We present a method based on the orthogonal symmetric non-negative matrix tri-factorization of the normalized Laplacian matrix for community detection in complex networks. While the exact factorization of a given order may not exist and is NP hard to compute, we obtain an approximate factorization by solving an optimization problem. We establish the connection of the factors obtained through the factorization to a non-negative basis of an invariant subspace of the estimated matrix, drawing parallel with the spectral clustering. Using such factorization for clustering in networks is motivated by analyzing a block-diagonal Laplacian matrix with the blocks representing the connected components of a graph. The method is shown to be consistent for community detection in graphs generated from the stochastic block model and the degree corrected stochastic block model. Simulation results and real data analysis show the effectiveness of these methods under a wide variety of situations, including sparse and highly heterogeneous graphs where the usual spectral clustering is known to fail. Our method also performs better than the state of the art in popular benchmark network datasets, e.g., the political web blogs and the karate club data.

Accenture has chosen an artificial intelligence-powered virtual agent called Amelia, to push cognitive machine learning towards businesses like banks and insurance companies. Amelia, developed by IT automation provider IPsoft, is a self-learning cognitive agent you can actually talk with in natural language. In other words, she can hold a back and forth conversation and, as well as answering questions, she can manage processes for you. For instance, in banking, she could open up an account for you. Edwin van Bommel, chief cognitive officer at IPsoft told IBTimes UK: "Amelia will answer your questions in natural language. It will all be very conversational, as opposed to AI-based services like Siri where each utterance is recognised as a new separate question."

Two years ago, a lawyer in Indiana sent me a check for seventy-eight thousand dollars. The money was from my uncle Walt, who had died six months earlier. I hadn't been expecting any money from Walt, still less counting on it. So I thought I should earmark my inheritance for something special, to honor Walt's memory. It happened that my longtime girlfriend, a native Californian, had promised to join me on a big vacation. She'd been feeling grateful to me for understanding why she had to return full time to Santa Cruz and look after her mother, who was ninety-four and losing her short-term memory. She'd said to me, impulsively, "I will take a trip with you anywhere in the world you've always wanted to go." To this I'd replied, for reasons I'm at a loss to reconstruct, "Antarctica?" Her eyes widened in a way that I should have paid closer attention to. But a promise was a promise. Hoping to make Antarctica more palatable to my temperate Californian, I decided to spend Walt's money on the most deluxe of bookings--a three-week Lindblad National Geographic expedition to Antarctica, South Georgia island, and the Falklands. I paid a deposit, and the Californian and I proceeded to joke, uneasily, when the topic arose, about the nasty cold weather and the heaving South Polar seas to which she'd consented to subject herself. I kept reassuring her that as soon as she saw a penguin she'd be happy she'd made the trip. But when it came time to pay the balance, she asked if we might postpone by a year. Her mother's situation was unstable, and she was loath to put herself so irretrievably far from home. By this point, I, too, had developed a vague aversion to the trip, an inability to recall why I'd proposed Antarctica in the first place. The idea of "seeing it before it melts" was dismal and self-cancelling: why not just wait for it to melt and cross itself off the list of travel destinations? I was also put off by the seventh continent's status as a trophy, too remote and expensive for the common tourist to set foot on. It was true that there were extraordinary birds to be seen, not just penguins but oddities like the snowy sheathbill and the world's southernmost-breeding songbird, the South Georgia pipit. But the number of Antarctic species is fairly small, and I'd already reconciled myself to never seeing every bird species in the world. The best reason I could think of for going to Antarctica was that it was absolutely not the kind of thing the Californian and I did; we'd learned that our ideal getaway lasts three days.

Suzanne, a young woman in San Francisco, met a man--call him John--on the dating site OKCupid. John was attractive and charming. More notably, he indulged in the kind of profligate displays of affection which signal a definite eagerness to commit. He sneaked Suzanne's favorite snacks into her purse as a workday surprise and insisted early on that she keep a key to his apartment. He asked her to help him choose a couch and then spooned with her on all the floor models. He even accompanied her, unprompted, to the D.M.V.--an act roughly equivalent, in today's gallantry currency, to Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea monster. As we learn from the podcast "Reply All," which reported the tale, Suzanne was not the only woman on whom John had chosen to bestow his favor. Six months into their relationship, she discovered that he was seeing half a dozen other women, one of whom he'd been stringing along for two years. All of them had received the couch-spooning treatment.

