New drone video shows the moment pilot Mark Finkelstein was rescued after making an emergency water landing off the coast of Oak Island Pier in North Carolina. The personal aircraft experienced engine failure, according to Finkelstein. Rescuers, who were already in the area responding to a nearby call, are seen rushing to the small plane and extracting Finkelstein in less than 30 seconds. The rescue footage was released on 27 August after officials from the Federal Aviation Administration finished their investigation.

Just before midnight on New Year's Eve, 25 years ago, Queen Elizabeth II stepped off a private barge to arrive at London's Millennium Dome for its grand opening ceremony. Dressed in a pumpkin-orange coat, she entered the venue with Prince Philip, taking her place alongside Tony and Cherie Blair and 12,000 guests to celebrate the dawn of a new millennium. At the stroke of midnight, Big Ben began to chime and 40 tonnes of fireworks were launched from 16 barges lined along the river. The crowd joined hands, preparing to sing Auld Lang Syne. For a few long moments, the Queen was neglected – she flapped her arms out like a toddler wanting to be lifted up, before Blair and Philip noticed her, took a hand each, and the singing began. A new century was born. One politician who wasn't in attendance at the glitzy celebration was Paddy Tipping, a Labour MP who spent the night in the Cabinet Office.

Most works on modeling the conversation history in Conversational Question Answering (CQA) report a single main result on a common CQA benchmark. While existing models show impressive results on CQA leaderboards, it remains unclear whether they are robust to shifts in setting (sometimes to more realistic ones), training data size (e.g. from large to small sets) and domain. In this work, we design and conduct the first large-scale robustness study of history modeling approaches for CQA. We find that high benchmark scores do not necessarily translate to strong robustness, and that various methods can perform extremely differently under different settings. Equipped with the insights from our study, we design a novel prompt-based history modeling approach, and demonstrate its strong robustness across various settings. Our approach is inspired by existing methods that highlight historic answers in the passage. However, instead of highlighting by modifying the passage token embeddings, we add textual prompts directly in the passage text. Our approach is simple, easy-to-plug into practically any model, and highly effective, thus we recommend it as a starting point for future model developers. We also hope that our study and insights will raise awareness to the importance of robustness-focused evaluation, in addition to obtaining high leaderboard scores, leading to better CQA systems.

Old-fashioned police forensics analysis met hi-tech computer algorithms in a new study of 2,500-year-old pottery sherds, in which Tel Aviv University researchers conclude that literacy was widespread enough for the fledgling People of the Book to have penned parts of the Bible in the 7th century BCE. "The high literacy rate detected within the small Arad stronghold… demonstrates widespread literacy in the late 7th century BCE Judahite military and administration apparatuses, with the ability to compose biblical texts during this period a possible by-product," write the researchers. This is the first study to combine forces between AI algorithms and human forensics know-how, the researchers note. The study, "Forensic document examination and algorithmic handwriting analysis of Judahite biblical period inscriptions reveal significant literacy level," was published September 9 in the prestigious online PLOS journal. Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up The study combines high-resolution imaging methods and complex computer algorithms with trusted police handwriting analysis to prove that the examined 18 texts had no fewer than 12 different authors way back in circa 600 BCE.

The tool is designed to animate similar elements within an image, such as balloons or raindrops, said Nora Willett, a graduate student in Princeton's Department of Computer Science and the lead author of a paper presenting the research. To do so, the user manually selects a subset of the repeating objects, then draws motion lines and specifies the frequency and velocity at which the objects should move. "The main challenge in this system was to design an interface that allows the person and the computer to work together to create a plausible animation," said co-author Adam Finkelstein, a Princeton professor of computer science. "The person provides clues about what aspects of the scene they would like to animate, and the computer removes much of the difficulty and tedium that would be required to create the animation completely by hand." The new tool builds on the existing capabilities of the Autodesk SketchBook Motion animation app.

If 2017 left you breathless, exhausted by unexpected headlines, then brace yourself. The coming year may bring even more turbulent change, according to the CEOs, academics, economists and other bold thinkers we consulted for our annual peek at the year ahead.

At the site of an ancient city on the West Bank, archaeologists are hunting for evidence of the tabernacle that once housed the Ark of the Covenant. Associates for Biblical Research, a consortium of individuals and universities, recently completed four weeks of excavation in Shiloh with the goal of eventually locating the tabernacle. Dr. Scott Stripling, director of excavations at Shiloh and provost at The Bible Seminary in Houston, Texas, told Fox News that the site could offer up vital clues. "We have just begun the process of accumulating evidence but we're confident that the tabernacle rested at Shiloh," he said, adding that that the tabernacle was located at Shiloh for about 350 years. "The tabernacle was set up at Shiloh in 1400 B.C. - Joshua 18:1 mentions it."

Software can now predict when people are most likely to try new things. Scientists analyzed purchasing data from over 280,000 shoppers and found that the more people purchase a product, the more likely they are to stick with it. However, it also found those who have recently switched brands are twice as likely to try a new one. Scientists analyzed purchasing data from over 280,000 shoppers and found that the more people purchase a product, the more likely they are to continue to do so. Researchers at the University of London designed an AI to predict when people are most likely to try new things - such as switching from one product to another.

In most ancient cultures, literacy was rare, reserved for specialized scribes or religious officials. But new research shows that in the ancient kingdom of Judah, literacy may have been widespread, a fact that may reshape the timeline of when and where the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament was written. In a study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers looked at 16 ink inscriptions from a Judean fort in Arad--a remote border post in ancient times--written around 600 BCE. Using computerized imaging and machine learning tools, Tel Aviv University researchers were able to determine that the messages were written by at least six different individuals. According to a press release, the incriptions were primarily about mundane topics, like troop movements and food expenses. The nature and tone of the inscriptions, the researchers say, indicates the ability to read and write all through the chain of command, from the commander of the small garrison to the deputy quartermaster of the fort.

The performance of anytime algorithms can be improved by simultaneously solving several instances of algorithm-problem pairs. These pairs may include different instances of a problem (such as starting from a different initial state), different algorithms (if several alternatives exist), or several runs of the same algorithm (for non-deterministic algorithms). In this paper we present a methodology for designing an optimal scheduling policy based on the statistical characteristics of the algorithms involved. We formally analyze the case where the processes share resources (a single-processor model), and provide an algorithm for optimal scheduling. We analyze, theoretically and empirically, the behavior of our scheduling algorithm for various distribution types.