China agreed Saturday to return an American sea drone it had captured after the Pentagon demanded it back, defusing tensions at the end of a week of confrontations over Beijing's territorial ambitions in the South China Sea. China's Defense Ministry said it would return "in an appropriate manner" the U.S. sea vessel seized this week by the Chinese navy. But the ministry also accused the U.S. of "public hyping" that was "not conducive to solving the problem smoothly." Chinese officials did not specify what happened or when Beijing would hand back the device. The ministry, in a statement, said that the device was unidentified when found and that officials later concluded it was an American drone.

China agreed Saturday to return an American sea drone it had captured after the Pentagon demanded it back, defusing tensions at the end a week of confrontations over Beijing's territorial ambitions in the South China Sea. China's Defense Ministry said it would return "in an appropriate manner" the U.S. sea vessel seized this week by the Chinese navy. But the ministry also accused the U.S. of "public hyping" that was "not conducive to solving the problem smoothly." Chinese officials did not specify what happened or when Beijing would hand back the device. The ministry, in a statement, said the device was unidentified when found and that officials later concluded it was an American drone.

Within the last week, the CIA, Obama administration and FBI have all agreed that Russian intervened in the presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump. The White House went so far as to say that the cyberattacks were directed by president Vladimir Putin himself. The New York Times offers a detailed look at the Russian hack of the DNC which led to emails and other documents making it into the hands of WikiLeaks and other websites. Google wants to use AI to fight abusive behavior online. It may not work for bigger sites and services, but there's still potential to do some good.

We don't enter that word. Trump swiftly deleted the tweet and replaced it with one using the correct spelling. But the Twitter account for the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the standard-bearer for English-language words, had already poked fun at Trump's grammar mistake. We don't enter that word. Trump, a Republican and prolific tweeter with 17.4 million followers, has had spelling mistakes in previous tweets. China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters - rips it out of water and takes it to China in unprecedented act.

Trains with a guard become driver-only trains, which then become driverless trains. That's the fear underlying Aslef's dispute with Southern railways and accounts for the rearguard action to prevent further job losses across the rail industry. There is also scorn for Southern's management, which has attacked drivers' basic terms and conditions, and there is anger at transport secretary Chris Grayling's anti-union stance. But, at its heart, the dispute is over the status and even the very existence of the job of train driver, which has been around for nigh on 200 years. Like most people, train drivers will have read the screaming headlines warning of a robot revolution that spells the end for millions of jobs.

It may take several years or even decades, but hackers won't necessarily always be human. Artificial intelligence -- a technology that also promises to revolutionize cybersecurity -- could one day become the go-to hacking tool. Organizers of the Cyber Grand Challenge, a contest sponsored by the U.S. defense agency DARPA, gave a glimpse of the power of AI during their August event. Seven supercomputers battled each other to show that machines can indeed find and patch software vulnerabilities. Theoretically, the technology can be used to perfect any coding, ridding it of exploitable flaws.

They also said that the government is in a better position than technology companies to invest in AI applications aimed at broad societal problems. They agreed that AI is in a crucial developmental moment, and that government has a unique opportunity to shape its future. That was the message from prominent AI technologists and researchers at a Senate committee hearing last week. The White House made a similar argument in a "National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan," which it published in October. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who convened the hearing, expressed concern that the United States not cede its leadership in developing AI to China or any other foreign government.

Recently we wrote about the development of AI and neural nets beyond the second generation Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Nets (CNNs / RNNs) which have come on so strong and dominate the current conversation about deep learning. Our research shows that the next generation of neural nets is most likely to be led by Spiking Neural Nets (SNNs) that are a return to the'strong' AI tradition and closely mimic actual brain function. Unlike CNNs that fire signals to every one of their deep layer connections every time, SNNs are modeled after the fact that in the brain neurons do not constantly communicate with one another. Rather they communicate in spikes of signals or more correctly short trains of spiking signals. As each spike in the train arrives at a neuron it raises the potential of that neuron until finally a spike arrives that tips it over its potential threshold and it in turn fires, propelling the signal onward.

Sometimes you go out hard and party like the cool kids. Other times, your Saturday night plans are … less than spectacular. For times like those, here are the 6 best ways to get entertainment out of your Amazon Echo when you're bored and lonely, or just sick of other people. After all, your friends may judge you, but Alexa never will. You can either read this whole article, or watch our entertaining video coverage where we make fools out of ourselves in the attempt to honestly demonstrate these features to you.

What will be the impact of machine learning on economics? NEW YORK, NY - MAY 05: Susan Athey speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2014 - Day 1 on May 5, 2014 in New York City. The short answer is that I think it will have an enormous impact; in the early days, as used "off the shelf," but in the longer run econometricians will modify the methods and tailor them so that they meet the needs of social scientists primarily interested in conducting inference about causal effects and estimating the impact of counterfactual policies (that is, things that haven't been tried yet, or what would have happened if a different policy had been used). Examples of questions economists often study are things like the effects of changing prices, or introducing price discrimination, or changing the minimum wage, or evaluating advertising effectiveness. We want to estimate what would happen in the event of a change, or what would have happened if the change hadn't taken place.