Silicon Valley is a place obsessed with the future, but often forgetful about the past. Earlier this year, one of the Valley's most controversial techies took this future-worship to the next level -- by founding a religion called Way of the Future. Its purpose is to "develop and promote the realisation of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence", according to public documents that were first reported by Wired magazine. This is the stuff of science fiction, except that people here actually take it seriously. The founder of Way of the Future is Anthony Levandowski, the notorious engineer at the centre of a lawsuit between Alphabet's autonomous car unit, Waymo, and Uber. In the case, which has riveted Silicon Valley, Waymo accuses Levandowski, a former employee, of stealing trade secrets related to self-driving sensors and taking them to Uber.

Match Group, the company that owns Tinder, has bought a controlling stake in Hinge, which was redesigned to cater to individuals seeking relationships instead of the casual dating (and hookup) culture prevalent in other dating apps. This adds the'anti-Tinder' to the company's collection of other online services OkCupid, PlentyOfFish and Match.com, Match Group bought a 51 percent stake in Hinge with the option to buy the rest of the shares in the next year, both companies told Bloomberg. But the former actually started investing in the latter back in September, taking a seat on its board and starting discussions of a potential acquisition. In March, Match Group sued the company behind one of the only other remaining notable dating services, Bumble, for patent infringement. The latter quickly countersued, revealing that Match Group was interested in acquiring it, and Bumble claimed the first lawsuit was intended to drive down the asking price and sully other interested parties.

Personalized probabilistic forecasts of time to event (such as mortality) can be crucial in decision making, especially in the clinical setting. Inspired by ideas from the meteorology literature, we approach this problem through the paradigm of maximizing sharpness of prediction distributions, subject to calibration. In regression problems, it has been shown that optimizing the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) instead of maximum likelihood leads to sharper prediction distributions while maintaining calibration. We introduce the Survival-CRPS, a generalization of the CRPS to the time to event setting, and present right-censored and interval-censored variants. To holistically evaluate the quality of predicted distributions over time to event, we present the Survival-AUPRC evaluation metric, an analog to area under the precision-recall curve. We apply these ideas by building a recurrent neural network for mortality prediction, using an Electronic Health Record dataset covering millions of patients. We demonstrate significant benefits in models trained by the Survival-CRPS objective instead of maximum likelihood.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Earlier this week, the Justice Department announced that a grand jury had indicted former CIA employee Joshua Schulte for leaking classified information in 2016. While the indictment does not specify which leaks Schulte is tied to, several news organizations have reported that he provided the WikiLeaks Vault 7 documents, which comprised thousands of pages of classified material detailing the CIA's cyber operations and digital surveillance efforts. Among other revelations, the documents showed the U.S. intelligence community making widespread use of existing or repurposed techniques and computer programs to carry out its own operations. Unfortunately, the indictment offers frustratingly few clues as to how the government believes Schulte, a 29-year-old former member of the CIA's Engineering Development Group, carried out these leaks two years ago and how he was caught.

Tesla sued a former employee Wednesday for allegedly hacking the automaker's computer systems and stealing company secrets, shedding light on what chief Elon Musk had suggested was the work of a secretive internal saboteur. Tesla attorneys wrote in their lawsuit that Martin Tripp, a former technician at the company's Gigafactory battery plant in Nevada, wrote software to aid in an elaborate theft of several gigabytes of confidential data, including photos and video of Tesla's manufacturing systems. The firm's attorneys said Tripp worked at Tesla from October to last week, when company investigators confronted him with evidence. Tripp, attorneys wrote, also gave journalists false information about the company, including claims that defective batteries had been used in Tesla's Model 3 sedans. The court file did not name an attorney for Tripp, who could not be located.

Immuta Inc., the data management for AI vendor, said it will use a $20 million funding round to establish a European beachhead in London as it sharpens its focus on helping enterprises develop "ethical" AI algorithms that comply with new European privacy rules as well as possible U.S. data privacy regulations. The Series B funding round announced Wednesday (June 20) was led by DFJ Growth and joined by new investors Citi Ventures and Dell Technologies Capital. The startup's customers include banks such as Barclays (NASDAQ: DTYS), insurers and U.S. intelligence agencies. Immuta's data management platform is designed to provide greater control of the data fed into algorithms, speeding deployment as well as increasing visibility into how automation tools are functioning. The goals include "controls around data science" Immuta CEO Matthew Carroll said in an interview, along with helping enterprises get a handle on what he called "analytics ethics."

The Trump administration's privacy, competition and consumer protection cops plan to embark on a cross-country listening tour to gauge how academics and average Web users believe the U.S. government should address digital-age challenges, from the rise of artificial intelligence to the data-collection mishaps that have plagued companies like Facebook. The effort announced Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission and its new chairman, Joe Simons, includes 15 or more public sessions in a series of cities that have yet to be announced. The hearings are expected to touch on a wide array of topics like the agency's "remedial authority" to address privacy and security abuses, the potential risks posed by big data, and the commission's tools to enforce antitrust laws as media, tech and telecom companies gobble each other up or seek to enter new lines of business. The public outreach will begin in September and continue into January 2019, the agency said. It could presage tougher scrutiny of Silicon Valley in response to complaints that the FTC has been too soft on tech giants and the ways they collect, swap and manipulate personal information about billions of Americans.

So much of our day-to-day lives has been given over to technology. From how we bank to how we shop, from how we interact with friends and colleagues to how we consume media. As you would imagine the advancements just keep on coming too, and they are having a profound impact on the legal world as well as industry. Artificial intelligence is now being deployed by lawyers across the globe to support the way they provide services to clients. Nowhere else is this marriage of legal expertise and emerging tech more obvious than in the way non-disclosure agreements can now be created using Robot Lawyer LISA.

A robot servant that can be controlled using the power of thought has been developed by MIT engineers. The machine, named Baxter, reads human brainwaves in real-time so that it knows when a human is unhappy with its actions. If a human think a mistake has been made, Baxter takes notice - and corrects himself. Baxter's owner can then make subtle hand gestures to direct the machine into performing a different task. Scientists say the technology is designed to make robots acts like an extension of a person's will, without any training.

Warning note: While there won't be any NSFW photos in this post, there will be some photos of ladies in light clothing (e.g. Intel released Movidius Neural Compute Stick allowing low power image recognition at the edge earlier this year, and we've seen it work just fine with Raspberry Pi 3 board delivering three times the performance against an inference solution leveraging VideoCore IV GPU. Christian Haschek owns a photo hosting site (PictShare) which happens to run open source code with the same name, and allows user to upload images anonymously. However, he soon found out that at least one user uploaded some child pornography. He contacted the authorities, but then wondered whether there may be others?