A group of researchers recently developed an AI program to assist them in a complex procedure for an experiment involving finely optimized conditions. But rather than simply assist, the AI showed enough proficiency to run the experiment on its own and faster than humans or previous programs designed for the experiment. "I didn't expect the machine could learn to do the experiment itself, from scratch, in under an hour," co-lead researcher Paul Wigley, a doctoral student at the Australian National University Research School of Physics and Engineering, said in a statement. The physicists from the ANU, University of Adelaide, and the University of New South Wales Australian Defence Force Academy, were attempting to recreate an experiment that won the 2001 Nobel Prize – creating a Bose-Einstein condensate, a super chilled gas trapped in between laser beams. Bose-Einstein condensates are able to reach temperatures so low that they are some of the coldest areas of the universe, in some cases less than a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, the temperature where all atoms stop moving.

Employer wellness programs can gather medical information from employees and spouses -- so long as financial incentives or penalties don't exceed 30 percent of the annual cost for an individual in the company's group health plan, according to final rules issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Monday. Although such penalties or incentives could run into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars, the programs are considered voluntary -- and therefore legal, the commission said. The rules seek to ensure "wellness programs actually promote good health and are not just used to collect or sell sensitive medical information about employees and family members or to impermissibly shift health insurance costs to them," the EEOC said. But the final rules drew immediate concern from some groups. Jennifer Mathis, director of programs for the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, says the new rule rolls back protections in existing law.

IBM's technology has won Jeopardy, managed companies and is now practicing law. ROSS, 'the world's first artificially intelligent attorney' powered by Watson, recently landed a position at New York law firm Baker & Hostetler handling the firm's bankruptcy practice. The machine is designed to understand language, provide answers to questions, formulate hypotheses and monitor developments in the legal system. IBM's technology has won Jeopardy, managed companies and is now practicing law. ROSS, 'the world's first artificially intelligent attorney' powered by Watson, has just landed a position at New York law firm Baker & Hostetler handling the firm's bankruptcy practice Lawyers ask ROSS research questions in natural language, just like they were talking to a colleague, and the AI'reads' through the law, gathers evidence, draws inferences and returns with a'highly relevant', evidence-based answer.

Donald Trump has promised that "we're gonna get Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country, instead of in other countries." He said this at a speech at Virginia's Liberty University and several other events. It is very likely that he is not serious; Trump tends to say things he couldn't possibly mean. But he did raise an intriguing question about whether Apple -- and other American companies -- could bring manufacturing back to the United States. When American companies moved manufacturing to China, it was all about cost.

Update, 16 May 2016: We have received more information from DeepMind and the Royal Free on this story, and are considering their response.

Industrial revolutions are momentous events. By most reckonings, there have been only three. The first was triggered in the 1700s by the commercial steam engine and the mechanical loom. The harnessing of electricity and mass production sparked the second, around the start of the 20th century. The computer set the third in motion after World War II (see "The Man Who Made the Computer Age Possible," by Jeffrey E. Garten). It might seem too soon to proclaim that the fourth industrial revolution, spurred by interconnected digital technology, has begun. But Henning Kagermann, the head of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering (Acatech), did exactly that in 2011, when he used the term Industrie 4.0 to describe a proposed government-sponsored industrial initiative. When you look closely at the rapid pace of digitization in industry today, the name doesn't seem hyperbolic at all. It is a signal of sweeping change that is rapidly transforming many companies and may catch others by surprise.

The question of what it meant to be human obsessed the ancient Greeks. The beloved myths of Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, the sorceress Medea, the engineer Daedalus, the inventor-god Hephaestus, and the tragically inquisitive Pandora all raised the basic question of the boundaries between human and machine. Today, developments in biotechnology and advances in artificial intelligence (AI) bring a new urgency to questions about the implications of combining the biological and the technological. It's a discussion that we might say the ancient Greeks began. Medea, the mythic sorceress whose name means'to devise', knew many arcane arts. These included secrets of rejuvenation. To demonstrate her powers, Medea first appeared to Jason and the Argonauts as a stooped old woman, only to transform herself into a beautiful young princess. Jason fell under her spell and became her lover. He asked Medea to restore the youthful vigour of his aged father, Aeson.

Frank Pasquale, professor of law at the University of Maryland, reflects on the roles of machines and machine learning in today's society, and to what extent'opaque' algorithmic systems should be subject to human oversight. The theme of "technics out of control" animated several other mid-20th-century films. Common themes emerged, variations on the Frankenstein or "sorcerer's apprentice" myths. For example, in Colossus: The Forbin Project, a machine assures perpetual peace, but appears capable of controlling much more than nuclear arsenals. It sternly warns one of its creators that "freedom is just an illusion" and "In time you will come to regard me not only with respect and awe, but with love."

XGBoost is an optimized distributed gradient boosting system designed to be highly efficient, flexible and portable. It implements machine learning algorithms under the Gradient Boosting framework. XGBoost provides a parallel tree boosting(also known as GBDT, GBM) that solve many data science problems in a fast and accurate way. The same code runs on major distributed environment(Hadoop, SGE, MPI) and can solve problems beyond billions of examples. XGBoost open source project is actively developed by amazing contributors from DMLC/XGBoost community. This work was supported in part by ONR (PECASE) N000141010672, NSF IIS 1258741 and the TerraSwarm Research Center sponsored by MARCO and DARPA.

In the James Cameron blockbuster The Terminator and its follow up sequels, the world was ruled by machines. Flying robots patrolled the skies while land-based vehicles with minds of their own trundled along on the ground below. But thankfully, instead of trying to wipe out humanity, these drones could soon be an indispensable component of our lives: building skyscrapers using 3D printing technology; transporting cargo across town; crop spraying; or helping find people trapped in buildings. Lockheed Martin's K-Max is a full size, unmanned helicopter, capable of both autonomous and remote-controlled operations. Previously deployed in combat zones, it is now increasingly being used for civilian applications, from fire fighting, to heavy lifting and oil drilling.