Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence

Hao Zhang/The New York Times

A voice recognition program translated a speech given by Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft’s top scientist, into Mandarin Chinese.

Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs.

The advances have led to widespread enthusiasm among researchers who design software to perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. They offer the promise of machines that converse with humans and perform tasks like driving cars and working in factories, raising the specter of automated robots that could replace human workers.

The technology, called deep learning, has already been put to use in services like Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant, which is based on Nuance Communications’ speech recognition service, and in Google’s Street View, which uses machine vision to identify specific addresses.

But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just “neural nets” for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain.

“There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,” said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. “The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed.”

Artificial intelligence researchers are acutely aware of the dangers of being overly optimistic. Their field has long been plagued by outbursts of misplaced enthusiasm followed by equally striking declines.

In the 1960s, some computer scientists believed that a workable artificial intelligence system was just 10 years away. In the 1980s, a wave of commercial start-ups collapsed, leading to what some people called the “A.I. winter.”

But recent achievements have impressed a wide spectrum of computer experts. In October, for example, a team of graduate students studying with the University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton won the top prize in a contest sponsored by Merck to design software to help find molecules that might lead to new drugs.

From a data set describing the chemical structure of 15 different molecules, they used deep-learning software to determine which molecule was most likely to be an effective drug agent.

The achievement was particularly impressive because the team decided to enter the contest at the last minute and designed its software with no specific knowledge about how the molecules bind to their targets. The students were also working with a relatively small set of data; neural nets typically perform well only with very large ones.

“This is a really breathtaking result because it is the first time that deep learning won, and more significantly it won on a data set that it wouldn’t have been expected to win at,” said Anthony Goldbloom, chief executive and founder of Kaggle, a company that organizes data science competitions, including the Merck contest.

Advances in pattern recognition hold implications not just for drug development but for an array of applications, including marketing and law enforcement. With greater accuracy, for example, marketers can comb large databases of consumer behavior to get more precise information on buying habits. And improvements in facial recognition are likely to make surveillance technology cheaper and more commonplace.

Artificial neural networks, an idea going back to the 1950s, seek to mimic the way the brain absorbs information and learns from it. In recent decades, Dr. Hinton, 64 (a great-great-grandson of the 19th-century mathematician George Boole, whose work in logic is the foundation for modern digital computers), has pioneered powerful new techniques for helping the artificial networks recognize patterns.

Modern artificial neural networks are composed of an array of software components, divided into inputs, hidden layers and outputs. The arrays can be “trained” by repeated exposures to recognize patterns like images or sounds.

These techniques, aided by the growing speed and power of modern computers, have led to rapid improvements in speech recognition, drug discovery and computer vision.

Deep-learning systems have recently outperformed humans in certain limited recognition tests.

Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.

The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.

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Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence

Hao Zhang/The New York Times

A voice recognition program translated a speech given by Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft’s top scientist, into Mandarin Chinese.

Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs.

The advances have led to widespread enthusiasm among researchers who design software to perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. They offer the promise of machines that converse with humans and perform tasks like driving cars and working in factories, raising the specter of automated robots that could replace human workers.

The technology, called deep learning, has already been put to use in services like Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant, which is based on Nuance Communications’ speech recognition service, and in Google’s Street View, which uses machine vision to identify specific addresses.

But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just “neural nets” for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain.

“There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,” said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. “The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed.”

Artificial intelligence researchers are acutely aware of the dangers of being overly optimistic. Their field has long been plagued by outbursts of misplaced enthusiasm followed by equally striking declines.

In the 1960s, some computer scientists believed that a workable artificial intelligence system was just 10 years away. In the 1980s, a wave of commercial start-ups collapsed, leading to what some people called the “A.I. winter.”

But recent achievements have impressed a wide spectrum of computer experts. In October, for example, a team of graduate students studying with the University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton won the top prize in a contest sponsored by Merck to design software to help find molecules that might lead to new drugs.

From a data set describing the chemical structure of 15 different molecules, they used deep-learning software to determine which molecule was most likely to be an effective drug agent.

The achievement was particularly impressive because the team decided to enter the contest at the last minute and designed its software with no specific knowledge about how the molecules bind to their targets. The students were also working with a relatively small set of data; neural nets typically perform well only with very large ones.

“This is a really breathtaking result because it is the first time that deep learning won, and more significantly it won on a data set that it wouldn’t have been expected to win at,” said Anthony Goldbloom, chief executive and founder of Kaggle, a company that organizes data science competitions, including the Merck contest.

