In an announcement, IARPA officials laid out the project's goals: "The DIVA program will produce a common framework and software prototype for activity detection, person/object detection and recognition across a multicamera network," IARPA officials wrote. "The impact will be the development of tools for forensic analysis, as well as real-time alerting for user-defined threat scenarios." In other words: the system should be able to identify suspicious behavior in real-time. One of the problems with existing systems is that they can identify individual people or objects, but not many of them at the same time, or the complex interactions between them. The DIVA system as it is proposed would be able to identify certain types of movements like a person carrying a firearm, two people exchanging an object, or someone walking up and abandoning a potentially dangerous object on the street.

Google has apologized after its new photo app labelled two black people as "gorillas". The photo service, launched in May, automatically tags uploaded pictures using its own artificial intelligence software. My friend's not a gorilla," Jacky Alciné tweeted on Sunday after a photo of him and a friend was mislabelled as "gorillas" by the app. Shortly after, Alciné was contacted by Yonatan Zunger, the chief architect of social at Google. "Big thanks for helping us fix this: it makes a real difference," Zunger tweeted to Alciné. He went on to say that problems in image recognition can be caused by obscured faces and "different contrast processing needed for different skin tones and lighting". "We used to have a problem with people (of all races) being tagged as dogs, for similar reasons," he said. "We're also working on longer-term fixes around both linguistics (words to be careful about in photos of people) and image recognition itself (e.g., better recognition of dark-skinned faces).

Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop has admitted the federal government can learn a lot from the private sector in how it can do things more efficiently, effectively, and productively with tax payers' dollars. Speaking at the Vivid Ideas panel, Drones for Good, Bishop said that much like how the private sectors have begun working with startups, she has established in her own portfolio an ideas hub, dubbed the Innovation Exchange, to find new ways to solve foreign aid development challenges that exist in the region with the help of others. She said the Department of Foreign Affairs is already working with a mix of people from the private sector, public sector, the United States, and the World Bank such as Michael Bloomberg and Ryan Stokes. "We've got to do things differently to get better outcomes," she said, acknowledging the government needs to be an "exemplar" when it comes to innovation. One of the earliest examples of when the government worked with the private sector, according to Bishop, was looking into how to improve the delivery of pharmaceuticals to remote areas of Papua New Guinea. "People were still dying ... and yet kids were still getting access to cans of coke.

Despite the hype, drones may be only one small part of the future of post. Speaking Wednesday at the Drones For Good panel held during Sydney's Vivid festival, Dirk van Lammeren, general manager of small business at Australia Post, told Mashable Australia the company is considering all of its options. In dense, urban areas, for example, he's not entirely convinced of the value of airborne drones. Drones that can move along the pavement, though? That can't be ruled out.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) teamed-up with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create a unique piece of technology capable of recognizing tattoos. Since 2014, the tandem has already been able to compile a database of 15,000 tattoos, giving them the foundation for developing recognition algorithms. Researchers from the Imaging wing of the NIST developed the idea of tracking tattoos for four reasons. First, one out of every five adults in the US has a tattoo. Second, tattoos provide distinguishing marks that serve as a form of identification.

In the 1936 film Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin plays a factory worker whose only job is to tighten two bolts--again and again, all day, until he finally goes mad. That model is reaching its own breaking point, says German industrial giant Siemens, because it's too clunky to keep up with market demands. "We're going to see more complex products that consumers or different industries want us to manufacture," says Livio Dalloro, head of research for Siemens Corporate Technology. "The costs to bring [an assembly line] up and then essentially bring this down, when you are going to be switching to a different product, are pretty high." In other words, the costs of reconfiguring a traditional production line for a new product get in the way of being able to quickly iterate on product design.

The Financial Times is reporting that Adidas is going to bring back production to its native Germany for the first time in 30 years. It's spent the last six months testing a robotic factory with automated production lines creating soles and uppers separately before stitching them together. Spurred on by the results, the company is working on a large facility near Ansbach which will begin making sneakers for sale at some point next year. Another facility will be built in the US, although both are expected to produce just a tiny fraction of the 301 million pairs the firm made last year. The paper explains that a robot production line takes about five hours to create each pair of sneakers from scratch. By comparison, it apparently takes "several weeks" to do the same job in an Asian factory with human workers.

Cylance, an Irvine, California-based cybersecurity startup that taps machine-learning and artificial intelligence (A.I.) to thwart malware, has raised 100 million in a Series D round led by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and Insight Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors. The company was founded in 2012 by Stuart McClure, who sold an Internet security firm to McAfee for 86 million eight years ago and came on board as McAfee's chief technology officer (CTO). Prior to this round, Cylance had already raised about 77 million, including a 42 million round last July and 20 million the previous year. McClure has an interesting background -- his venture into the security realm was influenced by a deadly plane crash he was involved in back in 1989, one which resulted in the death of nine passengers. The event was apparently caused by a flaw in the Boeing 747's locking mechanism -- a known fault that the company ignored.

States across the US are scrambling to figure out how to regulate self-driving cars, wearable technologies that track our health, smart homes that constantly monitor their infrastructure and the rest of the devices emerging from the so-called "internet of things" (IoT). The result is a smattering of incomplete and inconsistent law that could depress the upside of the technology without really addressing its risks. What's most notable about these early regulatory attempts is not that they are varied – that is to be expected. It's that the regulations deal mostly with physical safety, leaving privacy and cybersecurity issues almost wholly unexamined. This seems to be a pattern now, true too of drone regulation, where regulatory bodies have jurisdiction over physical threats, not informational ones.

The EHang 184 autonomous aerial vehicle is unveiled at the EHang booth at CES International in January in Las Vegas. The drone is large enough to fit a human passenger. The EHang 184 autonomous aerial vehicle is unveiled at the EHang booth at CES International in January in Las Vegas. The drone is large enough to fit a human passenger. The idea: a drone taxi that can transport a single passenger for up to 23 minutes.