Apple released its latest laptops on Thursday, a new range of computers to replace the ageing range of Retina MacBook Pros. They are thinner and lighter than their predecessors, with a new touch bar at the top of the keyboard and a fingerprint sensor replacing the power button. They are £750 more than the machines they replace were – though their price has also gone up. The larger of the two new MacBook Pros, the 15in with Touch Bar, is the first laptop the company has released with a starting price of more than £2,000 for more than a decade: it begins at an eye-watering £2,349, with build-to-order options taking it well north of £4,000. Apple's former cheapest laptop, the £749 MacBook, is also being retired.

The National Transportation Safety Board is looking into an accident involving an enormous experimental drone belonging to Facebook which crashed earlier this year. The drone was built to bring internet to far-flung parts of the planet and designed to hover 60,000 ft above the surface of the Earth. However, in June the drone known as Aquila, ended up plummeting to earth after suffering a'structural failure' as it was coming into land. No one was hurt in the incident. The drone, called Aquila, suffered from a'structural failure' right before it landed According to Bloomberg the crash is one of several hiccups that the social network has faced in recent months, following an explosion earlier this year that destroyed one of its satellites.

A London NHS hospital trust has teamed up with tech giant Google to share patient data so it can save more lives. Doctors at the Royal Free say partnering with the artificial intelligence arm of Google - DeepMind - could free up over half a million hours per year, currently spent on paperwork, towards direct patient care. Medical staff will get'breaking news' style alerts about their patients. Privacy campaigners are concerned about data breaches. Information on more than 1.6 million patients a year will be shared with a subsidiary of Google.

DeepMind Health, the division of the Google-owned AI company that's focused on building links to healthcare providers to drive the application of machine learning algorithms for preventative medicine, has inked a fresh data-sharing agreement with the NHS Royal Free Hospital Trust in London. It's the second agreement signed between the pair -- and it supersedes their original agreement inked last year, which ran into controversy after a freedom of information request by New Scientist revealed the volume of patient identifiable medical data (PID) flowing from the Royal Free to DeepMind, and raised questions about whether NHS information governance principles were being correctly followed. The data in question was being used to power an app called Streams, built by DeepMind but using an NHS algorithm to generate alerts on patients at risk of Acute Kidney Injury (AKI). At the time the collaboration was made public, last February, no details were provided about how much PID was being shared between DeepMind and the NHS -- leading to huge consternation when the scope of the arrangement emerged. The U.K.'s data watchdog, the ICO, began investigating complaints about the data-sharing agreement. The Streams app also ran into trouble when it was revealed DeepMind and the Royal Free had not registered it as a medical device with the oversight body, the MHRA, despite piloting the app in the Royal Free's hospitals.

Complex problems may require sophisticated, non-linear learning methods such as kernel machines or deep neural networks to achieve state of the art prediction accuracies. However, high prediction accuracies are not the only objective to consider when solving problems using machine learning. Instead, particular scientific applications require some explanation of the learned prediction function. Unfortunately, most methods do not come with out of the box straight forward interpretation. Even linear prediction functions are not straight forward to explain if features exhibit complex correlation structure. In this paper, we propose the Measure of Feature Importance (MFI). MFI is general and can be applied to any arbitrary learning machine (including kernel machines and deep learning). MFI is intrinsically non-linear and can detect features that by itself are inconspicuous and only impact the prediction function through their interaction with other features. Lastly, MFI can be used for both --- model-based feature importance and instance-based feature importance (i.e, measuring the importance of a feature for a particular data point).

In this work, we present an application of Locally Interpretable Machine-Agnostic Explanations to 2-D chemical structures. Using this framework we are able to provide a structural interpretation for an existing black-box model for classifying biologically produced fuel compounds with regard to Research Octane Number. This method of "painting" locally interpretable explanations onto 2-D chemical structures replicates the chemical intuition of synthetic chemists, allowing researchers in the field to directly accept, reject, inform and evaluate decisions underlying inscrutably complex quantitative structure-activity relationship models.

Understanding neural networks is becoming increasingly important. Over the last few years different types of visualisation and explanation methods have been proposed. However, none of them explicitly considered the behaviour in the presence of noise and distracting elements. In this work, we will show how noise and distracting dimensions can influence the result of an explanation model. This gives a new theoretical insights to aid selection of the most appropriate explanation model within the deep-Taylor decomposition framework.

The miserable experience of fumbling for lost boarding passes and endless queuing at airports could finally be a thing of the past, as airports of the future will feature biometric tickets, virtual assistants and fast molecular security scanners. Designs for how airports could look in 25 years have been revealed - and they're not pie-in-the-sky because they include technology that is already being trialled and developed. The research shows how check-in - a major source of queues and frustration for travellers - will become an automated doddle by 2040. Visitors describe their experiences at Ireland's Killarney Park Vibrations from Route 66 road markings play'America the Beautiful' Here's a sneak peak of the Mediterranean Odyssey cruise Bizarre UFO-like object is spotted on NASA's satellite footage As well as online check-ins becoming far more common, passengers will be given a biometric token that will serve as their passport, boarding pass and ID for the journey, without having to keep hold of their separate documents, according to airport parking operator and retailer Airport Parking and Hotels (APH), who created the vision. In order to be issued with this token, each traveller will be scanned for biometric identifiers unique to them, such as iris patterns.

Eyewire Executive Director Amy Robinson Sterling will lead us through unprecedented scientific landscapes on humankind's neuroscientific journey of self-discovery, exploring the exciting prospects in blending machine intelligence and crowdsourced human intellect for the benefit of all. As a leading catalyst of neuroscience visualization spanning interactive web to virtual reality, Amy has advised the White House OSTP and the US Senate on crowdsourcing and open innovation. Fast Company credits her with "making neuroscience into a playground for today's hot tech du jour." Amy founded the TEDx Music Project (a collection of the best live music from TEDx events around the world), and was named one of Forbes' 30 Under 30 in 2015. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

After offering teachers early access to Minecraft: Education Edition this summer, Microsoft's classroom-friendly version of the immensely popular sandbox game was formally launched at the beginning of November. Not everyone is keen on Minecraft being used as a teaching tool, though, and ahead of Microsoft's UK launch event tomorrow, behavior expert for the government's Department for Education Tom Bennett has voiced his skepticism to The Times. "I am not a fan of Minecraft in lessons. This smacks to me of another gimmick which will get in the way of children actually learning," Bennett said. "Removing these gimmicky aspects of education is one of the biggest tasks facing us as teachers. We need to drain the swamp of gimmicks," he continued, mimicking some recent rhetoric from US President-elect Trump.