Advances in pattern recognition hold implications not just for drug development but for an array of applications, including marketing and law enforcement. With greater accuracy, for example, marketers can comb large databases of consumer behavior to get more precise information on buying habits. And improvements in facial recognition are likely to make surveillance technology cheaper and more commonplace.

Artificial neural networks, an idea going back to the 1950s, seek to mimic the way the brain absorbs information and learns from it. In recent decades, Dr. Hinton, 64 (a great-great-grandson of the 19th-century mathematician George Boole, whose work in logic is the foundation for modern digital computers), has pioneered powerful new techniques for helping the artificial networks recognize patterns.

Modern artificial neural networks are composed of an array of software components, divided into inputs, hidden layers and outputs. The arrays can be “trained” by repeated exposures to recognize patterns like images or sounds.

These techniques, aided by the growing speed and power of modern computers, have led to rapid improvements in speech recognition, drug discovery and computer vision.

Deep-learning systems have recently outperformed humans in certain limited recognition tests.

Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.

The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.

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G.E. Looks to Industry for the Next Digital Disruption

SAN RAMON, Calif. — When Sharoda Paul finished a postdoctoral fellowship last year at the Palo Alto Research Center, she did what most of her peers do — considered a job at a big Silicon Valley company, in her case, Google. But instead, Ms. Paul, a 31-year-old expert in social computing, went to work for General Electric.

Ms. Paul is one of more than 250 engineers recruited in the last year and a half to G.E.’s new software center here, in the East Bay of San Francisco. The company plans to increase that work force of computer scientists and software developers to 400, and to invest $1 billion in the center by 2015. The buildup is part of G.E’s big bet on what it calls the “industrial Internet,” bringing digital intelligence to the physical world of industry as never before.

The concept of Internet-connected machines that collect data and communicate, often called the “Internet of Things,” has been around for years. Information technology companies, too, are pursuing this emerging field. I.B.M. has its “Smarter Planet” projects, while Cisco champions the “Internet of Everything.”

But G.E.’s effort, analysts say, shows that Internet-era technology is ready to sweep through the industrial economy much as the consumer Internet has transformed media, communications and advertising over the last decade.

In recent months, Ms. Paul has donned a hard hat and safety boots to study power plants. She has ridden on a rail locomotive and toured hospital wards. “Here, you get to work with things that touch people in so many ways,” she said. “That was a big draw.”

G.E. is the nation’s largest industrial company, a producer of aircraft engines, power plant turbines, rail locomotives and medical imaging equipment. It makes the heavy-duty machinery that transports people, heats homes and powers factories, and lets doctors diagnose life-threatening diseases.

G.E. resides in a different world from the consumer Internet. But the major technologies that animate Google and Facebook are also vital ingredients in the industrial Internet — tools from artificial intelligence, like machine-learning software, and vast streams of new data. In industry, the data flood comes mainly from smaller, more powerful and cheaper sensors on the equipment.

Smarter machines, for example, can alert their human handlers when they will need maintenance, before a breakdown. It is the equivalent of preventive and personalized care for equipment, with less downtime and more output.

“These technologies are really there now, in a way that is practical and economic,” said Mark M. Little, G.E.’s senior vice president for global research.

G.E.’s embrace of the industrial Internet is a long-term strategy. But if its optimism proves justified, the impact could be felt across the economy.

The outlook for technology-led economic growth is a subject of considerable debate. In a recent research paper, Robert J. Gordon, a prominent economist at Northwestern University, argues that the gains from computing and the Internet have petered out in the last eight years.

Since 2000, Mr. Gordon asserts, invention has focused mainly on consumer and communications technologies, including smartphones and tablet computers. Such devices, he writes, are “smaller, smarter and more capable, but do not fundamentally change labor productivity or the standard of living” in the way that electric lighting or the automobile did.

But others say such pessimism misses the next wave of technology. “The reason I think Bob Gordon is wrong is precisely because of the kind of thing G.E. is doing,” said Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at M.I.T.’s Center for Digital Business.

Today, G.E. is putting sensors on everything, be it a gas turbine or a hospital bed. The mission of the engineers in San Ramon is to design the software for gathering data, and the clever algorithms for sifting through it for cost savings and productivity gains. Across the industries it covers, G.E. estimates such efficiency opportunities at as much as $150 billion.

Some industrial Internet projects are already under way. First Wind, an owner and operator of 16 wind farms in America, is a G.E. customer for wind turbines. It has been experimenting with upgrades that add more sensors, controls and optimization software.

