legal avenues the family can realistically pursue.

An augmented Lagrangian (AL) can convert a constrained optimization problem into a sequence of simpler (e.g., unconstrained) problems, which are then usually solved with local solvers. Recently, surrogate-based Bayesian optimization (BO) sub-solvers have been successfully deployed in the AL framework for a more global search in the presence of inequality constraints; however, a drawback was that expected improvement (EI) evaluations relied on Monte Carlo. Here we introduce an alternative slack variable AL, and show that in this formulation the EI may be evaluated with library routines. The slack variables furthermore facilitate equality as well as inequality constraints, and mixtures thereof. We show how our new slack "ALBO" compares favorably to the original. Its superiority over conventional alternatives is reinforced on several mixed constraint examples.

The family of the driver killed in a US drone strike that targeted Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor have registered a case against US officials seeking murder charges. The case, filed by the family of Mohammad Azam who was killed last week along with Mansoor in the Pakistani town of Ahmad Wal near Afghan border, said the father of four was innocent. US officials described the car's driver as a "second male combatant" but according to Pakistani security officials he was a chauffeur named Mohammad Azam who worked for the Al Habib rental company based out of Quetta, the region's main city. "US officials whose name I do not know accepted the responsibility in media for this incident, so I want justice and request legal action against those responsible for it," Mohammad Qasim, Azam's brother said in a police report, a copy of which was seen by the AFP news agency. "My brother was innocent and he was very poor who has left behind four small children and he was the lone bread earner in the family," he added.

A DNA test has confirmed that Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in a U.S. drone strike, Pakistan's interior ministry said Sunday, as the family of a driver killed in the strike sought legal action. A DNA sample from one of the men killed in the U.S. drone attack was successfully matched with a close relative of Mansour, the interior ministry statement said. American and Afghan officials had already confirmed Mansour's death, but Islamabad had declined to do so before the DNA test results. Mansour had entered Pakistan from Iran using a false name and fake Pakistani identity documents on May 21, when his car was hit by the U.S. missile. On Sunday, the family of his driver -- identified as Mohammed Azam -- filed a police case against unknown U.S. officials, seeking to press murder charges against them, police officer Abdul Wakil Mengal said.

Some chronic conditions, such as the autoimmune disease scleroderma, are especially difficult to treat because patients exhibit highly variable symptoms, complications and treatment responses. The process of finding an effective treatment for an individual can be frustrating for doctors, and painful and expensive for patients. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), computer scientist and professor Suchi Saria, with Dr. Fredrick Wigley and an interdisciplinary team of experts at Johns Hopkins University, is leading a groundbreaking effort using Big Data to ease some of that pain for scleroderma patients. The team s research is in machine learning, a subfield of computer science and statistics that allows machines to learn from data. The team designs statistical algorithms that enable computers to analyze large volumes of medical records and identify subgroups of patients with similar patterns of disease progression.