"We will cooperate with each other and exercise leadership to support the early commercialization of automated and connected vehicle technologies," a declaration adopted at a meeting in the resort town of Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, said. Ministers and representatives from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States plus the European Union also pledged in the declaration to set up a group to work on resolving problems pertaining to introducing self-driving cars. "We obtained a common understanding to make efforts in the same direction to create regulation frameworks that (will) tend to vary depending on region," transport minister Keiichi Ishii told a news conference after the meeting. The envisioned international safety regulations would enable automakers to sell the same car models worldwide, resulting in lower sales prices due to mass production, experts say. The declaration noted that the introduction of self-driving cars is expected to have such benefits as reducing traffic accidents, improving efficiencies including logistics and alleviating burdens on drivers.

If you visit the data science competitions website Kaggle, the example problem that they have for new starters is predicting the survivors and non-survivors from the Titanic from a sampled training dataset. This training dataset contains various attributes of the passengers, like the passenger's ticket class, the boarding gate, number of siblings, age, gender, etc. One can build a model using whatever tool you prefer and test your algorithm on a sample and see how you faired against the best of the best. Don't be disillusioned if your model only comes out at 76% accuracy against the winner's 100%. One can just Google the actual names and see who lived and who did not.

Today's paper is by Gao Huang, Yu Sun, et al. It introduces a new way to perturb networks during training in order to improve their performance. Before I continue, let me first state that this paper is a real pleasure to read; it is concise and extremely well written. It gives an excellent overview of the motivating problems, previous solutions, and Huang and Sun's new approach. I highly recommended giving it a read!

A little while ago, you might have read about batch normalization being the next coolest thing since ReLu's. Things have since moved on, but it's worth mentioning because it has been adopted in most networks today. The original paper is pretty dense, and it's all goodies inside of there. So, this blog post is devoted to explaining the more confusing portions of batch normalization. What follows are a few concepts that you may find interesting or may not have fully understood when reading over Ioffe and Szegedy's paper.

HYDERABAD: Apple quietly acquired a little-known Hyderabad-based startup a few months ago for an undisclosed amount and while little is known about what Tuplejump does, the word is that this is part of the Cupertino-based giant's exploration into artificial intelligence. Known in the trade as an acqui-hire, nearly all of Tuplejump's 16 employees are in the process of becoming Apple staffers. A back-of-the-envelope calculation by an expert put the valuation at about 20 million (Rs 133 crore). "When there is a talent hire, the cost of hiring is usually calculated based on the last few years' salary," the expert said. "So, for a 16-member team, I think it would probably come up to around 4 million a year -- making this deal for something around 20 million (including for possible IP evaluation)."

Apple Inc. is pressing ahead with the development of an Echo-like smart-home device based on the Siri voice assistant, according to people familiar with the matter. Started more than two years ago, the project has exited the research and development lab and is now in prototype testing, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing unannounced Apple projects. Like Amazon Inc.'s Echo, the device is designed to control appliances, locks, lights and curtains via voice activation, the people said. Apple hasn't finalized plans for the device and could still scrap the project. If a product reaches the market, it would be Apple's most significant piece of new hardware since the company announced the Apple Watch in 2014.

Apple has bought Tuplejump, a machine learning technology company with operations in both India and the United States, TechCrunch reports. Apple continues to buy companies with machine learning expertise. The reason the company had its eyes on Tuplejump was for its "FiloDB" project, according to the report. The lead engineer on FiloDB has been working at Apple since this May, according to his LinkedIn. The purchase price is unknown, although it's almost certainly lower than Apple's last machine learning purchase, Turi, which was bought for around 200 million earlier this year.

They are wise-cracking companions, able to communicate in more than six million languages. Others are bent on enslaving or destroying humanity, deeming themselves better, more rational caretakers of the Earth in light of our irrational behaviors. Pilot or garbage man, soldier or slave, hero or villain--robots have played every role imaginable in popular science fiction for nearly a century. In the 21st century, real-life robots inspired by their fictional counterparts are beginning to take starring roles in everyday life. Several companies, Google among them, are testing autonomous cars (unfortunately, there is no indication that they will be able to travel into the past or future anytime soon).

Photo: Pixabay Rise of Artificial Intelligence Ushers Era of Robot Criminals As scientists continue to develop more and more advanced computer systems and the probability of creating a true artificial intelligence construct continues to increase, news headlines warning about the prospects of killer AIs threatening mankind are becoming increasingly widespread. Access to the historical limit order book for all global liquid securities at L3 resolution along with associated metadata. This AMI contains the interface to this AWS hosted multi-petabyte dataset, along with the software framework required to perform analysis on it. This framework integrates use of big-data tools and applies a world-leading machine learning library designed at Cambridge and MIT universities.

DUBAI // A 125cm-robot rescuer is the latest addition to Dubai Municipality's safety system for the emirate's beaches. The robot, which is shaped like a boat and manoeuvred by remote control, can reach a speed of 35kph or approximately 12 times the speed of a human. The goal behind launching this type of technology was to keep beachgoers safe, said Alya Al Harmoudi, director of the Environment Department at Dubai Municipality. "The move is also in response to the Dubai government directives to keep up with the latest technologies and innovations," she said, adding: "It was to ensure that all the necessary requirements and precautions are in place to enhance the rescue operations on the public beaches of Dubai." The device is fitted with an electric pump to facilitate movement and speed and travel up to a distance of 130km.