Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The world's harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) are masters in seeing through the cloudy coastal waters they call home. Equipped with dexterous whiskers, these pinnipeds use a suite of senses to navigate their surroundings with ease. Harbor seals may also use an important part of their vision to determine which direction they are moving, even with such an opaque view of the world. Now, we might know a bit more about how they can tell which direction they are heading.

Gamers have long been stigmatized as lonely weirdos. Some of that has been deserved--ask anyone who's had a bunch of children shout horrible slurs at them during a match of Call Of Duty. But some leaders in the gaming industry want to push back against that narrative by creating games that encourage users to form communities as part of the gameplay. The idea is that by fostering more human interactions, games can promote positivity and openness, bringing people together instead of pushing them apart. "Whether it's a town hall meeting for a community or whether it's a group of gamers getting together in a park, whenever people meet face-to-face, there's a level of civility, courtesy, and respect that you often see," says John Hanke, the founder and CEO of Niantic, the developer behind the massively popular augmented-reality mobile game Pokémon Go.

It's not often you meet someone who's genuinely changed the world, but that's what happens the day I greet Niantic CEO John Hanke. Sipping his coffee alone in a gargantuan San Franciscan boardroom, I wonder whether the man on the other end of this Zoom call realises just how often people use his former company's creation, Google Maps. Hanke's yearning to create started young. Fresh out of business school in the 1990s and already with one of the first online gaming successes to his name, he was snapped up – along with his company, Keyhole, by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and folded into the team that made Google Maps, now arguably the most useful thing on your smartphone. "None of us were interested in doing the thing where you got your driving directions, printed them out and took it with you on a sheet of paper," Hanke says.

MOBA games are currently one the most popular online game genres. In their basic gameplay, two teams of multiple players compete against each other to destroy the enemy's base, controlling a powerful unit known as "hero". Each hero has different abilities, roles and strengths. Thus, choosing a good combination of heroes is fundamental for the success in the game. In this paper we propose a recommendation system for selecting heroes in a MOBA game. We develop a mechanism based on association rules that suggests the more suitable heroes for composing a team, using data collected from a large number of DOTA 2 matches. For evaluating the efficacy of the line-up, we trained a neural network capable of predicting the winner team with a 88.63% accuracy. The results of the recommendation system were very satisfactory with up to 74.9% success rate.

Plenty of Tesla owners (and people who hope to own Teslas one day) love their electric cars. But do they love them enough to pay for the car twice? CNBC points out a trend where multiple recent buyers who paid for their cars with direct debit payments say their bank accounts were charged twice. That's annoying when it happens with a movie ticket or a pair of shoes, but can be backbreaking if it's a $53,000 SUV. To make matters worse, while Tesla's zero-contact deliveries and remote service stations can make it convenient to get a car, it's apparently not so easy to contact someone who can work out a way to reverse the charges.

This year's Pokémon Go Fest will be a virtual gathering. Niantic, creator of the Pokémon Go game, plans to donate all of its proceeds – a minimum of $5 million – from the sales of Pokémon Go Fest virtual tickets ($14.99 each, available now in the in-app store) for the July 25-26 event to charity. Half of the proceeds will go to fund projects from Black developers creating augmented reality (AR) projects for the Niantic augmented reality platform with "the goal of shining a light on characters and story and points of view that validate the lives and experiences of the Black community," said John Hanke, founder and CEO of Niantic, in a recent briefing on the event. 'The Last of Us Part II':We played the new PlayStation video game. Here's what you should know'You're crazy if you're not using (it):How to master the business social network LinkedIn The other half will be used to benefit U.S. non-profit organizations supporting local communities rebuilding from the economic havoc wrecked by the coronavirus pandemic.

Niantic Labs, the developer behind "Pokémon Go," has announced that it is planning to open its augmented reality platform to third-party developers. The company also shared it's vision for the future of its AR platform, which includes advancements in machine learning and computer vision. "Today, we are offering a preview of the technology we have been developing: the Niantic Real World Platform," Niantic CEO John Hanke said in a blog post. "This is the first time we've given an update of this nature publicly, and I'm confident it will provide a sense of how committed we are to the future of AR, and to furthering the type of experiences we have pioneered." The CEO also revealed that Niantic has acquired the computer vision and machine learning company Matrix Mill and established a new office in London.

Pokemon Go has been a huge boon for both Nintendo and the Pokemon Company, which holds the rights for the animated franchise. Lesser known is that the game is actually being produced by Niantic Labs, a San Francisco-based startup that was incorporated as a Google subsidiary in 2011 and spun out of the company last year when Google reorganized under the Alphabet moniker. Niantic is being funded by Google, Nintendo and the Pokemon company as well as Fuji TV and a few other high-profile investors. Niantic's team includes some key members of Google's former Maps team. While at Google, Niantic first built Field Trip, an app that would notify users of murals, historic buildings and other interesting places around them while walking through a city -- think of it as a kind of city guide for mobile devices that sends out alerts whenever you walk by something noteworthy.

We prove statistical rates of convergence for kernel-based least squares regression from i.i.d. data using a conjugate gradient algorithm, where regularization against overfitting is obtained by early stopping. This method is related to Kernel Partial Least Squares, a regression method that combines supervised dimensionality reduction with least squares projection. Following the setting introduced in earlier related literature, we study so-called "fast convergence rates" depending on the regularity of the target regression function (measured by a source condition in terms of the kernel integral operator) and on the effective dimensionality of the data mapped into the kernel space. We obtain upper bounds, essentially matching known minimax lower bounds, for the $\mathcal{L}^2$ (prediction) norm as well as for the stronger Hilbert norm, if the true regression function belongs to the reproducing kernel Hilbert space. If the latter assumption is not fulfilled, we obtain similar convergence rates for appropriate norms, provided additional unlabeled data are available.