Federated learning systems that jointly preserve Byzantine robustness and privacy have remained an open problem. Robust aggregation, the standard defense for Byzantine attacks, generally requires server access to individual updates or nonlinear computation -- thus is incompatible with privacy-preserving methods such as secure aggregation via multiparty computation. To this end, we propose SHARE (Secure Hierarchical Robust Aggregation), a distributed learning framework designed to cryptographically preserve client update privacy and robustness to Byzantine adversaries simultaneously. The key idea is to incorporate secure averaging among randomly clustered clients before filtering malicious updates through robust aggregation. Experiments show that SHARE has similar robustness guarantees as existing techniques while enhancing privacy.

We propose Zeno++, a new robust asynchronous synchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent~(SGD) under a general Byzantine failure model with unbounded number of Byzantine workers.

Following years of research, AI is starting to have an impact on the way science is done, as these five Imperial studies from 2017 show. Barely a week has gone by in 2017 without warnings in the media about how Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics is threatening to make all human workers redundant. The reality is likely to be more subtle and in fact involve closer collaboration between computers and humans. But even in complex areas like scientific research, AI is having an impact on the way we approach certain problems and questions. AI techniques, such as machine learning, represent a complete step-change in ability. By combing heavy lifting computational power with more subtle human-like reasoning we can start to address scientific problems that were previously thought to be intractable - to computers or human scientists separately.

Serko, a corporate travel booking and expense management business, is like a baby, Kiwi version of Concur, the SAP-owned technology company that is a developer of software that help businesses manage travel expenses. Serko's travel booking tool is used by more than 60 percent of enterprise businesses in Australia and New Zealand. The world's largest travel management companies (namely, BCD Travel, American Express Global Business Travel, Carlson Wagonlit Travel, and Hogg Robinson Group) all resell Serko's tool to their customers in Asia Pacific. So it is of regional significance that Serko plans to unveil a fresh travel-and-expense management platform with artificial intelligence (AI) baked in. In July 2017, the company will release a corporate online booking user interface as an optional premium solution alongside its booking tool for its 3 million users.

Hanson Robotics is showing its new humanoid robot boy that belongs in its Robokind portfolio of robots, a 2012 reincarnation of its earlier cartoonlike Zeno boy but this time more humanoid with an array of gestures and eye movements. Made in China, the boy-like robot stands 27 inches tall. The most commanding feature of the new Zeno is its head, made out of what creator David Hanson calls Frubber. The material, as the word sound suggests in melding flesh with rubber, is a spongy, structured elastic polymer that can mimic facial movements, contracting and folding like human skin. The material is also described as biomimetic polymer.

If you imagined that thought experiments were mere mental gymnastics meant to bamboozle the uninitiated, think again. Take Schrödinger's cat, perhaps the most famous example, which involves a cat that is simultaneously alive and dead. It seems bizarre – and that's the point. It was designed as a slap on the wrist for quantum theorists, to show that a theory that predicts such nonsense must be missing something. Current thinking is that perhaps nothing is missing, and quantum theory really is as weird as it seems.