AI-powered augmented reality devices will give human beings'superpowers' to detect lies and'read' emotions of people they are talking to, a futurist has claimed. Devin Liddell, Principal Futurist at Teague, said that computer vision systems built into headsets or glasses will pick up emotional cues that un-augmented human eyes and instincts cannot see. The technology would let people know if their date is lying or is sexually aroused, along with spotting a lying politician. Liddell said that as augmented reality'merges' with artificial intelligence, humans will gain sensory superpowers which will'transform the social landscape.' He described this as'backchannel' - a term normally used to describe discussions that are not made public and which can give people an advantage in negotiations, for example.

Automunge is a tabular preprocessing library that encodes dataframes for supervised learning. When selecting a default feature encoding strategy for gradient boosted learning, one may consider metrics of training duration and achieved predictive performance associated with the feature representations. Automunge offers a default of binarization for categoric features and z-score normalization for numeric. The presented study sought to validate those defaults by way of benchmarking on a series of diverse data sets by encoding variations with tuned gradient boosted learning. We found that on average our chosen defaults were top performers both from a tuning duration and a model performance standpoint. Another key finding was that one hot encoding did not perform in a manner consistent with suitability to serve as a categoric default in comparison to categoric binarization.

If you have ever used Google Maps on your phone without fiddling with the location settings, it goes without saying that the tech giant knows everywhere you've been. The really bad news is that even if you have previously tried to stop Google tracking your every movement, the company may have done so anyway. On Friday the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) won a legal action in the federal court, which ruled that, thanks to a peculiar set-up that required a user to check "No" or "Do Not Collect" to both "Location History" and "Web & App Activity" on some Android and Pixel phones, someone who ticked "No" to just one would still end up being tracked. We asked Dr Katharine Kemp, a legal academic from the University of New South Wales whose focus is consumer law, and the Australian cryptographer Vanessa Teague for their thoughts on the significance of the decision and how a person might go about securing their devices. Kemp, an Apple user herself, says that for many consumers, today's decision may not actually mean much, as the decision only related to Android users and Google has since updated the settings that formed the basis of the ACCC's complaint.

The idea of hurtling down a vacuum tube in a levitating pod at speeds of over 670 miles an hour may sound like the plot of the latest science fiction blockbuster, but it could soon become a reality. Virgin Hyperloop is developing the futuristic technology, which it claims could transform the way we travel. At the end of last year, the company demonstrated the technology in action, transporting two brave participants for the first time. Now, the tech giant has shared a step-by-step video of the passenger experience on board its Hyperloop system, all the way from arriving at the portal, to taking off on board a hyperloop pod. 'Showing the passenger experience of Virgin Hyperloop is a glimpse of the future, following the success three months ago when people rode in a hyperloop pod for the first time,' said Sultan Bin Sulayem, Chairman of Virgin Hyperloop and Group Chairman and CEO of DP World.

January is a peak time for downloading health and fitness apps and putting those Christmas present fitness trackers to work. But do they actually help you stay motivated? After the Christmas self-indulgence comes the inevitable New Year's resolution to get fit, lose weight, and eat more healthily. But while 65% of us make resolutions, only 12% successfully keep to them, polling firm ComRes finds. When Sarah, 34, a law professor from Australia, wanted to lose weight last year, she took the unusual approach of placing bets that she would achieve her exercise goals.

Hannah pulls up to the curb, opens the doors, and welcomes the kiddo inside. "We're headed to Darwin Elementary." That's where he goes to school, after all. For Milo's parents, there is good news and there is iffy news. The good news is that they don't have to cut babysitting checks for Hannah, because Hannah is a self-driving school bus.

Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, first codified in his 1942 short story "Runaround" (http://bit.ly/1AAkKhW), Robots were never to harm humans, or by inaction allow them to come to harm. Within months of the elucidation of these laws, however, an extremely primitive robot, the Norden bombsight, was being put to lethal use by the U.S. Army Air Corps. The bombsight combined a computer that calculated various factors affecting an aircraft's arrival over a target with an autopilot. Touted for its accuracy from high altitude, the Norden nevertheless tended to miss the aim point by an average of a quarter-mile.

Launched by digital health and weight-loss platform Lose It!, the new feature of an already existing app proposes a simple solution to those who struggle to keep track of their caloric intake: Take a photo of your food, and Snap It will immediately display its calorie count Showing people the caloric value of their foods before they eat them can help modify their eating habits. Some studies have shown that keeping a food journal helps people stick to their diet. And in an effort to fight rising obesity rates, the FDA announced in 2014 that chain restaurants throughout the U.S. will have to post calorie information in their menus (the rule is set to go into effect sometime next year). But the FDA rules won't apply to all restaurants. And food diets are cumbersome, tending to go the way of new year's resolutions.

Boston-based Lose It! (incorporated as FitNow Inc.) has released a new beta feature today called Snap It within its weight loss and calorie tracking app. As is easily guessed by the name, Snap It beta lets users take photos of their daily meals and snacks to automatically log them and derive approximate calorie counts. For now, users will be able to open the Lose It! app, pick a meal-type (breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack), take a photo of their food, submit and wait briefly for Snap It to analyze it. Snap It will present users with a few best guesses of what food was portrayed in the submitted pic. Users can then confirm the food seen in the photo, and add more detail.

Despite the increasing amount of time people spend on their smartphones, the app market is in a lull. Facebook, Snapchat, Uber and other big-name apps get heaps of downloads. But most everyone else is seeing demand level off. That's why appmakers are excited about Apple's expected announcement at its Worldwide Developer's Conference on Monday that apps may integrate with virtual assistant Siri. This would allow developers to build software allowing iPhone users to, say, talk to Siri to request a ride, order their meals or shop.