Visual localization is a fundamental machine learning problem. Absolute Pose Regression (APR) trains a scene-dependent model to efficiently map an input image to the camera pose in a pre-defined scene. However, many applications have continually changing environments, where inference data at novel poses or scene conditions (weather, geometry) appear after deployment. Training APR on a fixed dataset leads to overfitting, making it fail catastrophically on challenging novel data. This work proposes Continual Domain Expansion (ConDo), which continually collects unlabeled inference data to update the deployed APR. Instead of applying standard unsupervised domain adaptation methods which are ineffective for APR, ConDo effectively learns from unlabeled data by distilling knowledge from scene-agnostic localization methods. By sampling data uniformly from historical and newly collected data, ConDo can effectively expand the generalization domain of APR. Large-scale benchmarks with various scene types are constructed to evaluate models under practical (long-term) data changes. ConDo consistently and significantly outperforms baselines across architectures, scene types, and data changes. On challenging scenes (Fig.1), it reduces the localization error by >7x (14.8m vs 1.7m). Analysis shows the robustness of ConDo against compute budgets, replay buffer sizes and teacher prediction noise. Comparing to model re-training, ConDo achieves similar performance up to 25x faster.

Seekr Technologies CEO Pat Condo spoke with Fox News Digital about a partnership with Bear Grylls to encourage digital media literacy among young people. AI company Seekr and survivalist Bear Grylls are aiming to develop the "survival skill" of digital media literacy through their latest educational platform Mission Seekr. The company originally announced the project in June as an effort to arm the next generation "with critical media literacy tools and the confidence to safely navigate the online landscape." "At Seekr, we're committed to creating a more informed society and empowering people to make smart and educated decisions about the content they consume," Pat Condo, CEO of Seekr Technologies said in a statement. "Together with Bear Grylls, we're embarking on a groundbreaking adventure to develop critical media literacy skills and bring trust to the online experience."

Consumers have been skittish about the notion of artificial intelligence (AI) invading their homes: What if robots take over the world? But now those same consumers are starting to embrace the new technology in their personal lives and businesses. This in turn has raised the confidence of companies interested in the technology -- so much so that companies have tripled their AI investment since 2013, according to a survey by McKinsey & Company. AI, in fact, has the potential to completely change the way companies do business; and because of technological developments, more companies, in 2019, will be able to access and implement this life-changing technology. Already, companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google are leading the way.

New York City's historical buildings, businesses and sensibilities - some of them decades old - have been under siege for the past few years. One of the latest victims is the historic Waldorf Astoria hotel, which is closing in less than a week for renovations, possibly not to reopen for three years. Reportedly, 300-500 hotel rooms will remain, but the vast majority of the property will be converted to luxury condos. Wouldn't it be better to onboard the new condo "workload," without stripping away so much of the Waldorf's legacy hotel functionality? There's a data and analytics angle here, I promise.

Clancy declined to say how much Zuckerberg may have paid Crestron for the services, though he said it was probably not a normal rate, since Facebook is a big Crestron customer and they "helped him out." Zuckerberg's engineering did add some powerful new features that Clancy said he expects will be in high demand. For one, Zuckerberg's artificial intelligence went beyond fixed phrases or hitting buttons, since it has the ability to learn. Plus, Facebook's facial recongition technology and ability to text with Facebook Messenger are unique, Clancy said, not to mention the voice by Morgan Freeman. Unlike an off-the-shelf consumer product like Google Home or Apple HomeKit, Crestron manufactures all the devices in its ecosystem and has government-facility level cybersecurity.

The imminent arrival of the self-driving car will change how people move around city streets, but they could do so much more. The Tridika is a conceptual driverless electric vehicle I created to change how we use cars in our ever-growing cities, where space is expensive and limited. Inspired by Thyssenkrupp's Willy Wonka-esque Multi elevator, the Tridika works like a self-driving car you can literally park next to your apartment and use as an additional room. Instead of wheels, it works like a maglev train: magnets lift and propel the vehicle. It pulls its electricity from the tracks, and takes you wherever you command.