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A new technology using artificial intelligence detects depressive language in social media posts more accurately than current systems and uses less data to do it.

The technology, which was presented during the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, is the first of its kind to show that, to more accurately detect depressive language, small, high-quality data sets can be applied to deep learning, a commonly used AI approach that is typically data intensive.

Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that the words we use in interaction with others on a daily basis are a good indicator of our mental and emotional state.

This is the final part in a series of in-depth articles examining China’s efforts to build a stronger domestic semiconductor industry amid rising trade tensions.


Some in China see custom AI chips, which can offer superior performance to conventional integrated circuits even when manufactured using older processes, as helping the country loosen its dependence on the US in core technology.

Saudi Arabia has called its giga-project Neom, a new city 33 times the size of New York City, “the world’s most ambitious project” — and it sounds it.

Combining new classes of nanomembrane electrodes with flexible electronics and a deep learning algorithm could help disabled people wirelessly control an electric wheelchair, interact with a computer or operate a small robotic vehicle without donning a bulky hair-electrode cap or contending with wires.

By providing a fully portable, wireless brain-machine interface (BMI), the wearable system could offer an improvement over conventional electroencephalography (EEG) for measuring signals from visually evoked potentials in the . The system’s ability to measure EEG signals for BMI has been evaluated with six human subjects, but has not been studied with disabled individuals.

The project, conducted by researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Kent and Wichita State University, was reported on September 11 in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

Brain–computer interfaces, once used exclusively for clinical research, are now under development at several wealthy startups and a major tech company, and rudimentary versions are already popping up in online stores.

Why it matters: If users unlock the information inside their heads and give companies and governments access, they’re inviting privacy risks far greater than today’s worries over social media data, experts say — and raising the specter of discrimination based on what goes on inside a person’s head.

Robots aren’t going to take everyone’s jobs, but technology has already reshaped the world of work in ways that are creating clear winners and losers. And it will continue to do so without intervention, says the first report of MIT’s Task Force on the Work of the Future.


Widespread press reports of a looming “employment apocalypse” brought on by AI and automation are probably wide of the mark, according to the authors. Shrinking workforces as developed countries age and outstanding limitations in what machines can do mean we’re unlikely to have a shortage of jobs.

But while unemployment is historically low, recent decades have seen a polarization of the workforce as the number of both high- and low-skilled jobs have grown at the expense of the middle-skilled ones, driving growing income inequality and depriving the non-college-educated of viable careers.

This is at least partly attributable to the growth of digital technology and automation, the report notes, which are rendering obsolete many middle-skilled jobs based around routine work like assembly lines and administrative support.