We would be lost without GPS. The Global Positioning System constellation of satellites started life as a military project, but now enables turn-by-turn directions in the palm of your hand, and confidence that it's almost impossible to get lost as long as you can see the sky. GPS doesn't penetrate the briny deep, so Darpa, the Pentagon's research arm, wants a system that will keep the robots plumbing the oceans on the map, and it's asking for proposals from industry. The proposed solution also wins this week's award for best military acronym: "Posyndon," for Positioning System for Deep Ocean Navigation. "What they are trying to do here is revolutionize underwater navigation in a way that is similar for what GPS did for above water," says Neil Adams, director of defense systems at Draper, the non-profit R&D lab that's working on an answer.

John Markoff recently reported in the New York Times, "In its quest to maintain a United States military advantage, the Pentagon is aggressively turning to Silicon Valley's hottest technology -- artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter made his fourth trip to the tech industry's heartland since being named to his post last year. Before that, it had been 20 years since a defense secretary had visited the area, he noted in a speech at a Defense Department research facility near Google's headquarters. The Pentagon's intense interest in A.I. -- and by connection the Silicon Valley companies specializing in that technology -- has grown out of the'Third Offset' strategy articulated by Mr. Carter last fall. Concerned about the re-emergence of China and Russia as military competitors, he stated that computer-based, high-tech weapons would give the American military an edge in the future."

Difficult as it may be to remember now, there was a time when planning a vacation meant calling a travel agent. These professionals served as an intermediary between travelers and hotels, airlines and so on, taking vague notions ("We'd like to do two weeks across Europe") and turning them into itineraries. But over the past 15 years or so, do-it-yourself websites like Orbitz and Airbnb have empowered vacationers to pick their own accommodations, making travel agents increasingly unnecessary. The U.S. Department of Labor warns that the employment of travel agents is set to drop 12% by 2024, thanks largely to "the ability of travelers to use the Internet to research vacations and book their own trip." Those DIY sites have given rise to a new problem: too much choice.

Accenture has chosen an artificial intelligence-powered virtual agent called Amelia, to push cognitive machine learning towards businesses like banks and insurance companies. Amelia, developed by IT automation provider IPsoft, is a self-learning cognitive agent you can actually talk with in natural language. In other words, she can hold a back and forth conversation and, as well as answering questions, she can manage processes for you. For instance, in banking, she could open up an account for you. Edwin van Bommel, chief cognitive officer at IPsoft told IBTimes UK: "Amelia will answer your questions in natural language. It will all be very conversational, as opposed to AI-based services like Siri where each utterance is recognised as a new separate question."

"Crowd Control: Heaven Makes a Killing," CNET's crowdsourced science fiction novel written and edited by readers, continues. To read past installments, learn more about the project or see our contributor list, visit the digital table of contents. The headlines on Meta's screens were uncharacteristically ominous in the weeks leading up to his final certification at the academy. Discussions in classes were more easily derailed by questions about the future of interversal trade and immigration asked by students who just weeks earlier were more likely to be drooling or snoring through sessions that were largely remedial, a last chance to catch up. "I don't understand why we can't just offer more positions to the subs," Zulema shouted in frustration during one class, surprising her fellow students with her use of a derogatory term for migrants. "Yea, we need help now," echoed Nara.

Fox reports that DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is developing a defense technology using special pods that hibernate on the ocean floor until they are deployed. The pods, called "Upward Falling Payloads," or UFPs, are 15 feet high and weigh 5,000 pounds. They contain state-of-the-art military technology such as unmanned aerial vehicles that can be used for monitoring and surveillance or weapon systems to be deployed as a form of defense. The military can pre-position the pods throughout the world's oceans, lying dormant until they are activated in weeks, months or years. The UFPs can be activated remotely from anywhere in the world.