If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. A few years ago, I found myself investigating the thorny problem of Shakespearean authorship. I wanted to know if the anonymous Renaissance play Arden of Faversham (1590) was written partly or entirely by William Shakespeare. Perhaps, I thought, an AI could look over a field of plays divided into just two categories--Shakespeare on one side of the fence and everyone else on the other--and place Arden of Faversham decisively on the correct side.

Advances in 3D imaging have allowed vision users to overcome some challenging inspection tasks. In the machine vision marketplace, 3D imaging continues to mature, tackling applications 2D imaging cannot. "In a manufacturing setting, the fusion of 2D with 3D is necessary to measure how well components go together into an assembly and assess the product for final fit, finish, and packaging," says Terry Arden, CEO of LMI Technologies. According to David Dechow, Principal Vision Systems Architect at Integro Technologies, a systems integrator specializing in machine vision technologies with broad experience in helping companies implement 3D and 2D imaging for industrial automation, accuracy has improved as well. And with inspection tasks in 3D space, which may include measurement or reconstruction, precision is even more essential than with most tasks in robotic guidance or bin picking.

The increasing demand for on-device deep learning services calls for a highly efficient manner to deploy deep neural networks (DNNs) on mobile devices with limited capacity. The cloud-based solution is a promising approach to enabling deep learning applications on mobile devices where the large portions of a DNN are offloaded to the cloud. However, revealing data to the cloud leads to potential privacy risk. To benefit from the cloud data center without the privacy risk, we design, evaluate, and implement a cloud-based framework ARDEN which partitions the DNN across mobile devices and cloud data centers. A simple data transformation is performed on the mobile device, while the resource-hungry training and the complex inference rely on the cloud data center. To protect the sensitive information, a lightweight privacy-preserving mechanism consisting of arbitrary data nullification and random noise addition is introduced, which provides strong privacy guarantee. A rigorous privacy budget analysis is given. Nonetheless, the private perturbation to the original data inevitably has a negative impact on the performance of further inference on the cloud side. To mitigate this influence, we propose a noisy training method to enhance the cloud-side network robustness to perturbed data. Through the sophisticated design, ARDEN can not only preserve privacy but also improve the inference performance. To validate the proposed ARDEN, a series of experiments based on three image datasets and a real mobile application are conducted. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ARDEN. Finally, we implement ARDEN on a demo system to verify its practicality.

Penrose Studios set a new standard for VR storytelling last year with Arden's Wake, a stunning short that introduced us to Meena, a young girl living in a post-apocalyptic, waterlogged world. But that was just the prologue. At the Tribeca Film Festival, the studio is back with the next chapter, Tide's Fall. And it's bringing some serious star power: Alicia Vikander (Tomb Raider) has taken on the voice of Meena, and she's also serving as an executive producer. Just like in Ex Machina, Vikander instantly makes the character someone you can't help but connect with.

What makes some people smarter than others? A genetic analysis of families in Scotland, UK, hints that brainer people have fewer DNA mutations that impair intelligence and general health, rather than having more genetic variants that make them smarter. "This is one of the most exciting studies on the genetics of intelligence I've seen for a while," says Steve Stewart-Williams of the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, who was not involved in the work. One implication is that using gene editing to fix the hundreds of mutations that slightly damage people's health would make them smarter as well as healthier. "I think this strengthens the moral case for pursuing genome editing technologies," says ethicist Christopher Gyngell of the University of Oxford.

If you're a dog lover, you may have heard of Chaser, the border collie who has been called a "genius" and the "smartest dog in the world." Retired psychology professor John Pilley, Chaser's owner and co-author of a recent book about her, says he was able to teach her 1,000 words, the largest "vocabulary" of any non-human animal on record. Dog lovers and handlers alike tend to agree that some canines are quicker to catch-on, learn new tricks, and solve problems than other dogs. But how do we know that one dog is really smarter than another--possessing greater general intelligence--and not just more talented at specific tasks, such as learning words, or more easily trained? Despite growing interest in dog cognition over the past 20 years, it wasn't until very recently that scientists tried to answer this particular question empirically.