Google Crowdsource lets you help the company with language translation, handwriting recognition and map translation accuracy. Google has a formidable artificial intelligence team working on everything from photo recognition to email spam filtering. The online giant on Monday released a new Android app called Crowdsource that lets you contribute your own suggestions to language translation, handwriting recognition and street sign transcription. "Each microtask takes no more than five to 10 seconds, so knock away a few the next time you find yourself with a few moments to kill," Google suggests in the app description. "Every time you use it, you know that you've made the internet a better place for your community."

In image deconvolution problems, the diagonalization of the underlying operators by means of the FFT usually yields very large speedups. When there are incomplete observations (e.g., in the case of unknown boundaries), standard deconvolution techniques normally involve non-diagonalizable operators, resulting in rather slow methods, or, otherwise, use inexact convolution models, resulting in the occurrence of artifacts in the enhanced images. In this paper, we propose a new deconvolution framework for images with incomplete observations that allows us to work with diagonalized convolution operators, and therefore is very fast. We iteratively alternate the estimation of the unknown pixels and of the deconvolved image, using, e.g., an FFT-based deconvolution method. This framework is an efficient, high-quality alternative to existing methods of dealing with the image boundaries, such as edge tapering. It can be used with any fast deconvolution method. We give an example in which a state-of-the-art method that assumes periodic boundary conditions is extended, through the use of this framework, to unknown boundary conditions. Furthermore, we propose a specific implementation of this framework, based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). We provide a proof of convergence for the resulting algorithm, which can be seen as a "partial" ADMM, in which not all variables are dualized. We report experimental comparisons with other primal-dual methods, where the proposed one performed at the level of the state of the art. Four different kinds of applications were tested in the experiments: deconvolution, deconvolution with inpainting, superresolution, and demosaicing, all with unknown boundaries.

For anyone who's heard the "Oompa Loompa" song or Frankenstein pronounced as "Fronkensteen," news of actor Gene Wilder's death on Monday cuts deeply. Wilder died from complications of Alzheimer's disease at age 83, according to his nephew Jordan Walker-Pearlman. Wilder passed away in his hometown of Stamford, Connecticut, late Sunday, reported the Associated Press. He had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer that originates in the lymphatic system, in 1989. Wilder was born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee and began studying acting at age 12.

Did you read Farhad Manjoo's article in yesterday's "New York Times"? If you get your package via drone, and the costs drop as distribution becomes more efficient, not only do all those delivery people lose their gigs, and the people in the warehouse, which runs on robots, too, but so do the people in physical retail, which can no longer compete. Sounds good, very efficient, BUT WHERE IS EVERYBODY SUPPOSED TO WORK! The good news is you can have instant access to products at a cheap price. Been to a mall recently?

Microsoft Pix review: iOS photography app uses artificial intelligence to rival Apple's Camera'Project AI': HDFC in plans to deploy robots to greet customers Dumna tarmac scare: SpiceJet bus driver's alarm sent flyers scurrying

When you shoot with the iPhone's built-in Camera app, there are various ways to tweak focus and exposure, both before and after you hit the shutter. You might first tap and hold or swipe to adjust and lock focus and exposure. After the shot, you have options for adjusting saturation, contrast, sharpness, and more. Microsoft Pix (free on the iTunes Store), a photo and video shooting and editing app for iOS, doesn't want you to work that hard. It offers an effortless point-and-shoot alternative to the iPhone Camera app with a promise of superior results.

Seated against a deep red backdrop, gazing intently at hand-held mirrors, two eunuchs in sparkling saris inspect their appearance before Raksha Bandhan celebrations in the red light district of Mumbai. The photograph from the Reuters news agency is an arresting contemporary scene, but a new Tate Britain project is aiming to inspire deeper reflections with images from its own collection of paintings. Launching on Friday, Recognition is the winner of 2016's IK prize – an annual award, this year supported by Microsoft, for a project that embraces digital technology to explore and showcase Tate's collection of British art. This year, the challenge was to do it with artificial intelligence. The team behind the winning project, from the Italy-based communication research centre Fabrica, say their inspiration came from an intriguing conundrum: how can you apply rational thinking to a subject like art? Recognition matches stunning photographs from the 24/7 news cycle with centuries-old artworks, and presents them online.

Machines and robots are increasingly shoving humans aside in the workplace. They build, cook and clean for us and increasingly work for us - so much so that Oxford University predicts almost half of US jobs will be done by machines and robots within the next 20 years. And then there is the next wave of technology: smarter artificial intelligence and augmented reality. It is a future that is leaving many people concerned and confused, while others see endless potential. What opportunities can artificial intelligence provide?

HBO has released a new trailer for Westworld, its much anticipated android-apocalyptic-western drama series. With voiceover from the elegantly chilling Anthony Hopkins, the clip indicates that Westworld will tackle fraught, recurring questions surrounding artificial intelligence and what it means to be human. Based on Michael Crichton's 1973 thriller, the series imagines a future in which robots are enslaved by human programmers and situated in a western theme park. Human visitors can do with the androids as they please. "You and everyone you know were built to gratify the desires of people who pay to visit your world," lead programmer Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) admonishes Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood).

We've had more than 150 speakers in the past three seasons. Two of them made the news this summer: Danny Bickson (E9 Season 1) one of the co-founders of Graphlab then Dato then Turi and Arjun Bansal from Nervana systems (E12 Season 3). Turi just got acquired by Apple for 300M, and Nervana got acquired for 350M by Intel. In a different direction, at the last meetup, Raymond Francis explained to us what got picked by the LA Times a month later, Curiosity now uses Machine Learning on Mars. This news is exciting on two levels: First, robots can now explore the universe better and second, it definitely brings some perspective when we talk about the dichotomy between exploration and exploitation in our discussions.