If Amazon has its way, cities around the US will have vertical drone centers shaped like giant beehives in the middle of downtown districts, allowing the online retailer to coordinate speedy deliveries by unmanned aircrafts. The company has filed for a patent for "multi-level fulfillment centers" that would accommodate the landing and takeoff of drones in dense urban settings, the latest example of Amazon's futuristic vision of reshaping the way people receive packages. The application filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office, which was written in 2015 and published last week, included a number of drawings of drones flying in and out of tall cylinder-shaped buildings that Amazon wants to locate in central metropolitan areas. The centers would allow Amazon to shift away from the traditional model of large single-story warehouses that temporarily store packages before they are shipped to customers. Those buildings are typically located on the outskirts of urban areas and are not convenient for deliveries into cities where populations continue to swell, the company noted.

Microsoft has filed a new patent designed to discourage potential laptop thieves. The document describes functionality that would bring the devices in line with smartphones, which users can remotely disable and wipe, in order to prevent thieves from re-selling them. Microsoft's patent shows off a similar system for laptops, which remain a popular target for criminals. Users would be able to remotely disable a stolen laptop in much the same way, which should lead to a reduction in incidents of laptop theft. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

New Delhi: In order to become a frontrunner in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), India should take the lead in establishing a legal infrastructure on its application, a study said here on Thursday. According to a recent Assocham-PwC joint study titled "Leveraging artificial intelligence and robotics for sustainable growth", an early public sector interest could trigger a spurt of activity in the AI field in India, instead of waiting for technology to reach a level where regulatory intervention becomes necessary. The study said a range of applications for AI techniques in large-scale public endeavours like "Make in India", "Skill India" and others could range from crop insurance schemes, tax fraud detection, detecting subsidy leakage and security strategy. "If investments are made in the two initiatives without due cognisance of how Industry 4.0 (the next industrial revolution driven by robotic automation) may evolve with respect to demand for workforce size and skill sets, there is a possibility of ending up with capital-intensive infrastructures and assets that fall short of being optimised for automated operations and a large workforce skilled in areas growing beyond the need for manual intervention only," it added. Information technology (IT), manufacturing, agriculture and forestry are certain sectors that are expected to experience shrinkage of employment demand as robotic systems and machine learning algorithms take up several tasks, the study said.

This approach harnesses the power of targeted online advertising to reach potential Isis recruits, and redirects them towards anti-terrorist videos that can "change their minds about joining". According to the company, this method has proved with potential recruits clicking through at an "unusually high rate" and watched over half a million minutes of video content that debunks terrorist recruiting messages. This promising approach harnesses the power of targeted online advertising to reach potential Isis recruits, and redirects them towards anti-terrorist videos that can change their minds about joining. In previous deployments of this system, potential recruits have clicked through on the ads at an unusually high rate, and watched over half a million minutes of video content that debunks terrorist recruiting messages.

"Man," here, stands for the collective human race. But, why not use the latin word for "Wise woman" or "Wise person?" There was a movement in the tech world a few years ago to use female pronouns more often. Here's another question -- why do we call a list of bad things a "blacklist?" And, why is the opposite a "whitelist?" Why does white represent good and black represent bad?

A California-based startup called Instrumental developed an intelligent AI inspection system to help manufactures identify product defects on the assembly line. The California-based startup, founded by two form Apple engineers have raised over $10 million to make it easier to manufacture electronics and head off complicated problems before they start costing companies thousands of dollars a minute. Their customers, including Fortune 500 companies, have used the system to virtually disassemble 16,000 units and to take over 40,000 measurements, all remotely. Instrumental makes a hardware box that goes on the assembly line and takes a photo of every device that passes through and they recently announced their deep learning software called Detect which highlights units that appear defective or anomalous, giving our customers a significant edge in discovering and resolving product issues. Using TITAN X GPUs and cuDNN with the TensorFlow deep learning framework, they are able to process hundreds of units in seconds and identify the most interesting units to review.

We identify conditional parity as a general notion of non-discrimination in machine learning. In fact, several recently proposed notions of non-discrimination, including a few counterfactual notions, are instances of conditional parity. We show that conditional parity is amenable to statistical analysis by studying randomization as a general mechanism for achieving conditional parity and a kernel-based test of conditional parity.

Self-driving cars are only starting to navigate the nation's streets, but regulators are scrambling to catch up. In the race to deliver cars that can safely operate themselves, proponents are increasingly concerned about a fast-growing thicket of regulations and laws being proposed by states that could come in conflict with each other and threaten to hold up development. "It could be messier, and it could take longer than we want it to," IHS Automotive analyst Stephanie Brinley says. "We will see some state-by-state and some federal fights happening." Some believe the federal government must step in to create a national standard pertaining to testing, crash liability and design requirements.

Physicists have wondered for decades whether infinitely dense points known as singularities can ever exist outside black holes, which would expose the mysteries of quantum gravity for all to see. Singularities--snags in the otherwise smooth fabric of space and time where Albert Einstein's classical gravity theory breaks down and the unknown quantum theory of gravity is needed--seem to always come cloaked in darkness, hiding from view behind the event horizons of black holes. The British physicist and mathematician Sir Roger Penrose conjectured in 1969 that visible or "naked" singularities are actually forbidden from forming in nature, in a kind of cosmic censorship. But why should quantum gravity censor itself? Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) had a problem. Its investigation into corruption at Rolls-Royce was inching towards a conclusion, but four years of digging had produced 30 million documents. These needed to be sorted into "privileged" and "non-privileged", a legal requirement that involves paying junior barristers to do months of repetitive paperwork. "We needed a way that was faster," says Ben Denison, chief technology officer at the SFO. So, in January 2016, he started working with RAVN.