Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. A'very mean squirrel' is going nuts in this California town. Experts say it's rare for squirrels to attack people, and the most likely reason has to do with humans hand feeding or hand raising the animals. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here .

This article deals with the description and recognition of fiber bundles, in particular nerves, in medical images, based on the anatomical description of the fiber trajectories. To this end, we propose a logical formalization of this anatomical knowledge. The intrinsically imprecise description of nerves, as found in anatomical textbooks, leads us to propose fuzzy semantics combined with first-order logic. We define a language representing spatial entities, relations between these entities and quantifiers. A formula in this language is then a formalization of the natural language description. The semantics are given by fuzzy representations in a concrete domain and satisfaction degrees of relations. Based on this formalization, a spatial reasoning algorithm is proposed for segmentation and recognition of nerves from anatomical and diffusion magnetic resonance images, which is illustrated on pelvic nerves in pediatric imaging, enabling surgeons to plan surgery.

Gert-Jan Oskam, paralyzed for 12 years, is able to walk again thanks to the brain-spine "digital bridge" interface developed at France's Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). For the first time ever, a human has successfully received an implanted device to enable movement of the arms, hands and fingers after a paralyzing spinal cord injury. Onward Medical NV, a medical technology company based in the Netherlands, announced on Wednesday the surgical implant of its ARC-IM Stimulator, which is designed to restore function to the upper extremities of paralyzed patients. The patient, a 46-year-old man, suffered a spinal cord injury nearly two years ago, which left his left side almost fully paralyzed, doctors told Fox News Digital. The ARC-IM implantation took place on Aug. 14 at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV) in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Michel Roccati stands up and walks in Lausanne. The images made headlines around the world in late 2018. David Mzee, who had been left paralyzed by a partial spinal cord injury suffered in a sports accident, got up from his wheelchair and began to walk with the help of a walker. This was the first proof that Courtine and Bloch's system – which uses electrical stimulation to reactivate spinal neurons – could work effectively in patients. Fast forward three years, and a new milestone has just been reached.

The proliferation of artificial intelligence technology will have a bigger impact on the global economy and society than the internet, according to outgoing Cisco Australia chief technology officer Kevin Bloch. Australia's place at the table in the development of these new artificial intelligence technologies and systems that will underpin all sectors of the economy in decades to come is far from certain. Even Australia's largest companies had not yet come to grips with the importance of the shift toward AI tech and with few exceptions were not directing adequate resources into R&D. Mr Bloch will leave Cisco on Friday after 21 years at the company, including the last 12 years as its chief technology officer. It is only a little ironic that at the height of a global pandemic and all the economic uncertainty it has wrought, Mr Bloch says the scale of the opportunities in the tech sector are such that the time is right for a move.

Business use of AI grew 270% over the past four years, according to Gartner, while Deloitte says 62% of respondents to its corporate October 2018 report deployed some form of AI. That's up 53% from a year ago, but what we've learned is that adoption doesn't equal success, and success is an evolving model in this phase of our digital revolution. Unfortunately, roughly 25% of companies have seen half of their AI projects fail. Failure, in heavily technical deployments, like AI projects, is incredibly expensive when data scientist and other team time, technical cost of computation, and resources wasted is accounted for. Statistics like these have generated tremendous buzz around the end results: success or failure, but we've reached a pivot point where we must widen our lens and shift our attention.

If a chatbot falls alone in a forest, does it make a sound? Given that basically no one uses chatbots, does it even matter? Chatbots were all the rage with the media but never caught on with developers or the consumers they serve. As Digit's Ethan Bloch has eulogized, "I'm not even sure if we can say'chatbots are dead,' because I don't even know if they were ever alive." While Bloch is right to say that "No one can point to a chatbot that'all your friends were using'" as "Such a thing simply never existed," once upon a time many pundits pointed to chatbots as the future of commerce, social, and just about everything else.

The UK games market broke the £5bn sales mark for the first-time last year as Nintendo's new hybrid Switch console boomed and virtual reality headsets flew off the shelves. Gaming fans forked out £5.11bn on consoles, games, hardware such as headsets and attending events – a 12.4% year-on-year rise – as the sector defied a wider downturn in consumer spending. Trade body Ukie said that there has been a "renaissance" in games consoles as Nintendo's hybrid home console-meets-handheld device proved as popular in the UK as it has globally. Console sales, including the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, grew 30% to £659m, reversing a sales decline since 2014. "It is clear that the console gaming market is now enjoying a renaissance," said Dorian Bloch, director, entertainment at GfK. "Nintendo's Switch has enjoyed the best [sales] start for a Nintendo home console since the mighty Wii back in 2006."

Ethan Bloch was in junior high school in Baltimore during the dot-com boom. For his bar mitzvah -- the ceremony that welcomes 13-year-old Jewish boys into adulthood -- Bloch received $7,000 in cash. It was 1998 and, like so many amateur traders at the time, he plunged his wealth into the stock market, mostly software and telecommunication names like Lucent and Nortel. He quickly tripled his money. By age 15, it was all gone.

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, young directors who go by the joint film credit Daniels, are known for reality-warped miniatures--short films, music videos, commercials--that are eerie yet playful in mood. In their work, people jump into other people's bodies, Teddy bears dance to hard-core dubstep, rednecks shoot clothes from rifles onto fleeing nudists. Last year, their first feature-length project, "Swiss Army Man"--starring Daniel Radcliffe, who plays a flatulent talking corpse that befriends a castaway--premièred at Sundance, and left some viewers wondering if it was the strangest thing ever to be screened at the festival. The Times, deciding that the film was impossible to categorize, called it "weird and wonderful, disgusting and demented." Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that when the Daniels were notified by their production company, several years ago, that an Israeli indie pop star living in New York wanted to hire them to experiment with technology that could alter fundamental assumptions of moviemaking, they took the call. The musician was Yoni Bloch, arguably the first Internet sensation on Israel's music scene--a wispy, bespectacled songwriter from the Negev whose wry, angst-laden music went viral in the early aughts, leading to sold-out venues and a record deal. After breaking up with his girlfriend, in 2007, Bloch had hoped to win her back by thinking big. He made a melancholy concept album about their relationship, along with a companion film in the mode of "The Wall"--only to fall in love with the actress who played his ex. He had also thought up a more ambitious idea: an interactive song that listeners could shape as it played. But by the time he got around to writing it his hurt feelings had given way to more indeterminate sentiments, and the idea grew to become an interactive music video. The result, "I Can't Be Sad Anymore," which he and his band released online in 2010, opens with Bloch at a party in a Tel Aviv apartment. Standing on a balcony, he puts on headphones, then wanders among his friends, singing about his readiness to escape melancholy. He passes the headphones to others; whoever wears them sings, too. Viewers decide, by clicking on onscreen prompts, how the headphones are passed--altering, in real time, the song's vocals, orchestration, and emotional tone, while also following different micro-dramas. If you choose the drunk, the camera follows her as she races into the bathroom, to Bloch's words "I want to drink less / but be more drunk." Choose her friend instead, and the video leads to sports fans downing shots, with the lyrics "I want to work less / but for a greater cause."