The new sensors measure temperature, wind speeds, location and pitch of the blades. They collect three to five times as much data as the sensors on turbines of a few years ago, said Paul Gaynor, chief executive of First Wind. The data is collected and analyzed by G.E. software, and the operation of each turbine can be tweaked for efficiency. For example, in very high winds, turbines across an entire farm are routinely shut down to prevent damage from rotating too fast. But more refined measurement of wind speeds might mean only a portion of the turbines need to be shut down. In wintry conditions, turbines can detect when they are icing up, and speed up or change pitch to knock off the ice.

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Protests Erupt After Egypt’s Leader Seizes New Power

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Egyptians in central Cairo ran from tear gas during clashes with the police on Friday. Protesters took to the streets in several cities. More Photos »

CAIRO — Protests erupted across Egypt on Friday, as opponents of President Mohamed Morsi clashed with his supporters over a presidential edict that gave him unchecked authority and polarized an already divided nation while raising a specter, the president’s critics charged, of a return to autocracy.  

In an echo of the uprising 22 months ago, thousands of protesters chanted for the downfall of Mr. Morsi’s government in Cairo, while others ransacked the offices of the president’s former party in Suez, Alexandria and other cities.

Mr. Morsi spoke to his supporters in front of the presidential palace here, imploring the public to trust his intentions as he cast himself as a protector of the revolution and a fledgling democracy.

In a speech that was by turns defensive and conciliatory, he ultimately gave no ground to the critics who now were describing him as a pharaoh, in another echo of the insult once reserved for the deposed president, Hosni Mubarak.

“God’s will and elections made me the captain of this ship,” Mr. Morsi said.

The battles that raged on Friday — over power, legitimacy and the mantle of the revolution — posed a sharp challenge not only to Mr. Morsi but also to his opponents, members of secular, leftist and liberal groups whose crippling divisions have stifled their agenda and left them unable to confront the more popular Islamist movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The crisis over his power grab came just days after the Islamist leader won international praise for his pragmatism, including from the United States, for brokering a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel.

On Friday, the State Department expressed muted concern over Mr. Morsi’s decision. “One of the aspirations of the revolution was to ensure that power would not be overly concentrated in the hands of any one person or institution,” said the State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland.

She said, “The current constitutional vacuum in Egypt can only be resolved by the adoption of a constitution that includes checks and balances, and respects fundamental freedoms, individual rights and the rule of law consistent with Egypt’s international commitments.”

But the White House was notably silent after it had earlier this week extolled the emerging relationship between President Obama and Mr. Morsi and credited a series of telephone calls between the two men with helping to mediate the cease-fire in Gaza.

For Mr. Morsi, who seemed to be saying to the nation that it needed to surrender the last checks on his power in order to save democracy from Mubarak-era judges, the challenge was to convince Egyptians that the ends justified his means.

But even as he tried, thousands of protesters marched to condemn his decision. Clashes broke out between the president’s supporters and his critics, and near Tahrir Square, the riot police fired tear gas and bird shot as protesters hurled stones and set fires.

Since Thursday, when Mr. Morsi issued the decree, the president and his supporters have argued that he acted precisely to gain the power to address the complaints of his critics, including the families of protesters killed during the uprising and its aftermath.

By placing his decisions above judicial review, the decree enabled him to replace a public prosecutor who had failed to win convictions against senior officers implicated in the killings of protesters.

The president and his supporters also argued that the decree insulated the Constituent Assembly, which is drafting the constitution, from meddling by Mubarak-era judges.

Since Mr. Mubarak’s ouster, courts have dissolved Parliament, kept a Mubarak loyalist as top prosecutor and disbanded the first Assembly.

But by ending legal appeals, the decree also removed a safety valve for critics who say the Islamist majority is dominating the drafting of the constitution.

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo, and Helene Cooper from Washington.

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The Lede Blog: Vignettes of Black Friday

With promotions, discounts and doorbusters already well under way on Thanksgiving Day itself, many big-box retailers are making Black Friday stretch longer than ever. The Lede is checking out the mood of American consumers in occasional vignettes Thursday and Friday as the economically critical holiday shopping season kicks off.

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The New Old Age Blog: Home Health Care Help by the Hour

Here is a bright idea that ought to spread: You call your home care agency and say you will need your mother’s aide for the normal two hours on Monday and Wednesday, but for just half an hour (to drive her to a doctor’s office) on Tuesday, then 90 minutes on Thursday. And the agency says, “Sure.”

