Presidential advisors want more information on artificial intelligence and cognitive technology. In order to use it to best serve the people, the White House asked what leaders should consider when applying technology like Watson to challenges and opportunities in matters like education, the economy and climate change. In it's public response, IBM wrote back: "We believe that many of the ambiguities and inefficiencies of the critical systems that facilitate life on this planet can be eliminated. And we believe that AI systems are the tools that will help us accomplish these ambitious goals."

Samsung Electronics Co. is joining the race to create the smartest digital assistant by acquiring Viv, a Silicon Valley start-up launched by the same entrepreneurs who sold Siri to Apple. The deal announced Wednesday provides Samsung with technology to compete against Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. in the increasingly important field of programming computers to learn and respond as if they were human. The specialty, also known as artificial intelligence, has hatched a flock of voice-activated digital concierges -- such as Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana and Google's Assistant -- that work in personal computers, smartphones and Internet-connected speakers. Samsung plans to implant Viv into phones, televisions and a wide range of other devices. The South Korean company did not disclose how much it paid for the start-up.

To infer multilayer deep representations of high-dimensional discrete and nonnegative real vectors, we propose an augmentable gamma belief network (GBN) that factorizes each of its hidden layers into the product of a sparse connection weight matrix and the nonnegative real hidden units of the next layer. The GBN's hidden layers are jointly trained with an upward-downward Gibbs sampler that solves each layer with the same subroutine. The gamma-negative binomial process combined with a layer-wise training strategy allows inferring the width of each layer given a fixed budget on the width of the first layer. Example results illustrate interesting relationships between the width of the first layer and the inferred network structure, and demonstrate that the GBN can add more layers to improve its performance in both unsupervisedly extracting features and predicting heldout data. For exploratory data analysis, we extract trees and subnetworks from the learned deep network to visualize how the very specific factors discovered at the first hidden layer and the increasingly more general factors discovered at deeper hidden layers are related to each other, and we generate synthetic data by propagating random variables through the deep network from the top hidden layer back to the bottom data layer.

Alfred Nobel wanted the prizes that bear his name to recognize achievements that offered the "greatest benefit to mankind." The world's tiniest machines -- celebrated in this year's chemistry prize -- may revolutionize daily life. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Wednesday awarded the final Nobel prize in sciences for 2016. The 8 million kronor ( 930,000) chemistry prize went to Jean-Pierre Sauvage of France, Sir Fraser Stoddart of Britain, and Bernard "Ben" Feringa of the Netherlands. The scientists were recognized for their breakthroughs on molecular machines, which began with Dr. Sauvage linking two ring-shaped molecules in 1983.

Self-driving vehicles that can seamlessly shuttle people around cities are years away--perhaps even decades, depending on who is providing the forecast. But the founders of Clearpath Robotics aren't worried. They already have fleets of self-driving vehicles operating on roads with traffic, intersections, and pedestrians. But instead of shuttling people through city streets, the startup's self-driving vehicles navigate goods through the miles of roads inside massive industrial factories, including at Caterpillar cat and GE ge . "Unlike city streets, a factory floor is a controlled environment, which makes it an ideal place to introduce self-driving vehicles at scale," said Clearpath CEO and co-founder Matt Rendall.

The rapid introduction of self-driving cars and other advanced technologies makes it possible to achieve the zero deaths goal, the department said in a statement. Fully autonomous vehicles hold the potential to eliminate human error, which is a factor in 94 percent of crashes, according to the department.

The United Nation's Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES), which last week chose to ban all commercial trade of pangolins, will come to a close today. The pangolin, also known as the scaly anteater, has been poached to near extinction. Wildlife conservationists hope the ban will help restore the species, which is harvested for meat and scales. But others say trade sanctions aren't enough – that a coordinated effort between governments, businesses, conservationists, and communities will be necessary to save this maligned mammal. "Hopefully this will be followed by increased resources and attention being devoted to saving this well armored – but utterly defensive – and wholly unique species," Jeff Flocken, North American regional director at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, told Reuters.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

"Amy" saves entrepreneur Gillian Morris about 43 productive hours a year. Morris, the founder of Hitlist, a travel app that alerts users to cheap flights, has been using Amy, a virtual assistant from x.ai for about two years, to schedule meetings. To ask for Amy's help, Morris sends an email to the person or people she wants to meet with and copies Amy. From there, Amy takes Morris out of the email chain and handles the back and forth about dates and times. Morris estimates Amy schedules about 10 meetings for her a week, and spares her from having to read or respond to any related emails herself.