At a time when nuclear threats feel more alarming than ever, Netflix's doomsday film falls frustratingly flat. A 1964 masterpiece tells a much better cautionary tale. Somewhere over the Arctic reaches of North America, a nuclear bomber flies in a squadron, awaiting its orders. When a secret code appears on a machine in the cockpit, the crew looks at each other, stunned. The code is instructing them to attack.

The Partially-Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) is a general framework to determine reward-maximizing action policies under noisy action and sensing conditions. However, determining an optimal policy for POMDPs is often intractable for robotic tasks due to the PSPACE-complete nature of the computation required. Several recent solvers have been introduced that expand the size of problems that can be considered. Although these POMDP solvers can respect complex motion constraints in theory, we show that the computational cost does not provide a benefit in the eventual online execution, compared to our alternative approach that relies on a policy that ignores some of the motion constraints. We advocate using the POMDP framework where it is critical -- to find a policy that provides the optimal action given all past noisy sensor observations, while abstracting some of the motion constraints to reduce solution time. However, the actions of an abstract robot are generally not executable under its true motion constraints. The problem is addressed offline with a less-constrained POMDP, and navigation under the full system constraints is handled online with replanning. We empirically demonstrate that the policy generated using this abstracted motion model is faster to compute and achieves similar or higher reward than addressing the motion constraints for a car-like robot as used in our experiments directly in the POMDP.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized marketing of artificial intelligence (AI) software to help pathologists detect prostate cancer. The program, called Paige Prostate, is the first approved AI system in pathology. "We really believe this product can make a huge difference," Paige CEO Leo Grady, PhD, told Medscape Medical News. The program was approved as an adjunct to pathologist review, not a replacement. Grady explained that "for a second opinion today, you ship a glass slide to somebody else or you do another stain that's really expensive or you do another molecular test."

The FDA has authorized the first artificial intelligence software to help doctors detect prostate cancer. The program, called Paige Prostate, is the first approved AI system in pathology. "We really believe this product can make a huge difference," Paige CEO Leo Grady, PhD, says. The program was approved to help doctors, not to replace them. "For a second opinion today, you ship a glass slide to somebody else or you do another stain that's really expensive or you do another molecular test," Grady says.

Tinder, the most popular dating app in the world, has banned teens under the age of 18 but it's not stopping them from signing up. A Massachusetts man is accused of kidnapping and assaulting a woman he met on Tinder, threatening to kill her and her child if she went to the cops, authorities said. Peter Bozier, 28, was arrested Tuesday during a traffic stop in Sudbury after the victim told investigators she was severely beaten and strangled while being held against her will at Bozier's home, police said. The victim said the harrowing ordeal began a day earlier, police spokesman Lt. Robert Grady told the MetroWest Daily News. Grady said the woman managed to "release herself from the situation" and then went to a hospital in Burlington, where hospital staffers contacted police, the newspaper reported.

Paige, the startup that spun out of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and launched in 2018 to help advance cancer research and care by applying AI to better understand cancer pathology, is today announcing a milestone in its growth story: it has raised a further $20 million from Goldman Sachs and Healthcare Venture Partners, closing out its Series B at $70 million. Leo Grady, Paige's CEO, says the funding will go toward several areas. It will be used for hiring; to continue expanding its partnerships with biopharmaceutical companies (deals that have not yet been made public); and to continue investing in clinical work, based around algorithms it has built and trained using more than 25 million pathology slides in MSK's archive, plus IP related to the AI-based computational pathology that underpins Paige's work. It will also be used to help it expand to the U.K. and Europe. Paige has a CE mark to be used clinically in both regions and the startup already has beta sites in the U.K. and EU, but it hasn't had a fully commercial launch in either region, Grady said.

Health care startup Paige has raised an additional $15 million from Goldman Sachs to help diagnose cancer using computer vision trained on clinical imaging data. The funding shows that while COVID-19 investments are getting a lot of attention, AI-related efforts to fight cancer are also moving forward. The idea is to use data sets related to treatment and genomics to train deep learning networks to detect breast, prostate, and other major cancers. Paige builds computational pathology products to help pathologists deliver more accurate diagnoses to cancer patients and allow patients and their care teams to make faster, more informed treatment decisions. New York-based Paige has raised over $95 million to date.

Trailblazing information systems professor, Siobahn Day Grady, Ph.D., is a Black tech unicorn you should know about. Not only is she the first woman to receive a doctorate degree in the field of computer science -- according to North Carolina Central University -- from North Carolina A&T State University in 2018, but she also recently received a $190,000 grant to conduct research to improve self-driving cars. Grady received the grant from the National Science Foundation's Historically Black Colleges and Excellence in Research program and plans to use the funds to research and identify issues with self-driving cars. "This research is very timely and relevant; it's the future," Grady said, according to North Carolina Central University. "I'm excited to contribute to the field as well as provide research opportunities to students."

With the help of computational pathology firm Paige, healthcare technology giant Royal Phillips is bringing clinical artificial intelligence to pathology laboratories to help improve a pathologist's workflow and treatment planning for patients. According to a joint news release Thursday, this strategic collaboration will first start with Paige Prostate to help pathologists quantify and characterize cancer in tissue samples and make precise and efficient diagnoses. The release noted the need for more advanced cancer diagnosis technology as the number of cancer cases rises. Glass slide-based laboratory workflows are being converted to digital using solutions like ones offered by Phillips. Once digital images are created, the CE-marked Paige Prostate software is applied automatically to detect and localize prostate cancer, providing pathologists with valuable information they can use to evaluate prostate biopsies.

Robots could bring about a four-day working week in Britain as automation and artificial intelligence increase workplace efficiency, a new study has revealed. If new technologies were passed on to staff, they would be able to generate their current weekly economic output in just four days. Even relatively modest gains from using robots and AI had the potential to give British workers Scandinavian levels of leisure time, according to research done by the cross-party Social Market Foundation (SMF) thinktank. The research will boost John McDonnell's plans to reduce hours in the working week The conclusions of the study will come as a boost to John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, who wants to look at reducing hours in the working week. TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady used her speech to the organisation's annual gathering last month to call for a four-day working week, saying that it should be achievable by the end of the century.