The Atlanta Botanical Garden will be using a robotic sloth to save some of the world's most endangered species. The sloth robot, called Slothbot, hangs in trees to monitor animals, plants, and the environment. It was built by the robotics engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and uses solar panels to power itself. In larger environments, Salothbot will be able to switch between cables to cover more ground. "SlothBot embraces slowness as a design principle," the Georgia Tech "That's not how robots are typically designed today, but being slow and hyper-energy efficient will allow SlothBot to linger in the environment to observe things we can only see by being present continuously for months, or even years."

Jasmine Lawrence works with the Everyday Robots project from Alphabet's X moonshot factory. She thinks there's a lot of unanswered ethical questions about how to use robots and how to think of them: Are they slaves or tools? Do they replace or complement people? As a product manager, she said, confronting some of those questions can be frightening, and it brings up the question of bias and the responsibility of the creator. Lawrence said she wants to be held accountable for the good and bad things she builds.

A federal appeals court on Friday struck down a California law that barred internet sites from disclosing the ages of screen actors. The 2017 law, which the Screen Actors Guild had sought as a means to reduce age discrimination, violates the 1st Amendment, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided unanimously. The law was challenged by the Internet Movie Database -- IMDb.com -- a free website that provides information about movies, television shows and video games and offers encyclopedic profiles of actors. In addition to its publicly available site, IMDb has a subscription-based service for the entertainment industry, known as IMDbPro, which the court described as "Hollywood's version of LinkedIn." Actors, writers, set designers, makeup artists and others create resumes by uploading head shots, prior jobs and biographical information to the site.

The advancement and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has surged in the last few years. Businesses across almost every industry are rushing to take advantage of capabilities AI offers, pouring massive capital towards it. The technology holds huge promises and expectations to drive efficiency and innovation throughout an organization. But when the adoption of this tech increases, their liabilities also emerge. Even programmers often do not aware of exactly how their AI will learn, adapt experiences, and how it comes at any decision.

Sony unveiled the PlayStation 5 last week, sharing with the world the console's design, specs, games and accessories. One question remains in everyone's mind: How much will it cost? Devindra and Cherlynn are joined by deputy managing editor Nathan Ingraham to discuss this device's eye-catching appearance, size and speculate how much it will cost. Nate also tells us why The Last Of Us II is a heartbreaking game worth the emotional investment. Then, our hosts take a look at the latest developments in major tech companies' facial recognition systems, as well as Twitter's new voice message format.

From foreign intervention in free elections to the rise of the American surveillance state, the Internet has transformed the relationship between the public and private sectors, especially democracy's public sphere. The global pandemic only further highlights the extent to which technological innovation is changing how we live, work, and play. What has too often gone unacknowledged is that the same revolution has produced a series of conflicts between our desires as consumers and our duties as citizens. Left unaddressed, the consequence is a moral vacuum that has become a threat to liberal democracy and human values. Surveillance in the Internet Age, whether by governments or companies, often relies on algorithmic searches of big data.

A second burst of interest in AI authorship broke out in the mid-1980s. Congress once again commissioned a study, this time from its Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), to address this and other controversial computer-related issues. OTA did not offer an answer to the question, perhaps in part because at that time, it was a "toy problem" because no commercially significant outputs of AI or other software programs had yet been generated.5 But deep learning and other AI breakthroughs have caused IP professionals to rethink the AI authorship issue.1,2 For example, The Next Rembrandt video features a group of art experts and computer scientists discussing how they collaborated to digitize many Rembrandt paintings, develop models of particular features of the paintings, and then create a Rembrandt-like portrait of a man with facial hair wearing a hat and looking to the right.6 The resulting AI-generated painting really does look like a Rembrandt.

Following a proposal by the Conference of Presidents (president and chairs of political groups), plenary set out the responsibilities, numerical strength and term of office of three special committees and the tax subcommittee. Lists of members will be announced in a subsequent plenary session. After a series of special committees and a committee of inquiry, created to delve into the various tax leaks and scandals of recent years, Parliament today established a more permanent setup to shed light on the matter. The subcommittee on tax matters will be composed of 30 members. It will deal particularly with the fight against tax fraud, tax evasion and tax avoidance, as well as financial transparency for taxation purposes.

MIT researchers have created an AI tool capable of generating time-lapse videos that predict how human artists use their hands to create watercolor or digital paintings. The AI is trained using time-lapse videos of people making art on Vimeo and YouTube. The probabilistic model can synthesize and predict moments in the painting process from just a single image of an artwork. The network is meant to mimic the ability skilled human artists possess to see a piece of art and comprehend the series of brush strokes or steps a person took to put it together. There are often many possible ways to create a given painting.

Marrying topic models and language models exposes language understanding to a broader source of document-level context beyond sentences via topics. While introducing topical semantics in language models, existing approaches incorporate latent document topic proportions and ignore topical discourse in sentences of the document. This work extends the line of research by additionally introducing an explainable topic representation in language understanding, obtained from a set of key terms correspondingly for each latent topic of the proportion. Moreover, we retain sentence-topic associations along with document-topic association by modeling topical discourse for every sentence in the document. We present a novel neural composite language model that exploits both the latent and explainable topics along with topical discourse at sentence-level in a joint learning framework of topic and language models. Experiments over a range of tasks such as language modeling, word sense disambiguation, document classification, retrieval and text generation demonstrate ability of the proposed model in improving language understanding.