One humid afternoon in July, José Ramírez-Garofalo drove his large Toyota truck through the lush new hills, valleys, and meadows of Freshkills Park, a twenty-two-hundred-acre green space that the city is constructing on Staten Island. Ramírez-Garofalo, a young man with dark hair, large forearms, and the beginnings of a goatee, drove and talked fast. "It's an impermeable geotextile membrane," he said, referring to the thick plastic that was used, starting in the mid-nineties, to cap the four giant trash mounds of the old Fresh Kills landfill. "On top there is playground soil." The process of capping and terraforming the four mounds that once made up the country's largest dump is complete, but the park won't be fully open until at least 2036.

Regular patterns of vegetation are considered widespread landscapes, although their global extent has never been estimated. Among them, spotted landscapes are of particular interest in the context of climate change. Indeed, regularly spaced vegetation spots in semi-arid shrublands result from extreme resource depletion and prefigure catastrophic shift of the ecosystem to a homogeneous desert, while termite mounds also producing spotted landscapes were shown to increase robustness to climate change. Yet, their identification at large scale calls for automatic methods, for instance using the popular deep learning framework, able to cope with a vast amount of remote sensing data, e.g., optical satellite imagery. In this paper, we tackle this problem and benchmark some state-of-the-art deep networks on several landscapes and geographical areas. Despite the promising results we obtained, we found that more research is needed to be able to map automatically these earth mounds from space.

The massive Valles Marineris canyon has been revealed in stunning new images taken by the European Space Agency's Mars Express. At 2,485 miles long, over 124 miles wide and more than 4 miles deep, the Red Planet's canyon makes America's seem downright puny by comparison - Valles Marineris would span the distance from the northern tip of Norway to the southern tip of Sicily. The new image depicts two trenches, or chasma, that form a portion of the western part of Valles Marineris. The picture uses data from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) onboard Mars Express and it is a'true color' image, meaning it shows what would be seen by the human eye if looking at this region of Mars. The Red Planet's massive canyon has been revealed in new images released by the European Space Agency.

U.S. olympian Mike Powell made history in 1991 at the summer games in Los Angeles when he leaped over 29-feet in the long jump. Already towering at 6 feet 2 inches, Powell's jump was equivalent to 4.7 times his own height and is still undefeated -- at least, by human beings. In a new paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, a team of roboticists has designed a teeny-tiny robot -- only 2.5 inches long and 1.1 grams -- that has achieved a long jump equal to six times its body length. Even more, the robot achieves this Olympic world record-breaking jump without any legs. Instead, the researchers write that it could be the future of deadly pollutant detection in our cities.

Archaeologists have uncovered scores of long-abandoned settlements along coastal Madagascar that reveal environmental connections to modern-day communities. They have detected the nearly indiscernible bumps of earthen mounds left behind by prehistoric North American cultures. Still other researchers have mapped Bronze Age river systems in the Indus Valley, one of the cradles of civilization. All of these recent discoveries are examples of landscape archaeology. They're also examples of how artificial intelligence is helping scientists hunt for new archaeological digs on a scale and at a pace unimaginable even a decade ago.

Businesses are often sitting on mounds of data that are not utilized. John Kelly, IBM's "father of Watson," says that 80% of data is "untouched," meaning it's never actually used to make improvements or changes deemed necessary by the customer. You might have state-of-the-art martech tools sitting in your martech stack- but how can you use all these data sources to see the bigger picture, and unlock the full potential of your marketing and media investments? Instead of keeping your customer data siloed, with different data sets spread out across different ecosystems, businesses need to start recognizing the value of connecting these data sources. Having one integrated customer intelligence platform that helps businesses understand their customers' conversations from all data sources can be a real game-changer.

Not only does Starbucks go through mounds of coffee beans to satiate its raving fans, but they also have mounds of data that they leverage in many ways to improve the customer experience and their business. With 90 million transactions a week in 25,000 stores worldwide the coffee giant is in many ways on the cutting edge of using big data and artificial intelligence to help direct marketing, sales and business decisions. When Starbucks launched its rewards program and mobile app, they dramatically increased the data they collected and could use to get to know their customers and extract info about purchasing habits. The mobile app has more than 17 million and the reward program has 13 million active users. These users alone create an overwhelming amount of data about what, where and when they buy coffee and complementary products that can be overlaid on other data including weather, holidays and special promotions. Here are just some of the ways that Starbucks uses the data it collects.

At a glance, a single worker of the genus Macrotermes is not a very complex creature--less than half an inch long, eyeless, wingless, with an abdomen so transparent you can spot the dead grass it ate for lunch. Put it in a group, though, and it may pile up pinhead-sized balls of mud, one after the other, until a complex mound takes shape. By the time that mound is 17 feet tall, it will be equivalent in scale to the Burj Khalifa. In its basement sits a symbiotic fungus, which digests grass for the nest and requires continuous care from the workers. Although termites build without the benefit of architects or engineers, their mounds are ingeniously constructed, using cues known only to the bugs.

Not only does Starbucks go through mounds of coffee beans to satiate its raving fans, but they also have mounds of data that they leverage in many ways to improve the customer experience and their business. With 90 million transactions a week in 25,000 stores worldwide the coffee giant is in many ways on the cutting edge of using big data and artificial intelligence to help direct marketing, sales and business decisions. When Starbucks launched its rewards program and mobile app, they dramatically increased the data they collected and could use to get to know their customers and extract info about purchasing habits. The mobile app has more than 17 million and the reward program has 13 million active users. These users alone create an overwhelming amount of data about what, where and when they buy coffee and complementary products that can be overlaid on other data including weather, holidays and special promotions.

Not only does Starbucks go through mounds of coffee beans to satiate its raving fans, but they also have mounds of data that they leverage in many ways to improve the customer experience and their business. With 90 million transactions a week in 25,000 stores worldwide the coffee giant is in many ways on the cutting edge of using big data and artificial intelligence to help direct marketing, sales and business decisions. When Starbucks launched its rewards program and mobile app, they dramatically increased the data they collected and could use to get to know their customers and extract info about purchasing habits. The mobile app has more than 17 million and the reward program has 13 million active users. These users alone create an overwhelming amount of data about what, where and when they buy coffee and complementary products that can be overlaid on other data including weather, holidays and special promotions.