News

The emotions we feel may shape what we see

Our emotional state in a given moment may influence what we see, according to findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. In two experiments, researchers found that participants saw a neutral face as smiling more when it was paired with an unseen positive image.

Iron Age study targets British DNA mystery

A recent study showed that the present-day genetic landscape of Britain was largely laid down by the Bronze Age.

Towards a Virtual Stuntman

Motion control problems have become standard benchmarks for reinforcement learning, and deep RL methods have been shown to be effective for a diverse suite of tasks ranging from manipulation to locomotion. However, characters trained with deep RL often exhibit unnatural behaviours, bearing artifacts such as jittering, asymmetric gaits, and excessive movement of limbs. Can we train our characters to produce more natural behaviours?

New research shows successful founders are far older than the Valley stereotype

Why symmetry gets really interesting when it is broken

A hypothetical alien visitor, sent to observe all of human culture – art and architecture, music and medicine, storytelling and science – would quickly conclude that we as a species are obsessed with patterns. The formal gardens of 18th-century England, the folk tales of medieval Germany and the traditional woven fabrics of Mayan civilisation have little in common, but they each owe their aesthetic appeal to being composed of smaller, identical parts arranged into a harmonious whole.

Amazon spent close to $23B on R&D in 2017, outpacing fellow tech giants

This Chinese Facial Recognition Surveillance Company Is Now the World’s Most Valuable AI Startup

Introducing Kayenta: An open automated canary analysis tool from Google and Netflix

Is it Time for Quantum Computing Startups? Maybe

That was the message of the Q Summit, a one-day meeting of quantum computing researchers, investors, and entrepreneurs hosted by IBM in Menlo Park, Calif., last week.

Why SQLite Does Not Use Git

SQLite does not use the Git version control system. SQLite uses Fossil instead. Fossil and Git are both block-chain version-control systems.