Government
Twitter buys Magic Pony, a startup that uses robots to scan pictures
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
After years in the making, FAA rules will clear way for routine flights of small commercial drones
WASHINGTON โ After years of struggling to write rules that will both protect public safety and free the benefits of a new technology, the Obama administration is on the verge of approving routine commercial use of small drones. The Federal Aviation Administration is expected to announce as early as Tuesday the creation of a new category of rules for drones weighing less than 55 pounds (25 kg). The long-anticipated rules will mean drone operators would be able to fly without special permission. Currently, they have to apply for a waiver from rules that govern manned aircraft, a process that can be time-consuming and expensive. Since 2014 the FAA has granted more than 6,100 waivers and another 7,600 are waiting for approval. Many more small companies have been using drones without FAA permission, say industry officials.
Google chairman Eric Schmidt dismisses Hollywood-driven AI fears as unrealistic
We are all familiar with the doomsday scenario depicted by many modern films, when artificial intelligence goes bad and takes over the world. But this is not going to happen, according to Google chairman, Eric Schmidt, who claims that super-intelligent robots will someday help use solve problems such as population growth and climate change. During a talk in Cannes, he said AI will be developed for the benefit of humanity and there will be systems in place in case anything goes awry. Artificial intelligence will let scientists solve some of the world's'hard problems.' During a talk in Cannes, Eric Schmidt said AI will be developed for the benefit of humanity and there will be systems in place in case anything goes awry. 'We've all seen those movies,' he said.
FAA rules to clear way for routine commercial drone flights
A hexacopter drone is flown during a drone demonstration at a farm and winery on potential use for board members of the National Corn Growers, Thursday, June 11, 2015 in Cordova, Md. Routine commercial use of small drones got a green light from the Obama administration June 21, 2016, after years of struggling to write regulations that would both protect public safety and unleash the economic potential and societal benefits of the new technology.
Commercial Drone Rules: New FAA Norms To Be Announced This Week
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will announce its first rules permitting businesses to fly drones for limited purposes Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported. The move is likely to spark further demands for easing restrictions on unmanned aircraft. The announcement, which will allow drones weighing roughly 50 pounds to fly at low altitudes only in daylight and within sight of operators, is imminent, agency officials reportedly said. The Journal reported that the rules are unlikely to please some proposed commercial operations of drones, which would like the aircraft to be allowed to operate at nights and outside the operator's line of sight. Millions of new users have been attracted annually by commercial drone operations in the U.S. alone.
Stanford and White House host experts to discuss future social benefits of artificial intelligence Stanford News
The future of artificial intelligence is now. After years of steady progress in making computers "smarter," AI prototypes are being incorporated into hundreds of day-to-day actions, such as self-driving cars, intelligent smartphone assistants and several applications in academia, government and industry. As the technology improves, it will be applied in ever more high-impact economic, social, political and cultural areas. Stanford's Russ Altman, left, and Fei-Fei Li will host a June 23 panel on artificial intelligence. In the face of this revolution, Stanford and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will host a panel of AI visionaries from academia, government and industry to discuss how to responsibly integrate the ever-evolving technology into the real world.
A Theoretical Analysis of Deep Neural Networks for Texture Classification
Basu, Saikat, Karki, Manohar, DiBiano, Robert, Mukhopadhyay, Supratik, Ganguly, Sangram, Nemani, Ramakrishna, Gayaka, Shreekant
We investigate the use of Deep Neural Networks for the classification of image datasets where texture features are important for generating class-conditional discriminative representations. To this end, we first derive the size of the feature space for some standard textural features extracted from the input dataset and then use the theory of Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension to show that hand-crafted feature extraction creates low-dimensional representations which help in reducing the overall excess error rate. As a corollary to this analysis, we derive for the first time upper bounds on the VC dimension of Convolutional Neural Network as well as Dropout and Dropconnect networks and the relation between excess error rate of Dropout and Dropconnect networks. The concept of intrinsic dimension is used to validate the intuition that texture-based datasets are inherently higher dimensional as compared to handwritten digits or other object recognition datasets and hence more difficult to be shattered by neural networks. We then derive the mean distance from the centroid to the nearest and farthest sampling points in an n-dimensional manifold and show that the Relative Contrast of the sample data vanishes as dimensionality of the underlying vector space tends to infinity.
28IGF2M
There are countless internet quizzes that helps sort you into Hogwarts houses depending on your personality, but nothing comes quite close to this: an actual sorting hat powered by IBM Watson. The hat, created by IBM engineer Ryan Anderson, started off as a fun project for him and his two daughters to help expose the girls to STEM while bridging it with their interests in the Harry Potter series. His daughter helped by adding lines of established "ground truths" for each of the four houses, with Watson using deep learning to figure out more attributes and expanding known qualities of each house every time the hat is worn. With above 90 percent certainty, the hat sorted Hawking and Clinton into Ravenclaw for their wits.
Toyota Researcher Sees Cheap Robots Possible by Mass Production
The researcher hired by Toyota Motor Corp. to spearhead its robotics and artificial intelligence efforts says the automaker's production principles can be applied to build affordable helper robots for rapidly aging societies. Robot makers are struggling with the same scale challenges that the auto industry overcame with the "miracle" that occurred when Henry Ford developed the assembly line, according to Gill Pratt, the chief executive officer of Toyota Research Institute. Toyota's vaunted production system later showed how to make cars both more cheaply and reliably, despite mistake-prone humans' role in manufacturing, he said. "My thought is, if the Toyota production system can be applied to cars, maybe it can also be applied to robots, because they're quite similar," Pratt told reporters Friday in Tokyo. He's particularly sanguine about the prospects for devices that would help the elderly age where they live.
The quest for artificial intelligence that can outsmart hackers
In the future, will artificial intelligence be so sophisticated that it will be able to tell when someone is trying to deceive it? A Carnegie Mellon University professor and his team is working on technology that could move this idea from the realm of science fiction to reality. Their work -- rooted in game theory and machine learning -- is part of a larger push for more advanced AI. As AI becomes more commonplace in the technology we use every day, detractors and supporters are becoming more vocal about its potential risks and benefits. For some, smarter AI sets up a dangerous precedent for a future too reliant on machines to make decisions about everything from medical diagnoses to the operation of self-driving cars.