Government
US spy agency trials live video recognition to spot terrorists
A new surveillance technology will allow for the immediate, automatic detection of suspicious behaviour in live video feeds. The research project, led by the IARPA unit at the U.S. Office of National Intelligence, proposes a recognition system dubbed Deep Intermodal Video Analytics (DIVA), which is able to scour through multiple live video streams and pick out potential criminal and terror activities. Describing the project, IARPA officials noted: 'The DIVA program will produce a common framework and software prototype for activity detection, person/object detection and recognition across a multi-camera network. The impact will be the development of tools for forensic analysis, as well as real-time alerting for user-defined threat scenarios.' The technology is designed to pore through video surveillance and other incoming camera footage to search for new threats, as well as to identify individuals and objects already flagged by the authorities as posing a danger.
White House asks AI experts to help with America's prison overcrowding problem
America has a prison problem. Although the United States accounts for just 4.4 percent of the world's population, we account for 22 percent of the world's overall prisoner population. All this attempted correction comes at both social and financial expense. America spent around 80 billion on prisons, jails, probation, and parole in 2010, according to a report by The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. "We have built a system that is too large, and too unfair, and too costly โ in every sense of the word โ and we need to start to change it," heralded the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's Lynn Overmann on Tuesday in Washington, DC.
Adventures in Transcription
Transcription is the bane of my existence. Yes, it is fun to be a journalist, yes it is fun to travel around the country talking to diverse and interesting people, yes it is fun to weave those people into broader stories about the world at large. But there's a middle step in there in which I come home with reams of audio interviews that I've recorded that I have to type up. And that part is not fun. For my job, I travel somewhere every month and write a handful of stories from that place, which means dozens of dozens of interviews of people who go into my stories.
Google Founder Larry Page Funding Flying Car Companies Zee.Aero And Kitty Hawk
Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, has personally funneled over 100 million into a pair of secretive startups looking to revolutionize personal transport by developing flying cars, according to a new report from Bloomberg Businessweek. The report claims Page is backing the secretive Zee.Aero, a company that was initially set up six years ago and three years later, moved across the road from Google's huge headquarters in Mountain View. At the time, the company was reported to be working on a flying car -- based on a patent filing -- but little was known about Zee.Aero and who was backing it. The original patent filed by Zee.Aero for a flying car design. The report, based on information from 10 people familiar with the company's plans, including former employees, says Page initially lived in an apartment above the company's offices, but as it expanded, he had to move out.
Google hopes to apply machine learning to NHS data within 5 years
Google wants to apply its machine learning technology to NHS patient data within the next five years, TechCrunch reports. The search giant's London-based artificial intelligence research lab, DeepMind, announced a partnership with the Royal Free NHS Trust in London in February but the full extent of the arrangement is only just becoming clear. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between DeepMind and the Royal Free shows that the pair envisage a "broad ranging, mutually beneficial partnership, engaging in high levels of collaborative activity and maximizing the potential to work on genuinely innovative and transformational projects." The MoU -- obtained via a Freedom of Information (FoI) request from New Scientist -- states that DeepMind hopes to gain access to "data for machine learning research under appropriate regulatory and ethical approvals" within the next five years. Machine learning -- a subfield of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed -- has the potential to speed up patient diagnosis and optimise their treatments.
Jawbone upsets bereaved people by sending them strange Father's Day message out of the blue
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
Elon Musk Says We Are Just Characters In An Alien's Video Game - Gas 2
By all accounts, Elon Musk may be one of the smartest people alive. But he surprised more than a few people this week at the 2016 Code Convention in California when he stated his belief that we are not really real, but rather computer generated entities living inside a more advanced civilization's video game. Responding to a question from journalist Josh Topolsky, Musk said, "The strongest argument for us being in a simulation probably is the following. Forty years ago we had pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, 40 years later, we have photo realistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it's getting better every year. Soon we'll have virtual reality, augmented reality. "If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now.
Tinder bans teenage users, reversing policy of letting people as young as 13 use dating app
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
iPhone fingerprint sensor problems like wet fingers can be overcome by adding more fingerprints
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