A novice police officer assigned to watch over a refugee group tries to figure out whether the refugees have been framed for terrorism--and where the real killers are lurking. Technically, this is an accurate description of the plot of David Musgrave's debut novel, Lambda. Sounds like a pretty straightforward potboiler, right? But from its first page, Lambda is up to something weirder and more unwieldy, ditching a linear narrative and setting the story in an alternate-universe Britain where you can get in trouble with the cops for damaging a talking toothbrush. In Lambda's bizarro-world 2019, advances have been made in artificial intelligence to the point that "sentient objects" have been granted rights, including said toothbrush, aka the ToothFriendIV.

Davis Blalock, a computer science graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told Science magazine that some of the gains may not exist at all. Blalock and his mates compared dozens of approaches to improving neural networks--software architectures that loosely mimic the brain and found that it wasn't obvious what the state of the art even was. The researchers evaluated 81 pruning algorithms, programs that make neural networks more efficient by trimming unneeded connections. All claimed superiority in slightly different ways. But they were rarely compared properly--and when the researchers tried to evaluate them side by side, there was no clear evidence of performance improvements over a 10 year period.

Artificial intelligence (AI) just seems to get smarter and smarter. Each iPhone learns your face, voice, and habits better than the last, and the threats AI poses to privacy and jobs continue to grow. The surge reflects faster chips, more data, and better algorithms. But some of the improvement comes from tweaks rather than the core innovations their inventors claim--and some of the gains may not exist at all, says Davis Blalock, a computer science graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Blalock and his colleagues compared dozens of approaches to improving neural networks--software architectures that loosely mimic the brain.

Artificial intelligence (AI) just seems to get smarter and smarter. Each iPhone learns your face, voice, and habits better than the last, and the threats AI poses to privacy and jobs continue to grow. The surge reflects faster chips, more data, and better algorithms. But some of the improvement comes from tweaks rather than the core innovations their inventors claim--and some of the gains may not exist at all, says Davis Blalock, a computer science graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Blalock and his colleagues compared dozens of approaches to improving neural networks--software architectures that loosely mimic the brain.

Based in the Big Apple itself (New York), Synechron is one of the fastest-growing digital, business consulting & technology services providers. Since they opened their doors in 2001, Synechron has been expanding at a rapid rate. They now operate in 18 countries around the the world, and has a marked presence in the US, Australia, Canada, UK, Japan, The Netherlands, Hong Kong, Singapore, UAE, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Italy, France, and India. With the AI Summit London drawing ever closer (it's only one week away!), we spoke to Ben Musgrave, who is Synechron's Business Development Manager, in order to understand how one of the event's key sponsors is deploying AI today and how they plan to in the future. We started off our conversation with Musgrave – who'll be delivering a keynote speech at the AI Summit London – how they are currently involved in the AI-space.

For the first time ever, researchers have captured footage of wild chimpanzee mothers teaching their offspring to use tools. The videos taken at the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo shed new light on the evolution of teaching, showing how young chimpanzees learn from their mothers to catch termites with'fishing probes.' Mother chimpanzees were found to bring multiple tools or divide their own in half, allowing them to address the needs of their young without hindering their own ability to gather food. The videos taken at the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo shed new light on the evolution of teaching, showing how young chimpanzees learn from their mothers to catch termites with'fishing probes' The videos show how young chimpanzees learn from their mothers to catch termites with'fishing probes.' The footage also revealed that the mothers used different strategies to provide their young with tools.