To the editor: I empathize with Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck and his officers, who are reluctant to quickly release information and videos taken of police shootings. As imperfect human beings, none of us appreciates being exposed to intense public scrutiny. On the other hand, L.A.'s finest should learn from examples set by departments in cities like Las Vegas, where officers quickly post information about shootings online. First, bad things grow in the dark, and you can't set a behavioral standard without oversight. Opening up will create more support for genuine peace officers, who will then be reassured that the public has their back.

Designed to help understand the fundamentals of DS & Algorithms really well. A must have for programming interviews.

The brain is an electric organ, and its 86 billion neurons communicate via pulses of electricity. When a voltage change causes one neuron to "fire," it releases chemicals that trigger voltage changes in connected neurons. The brain's every operation, from automatic functions like maintaining a heartbeat to cognitive processes such as making sense of these words you are reading, can be understood as a flickering pattern of electrical activity, with neurons firing along specific pathways. A researcher at Arizona State University (my alma mater) has discovered how to control robots using the human brain. A controller wears a skullcap outfitted with 128 electrodes wired to a computer.

On the heels of Samsung's acquisition of Viv just a week ago, a new AI assistant has risen into the spotlight and is jockeying to fill the shoes of its now well-known rival. Ozlo, the Greylock- and Jerry Yang-backed independent entrant to the personal assistant race, is launching today on iOS and the web in an effort to give stalwarts like Siri, Alexa and Cortana a run for their money. The new personal assistant promises early adopters a good memory, a brain full of knowledge, and an independent soul -- everything you could hope for in your new binary friend. When I sat down with Charles Jolley, CEO of Ozlo and previous head of platform for Facebook on Android, the two of us immediately had a nice laugh about the repetitive female names for assistants in the marketplace right now -- Ozlo, by name alone, is already something different. That said, a name is one thing; the more important question is whether Ozlo is useful and doesn't make its users want to throw their phone against a wall after use.

Pedometers were the first sports wearable and now seem almost quaint. Today's wearables have grown in capabilities and formats, providing complex data on your overall fitness and easily integrates into your lifestyle. Smart watches, fit bits, simple pedometers and high-tech clothing are part of the multi-billion-dollar business that is the smart sports and fitness wearable industry. These products generated 3.5 billion in revenues in 2014 and sales are anticipated to reach 14.9 billion by 2021. Fitness trackers are the most broadly used sports wearables and provide information about the number of steps taken, calories burned, and stairs climbed although some also include heart rate and sleep pattern monitoring, and GPS tracking.

Researchers from Reconfigurable Robotics Lab at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne have created a soft and flexible robot. Made of elastomers--synthetic polymers with elastic properties--like silicon and rubber, the soft robots are powered by muscle-like actuators. Since the soft robots are cheap to produce and can be manufactured on a large scale, they can be applied on many levels. In Nature's journal Scientific Reports, the scientists reveal potential applications of the soft robots, which range from biomimetic systems and home care to handling fragile objects and patient rehabilitation. "Our robot designs focus largely on safety," said Jamie Paik, the director of the RRL, in a statement.

A new kind of computer, devised by researchers at Google DeepMind in the U.K., could broaden the abilities of today's best AI systems by giving them an important new feature--a kind of working memory. The researchers show that the computer, which consists of a large neural network connected to a unique form of memory, can perform relatively complex tasks by figuring out for itself what information to hold in its memory. The tasks include figuring out the best way to get from one station to another on London's spaghetti-like Underground transit network, after exploring diagrams of other types of networks and learning about the most salient features. The Google DeepMind researchers call their system a differentiable neural computer. It is differentiable in the sense that its behavior--including what to store in memory--can be learned using the mathematical process, called backpropagation, that underlies the working of neural networks.

"I wish I could touch you," Theodore says, laying in bed. Until she speaks up, tentatively. "How would you touch me?" It's a famously poignant scene from the movie Her, as the character Theodore is about to make vocal love to an artificial intelligence living in his ear. But according to half a dozen experts I interviewed, ranging from industrial designer Gadi Amit to the usability guru Don Norman, in-ear assistants aren't science fiction. In fact, a notable pile of discreet, wireless earbuds enabling just this idea are coming to market now. Sony recently released its first in-ear assistant, the Xperia Ear. Intel showed off a similar proof-of-concept last year.

Shootings are an epidemic in the US, but federal funding for research into gun violence has been in a deep freeze since 1996, thanks in part to the NRA-backed Dickey Amendment, which prevents the Center for Disease Control from pursuing research "to advocate or promote gun control." Basically, humans can't get money to research the problem of gun violence in the US. To get around this, some scientists want machines to do the job. On September 25, University of Pennsylvania computer scientists Ellie Pavlick and Chris Callison-Burch unveiled a new, human-annotated database of gun violence incidents in the US at the Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange Conference in New York. The database was created by workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform, and carefully highlights information from thousands of news articles over the course of several years, Pavlick told me in an interview.

IMAGE: Brown researchers have trained a computer algorithm to spot in laboratory samples a cellular transition associated with more aggressive cancers. Brown University researchers have developed a new image analysis technique to distinguish two key cancer cell types associated with tumor progression. The approach could help in pre-clinical screening of cancer drugs and shed light on a cellular metamorphosis that is associated with more malignant and drug-resistant cancers. The epithelial-mesenchymal transition, or EMT, is a process by which more docile epithelial cells transform into more aggressive mesenchymal cells. Tumors with higher numbers of mesenchymal cells are often more malignant and more resistant to drug therapies.