Cooperative communication plays a fundamental role in theories of human-human interaction--cognition, culture, development, language, etc.--as well as human-robot interaction. The core challenge in cooperative communication is the problem of common ground: having enough shared knowledge and understanding to successfully communicate. Prior models of cooperative communication, however, uniformly assume the strongest form of common ground, perfect and complete knowledge sharing, and, therefore, fail to capture the core challenge of cooperative communication. We propose a general theory of cooperative communication that is mathematically principled and explicitly defines a spectrum of common ground possibilities, going well beyond that of perfect and complete knowledge sharing, on spaces that permit arbitrary representations of data and hypotheses. Our framework is a strict generalization of prior models of cooperative communication. After considering a parametric form of common ground and viewing the data selection and hypothesis inference processes of communication as encoding and decoding, we establish a connection to variational autoencoding, a powerful model in modern machine learning. Finally, we carry out a series of empirical simulations to support and elaborate on our theoretical results.

By exploiting the duality between boosting and online learning, we present a boosting framework which proves to be extremely powerful thanks to employing the vast knowledge available in the online learning area. Using this framework, we develop various algorithms to address multiple practically and theoretically interesting questions including sparse boosting, smooth-distribution boosting, agnostic learning and, as a by-product, some generalization to double-projection online learning algorithms.

There's a lot of buzz about flying taxis, even though none are buzzing overhead. Investors are pouring capital into start-ups racing to develop new electric aircraft that take off and land vertically like a helicopter but fly horizontally like an airplane. Major airlines are investing in some of these start-ups, betting that they will one day zip passengers between airports and city centers much faster than cars or public transit. A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. One major issue is they will need enough places for these vehicles to take off and land.

Oracle is bringing Nvidia's AI Enterprise software suite alongside thousands of its latest GPUs to its cloud infrastructure, which could fuel the chipmaker's plans to make billions from subscription services. The partnership, which builds on earlier deployments, sets up Nvidia with the kind of infrastructure it requires to expand on a long-term goal to become a software powerhouse. It also gives Oracle's cloud service the plug-and-play hardware capacity and software framework to easily deploy AI software. Oracle and Nvidia have common expertise in areas that include healthcare, manufacturing, communications and financial services, and there's a lot of opportunity to collaborate there, said Leo Leung, vice president at Oracle, during a press briefing. The companies are "looking at the full stack so not just the GPUs and infrastructure but getting into the software layer, getting into the service layer," Leung said. Nvidia is known as a graphics chip company, but is betting its future on generating more revenue from software and services.

Standing on the outskirts of Oakland, California, Attila Toth takes in the nearby forested hills. The CEO looks out on what locals call "The Town" and, in the distance, San Francisco, or "The City." Close by, Toth sees tangles of redwood, eucalyptus and oak trees – and the wildfire risk they pose. This "wildland-urban interface" isn't far from the site of the 1991 Oakland Hills Fire, which flared up suddenly in a heavily residential area. Over four days, 3,000 thousand homes were destroyed in one of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods, causing an estimated $1.5 billion in damages ($3.2 billion in today's dollars).

These methods and ideas are discussed here. LOLA's console and see an LOLA's hard drive had decided to crash Performing all computation on board has several advantages: The video data are not corrupted by radio-transmission noise, commands are not lost, and there's no communication lag that might result in These findings are consistent with those of previous competitors (Nourbakhsh, Powers, and Birchfield 1995). On the down side, the on-board image processor contributes significantly to the battery drain, which is partly the result of its intended desktop use. Still, we are able to get about two hours of operation to each charge. Nomadic Technologies is currently making efforts to offer a version that is better suited for mobile robot use. Figure 1.

AT' Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ 07974 THE INITIAL RESULTS from a few AI research projects in statistics have been quite interesting to statisticians: Feasibility demonstration systems have been built at Stanford University, AT&T Bell Laboratories, and the University of Edinburgh. Several more design studies have been completed. A conference devoted to expert systems in statistics was sponsored by the Royal Statistical Society. On the other hand, statistics as a domain may be of particular interest to AI researchers, for it offers both tasks well suited to current AI capabilities and tasks requiring development of new AI techniques. Statisticians do a variety of tasks, some of which can now be assisted by expert system techniques.

Russia has boasted its robot tank outperformed manned vehicles in recent tests paving the way for Vladimir Putin to expand his droid army. Two unmanned tanks, one of which is designed as a kamikaze device, have been subjected to testing outside Moscow for almost a year. The tanks, called Nehreta, have undergone more rigorous testing in recent weeks and today it emerged they have performed better than the manned versions. The Russian'Nerehta' ground robot has aced its latest tests, it has been revealed. It can carry a 12.7mm or 7.62mm machine gun or an AG-30M grenade launcher.

I'm preparing to return to a pastime that I gave up a few years ago: flying radio-controlled model airplanes by first-person view, or FPV. Telemetry to Go: My ground station for receiving video was a battery-powered Raspberry Pi connected to two Wi-Fi dongles [top]. On board the plane, I mounted a camera module attached to a Pi Zero [bottom]. The final nail in the coffin was that I discovered that the Raspberry Pi Zero's camera connector wasn't making a very solid connection to its ribbon cable.