On Dec. 13, 2018, Richard Branson stood in the Mojave Desert, eyes fixed skyward as he witnessed the culmination of a lifelong dream: His space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, had sent an aircraft into suborbital space. For Branson, the launch was not merely proof of concept for his latest business venture. It signaled that humanity was on the edge of a fundamental breakthrough. "Today we have shown that Virgin Galactic can open space to the world," he declared. Four days later, the prominent philosopher Todd May published a short article in the Stone, a philosophy series run through the New York Times opinion section. "Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?" asked readers to consider the possibility that the demise of humanity might be morally desirable.

Video game photography is arguably enjoying a golden age. In recent years, the photo mode has exploded into blockbuster titles such as Spider-Man, offering intricate tools to pause the action, compose a shot, and tweak the finished result. You'll find the results peppered throughout social media feeds thanks to the Share button found on modern controllers. Often these depict "cool" moments, sometimes even absurd glitches, but mostly such photos, like those of popular snapper and EA DICE screenshot artist Petri Levälaht, are concerned with the beauty of big-budget video games. With each like, retweet, and share, we collectively revel in the technical artistry of worlds now so visually detailed they appear to rival our own, enthralled by the sheer density and arrangement of their pixels.

If you're still wondering about the role that AI will play as recruiting technology evolves, there are about 40 million new reasons to believe it will continue to heavily influence the future. Paradox, a conversational AI platform, announced yesterday that it received $40 million in new funding. The company, whose clients include McDonald's, CVS, Unilever, and other large organizations, plans to "leverage the funding to expedite its vision of a future where AI is a liberating force to help people do their best work," according to the company's press release. As Paradox's founder and CEO Aaron Matos explains, "No one goes into recruiting or HR because they like screening resumes, scheduling interviews, or managing paperwork." Hence, the company is looking to advance efforts around using its AI assistant, Olivia, to relieve common administrative burdens.

Mr. Singh was one of 30 IT executives who responded via email to CIO Journal's annual end-of-year questionnaire about their thoughts on emerging technologies and other issues. One important technology that is adding business value but hasn't generated much buzz is serverless computing, said Nigel Faulkner, head of technology at financial-services company T. Rowe Price Group Inc. In this emerging method of software development, physical and virtual servers traditionally used to run certain applications become invisible to the developers building apps because the servers are owned and managed by a cloud provider. This frees developers from having to manage servers and enables them to focus on writing code. Serverless computing can modernize applications while reducing the costs necessary to run and support them, Mr. Faulkner said.

How can we train a statistical mixture model on a massive data set? In this work we show how to construct coresets for mixtures of Gaussians. A coreset is a weighted subset of the data, which guarantees that models fitting the coreset also provide a good fit for the original data set. We show that, perhaps surprisingly, Gaussian mixtures admit coresets of size polynomial in dimension and the number of mixture components, while being independent of the data set size. Hence, one can harness computationally intensive algorithms to compute a good approximation on a significantly smaller data set. More importantly, such coresets can be efficiently constructed both in distributed and streaming settings and do not impose restrictions on the data generating process. Our results rely on a novel reduction of statistical estimation to problems in computational geometry and new combinatorial complexity results for mixtures of Gaussians. Empirical evaluation on several real-world datasets suggests that our coreset-based approach enables significant reduction in training-time with negligible approximation error.

It's easy to imagine a future in which your virtual personal assistant is everywhere you are. Before long, Alexa, Siri, Google, and others like them will be woven into the fabric of your home, ready to fulfill your every need whim. Forgot to close the garage door? Want to order your post-marathon double cheeseburger and fries before even crossing the finish line? This isn't as outlandish as it might sound.

Facebook will "cure, prevent, or manage all diseases in our children's lifetime." A new MIT computer responds to human emotions with almost 90% accuracy. NASA and Made in Space are going to turn asteroids into spaceships." Facebook will "cure, prevent, or manage all diseases in our children's lifetime." A new MIT computer responds to human emotions with almost 90% accuracy. NASA and Made in Space are going to turn asteroids into spaceships."