It sounds logical to hire someone to help — with bathing, dressing, errands, meal preparation, medication reminders – for only as many hours as an older adult needs assistance. But it is actually unusual for companies to offer such flexibility.

The majority of agencies require a four-hour minimum. Having to spend $80  — the national average cost for home care is $21 an hour — if you only need $40 worth of help is a big barrier for families trying to keep their elderly relatives living at home longer. A few agencies allow you to hire for fewer than four hours, but at higher rates.

But Mission Healthcare in San Diego, Calif., a three-year-old agency that began with Medicare-certified skilled home nursing and hospice care, expanded to general home care this summer and decided that clients should be able to specify how much help they want – in 15-minute increments — and will pay for.

“We’ll come for as long as they need us to,” said Mark Kimsey, one of Mission’s four directors. “In one hour, a well-trained caregiver can get the client bathed and dressed, prepare three meals and have them organized for the day.” (I have to think that is a speedy caregiver with a not-too-frail client, but still … )

Can Mission, which charges $19 to $20 an hour, actually make money this way? Though overall the agency serves 1,100 clients, its fledgling home care business is still small: 30 aides caring for just 60 clients. The aides can get benefits if they work enough hours, a bonus for them and for consumers (better employees, lower turnover), but an additional cost for the company.

The directors say they are profitable already, and that the approach will succeed because more people will like the flexibility and potential savings, and sign up. It is also true, let’s acknowledge, that a person who can get by with an hour or two a day for now may well need more help eventually, a boost for Mission’s bottom line.

Competitors are no doubt watching to see if this works. I’m curious, too, to see if the policy catches on. “Consumers can change the marketplace if they want to,” Mr. Kimsey said. It would be nice to think that is true.

Would you use this kind of hourly service, if it were available?

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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The New Old Age Blog: Home Health Care Help by the Hour

Here is a bright idea that ought to spread: You call your home care agency and say you will need your mother’s aide for the normal two hours on Monday and Wednesday, but for just half an hour (to drive her to a doctor’s office) on Tuesday, then 90 minutes on Thursday. And the agency says, “Sure.”

It sounds logical to hire someone to help — with bathing, dressing, errands, meal preparation, medication reminders – for only as many hours as an older adult needs assistance. But it is actually unusual for companies to offer such flexibility.

The majority of agencies require a four-hour minimum. Having to spend $80  — the national average cost for home care is $21 an hour — if you only need $40 worth of help is a big barrier for families trying to keep their elderly relatives living at home longer. A few agencies allow you to hire for fewer than four hours, but at higher rates.

But Mission Healthcare in San Diego, Calif., a three-year-old agency that began with Medicare-certified skilled home nursing and hospice care, expanded to general home care this summer and decided that clients should be able to specify how much help they want – in 15-minute increments — and will pay for.

“We’ll come for as long as they need us to,” said Mark Kimsey, one of Mission’s four directors. “In one hour, a well-trained caregiver can get the client bathed and dressed, prepare three meals and have them organized for the day.” (I have to think that is a speedy caregiver with a not-too-frail client, but still … )

Can Mission, which charges $19 to $20 an hour, actually make money this way? Though overall the agency serves 1,100 clients, its fledgling home care business is still small: 30 aides caring for just 60 clients. The aides can get benefits if they work enough hours, a bonus for them and for consumers (better employees, lower turnover), but an additional cost for the company.

The directors say they are profitable already, and that the approach will succeed because more people will like the flexibility and potential savings, and sign up. It is also true, let’s acknowledge, that a person who can get by with an hour or two a day for now may well need more help eventually, a boost for Mission’s bottom line.

Competitors are no doubt watching to see if this works. I’m curious, too, to see if the policy catches on. “Consumers can change the marketplace if they want to,” Mr. Kimsey said. It would be nice to think that is true.

Would you use this kind of hourly service, if it were available?

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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The Shrewd Shopper Carries a Smartphone

Tim Gruber for The New York Times

From left, Tara Niebeling, Sarah Schmidt, Bridget Jewell and Erin Vande Steeg are members of the social media team at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn.

Retailers are trying to lure shoppers away from the Internet, where they have increasingly been shopping to avoid Black Friday madness, and back to the stores. The bait is technological tools that will make shopping on the busiest day of the year a little more sane — and give shoppers an edge over their competition.

Those with smartphones in hand will get better planning tools, prices and parking spots. Walmart has a map that shows shoppers exactly where the top Black Friday specials can be found. A Mall of America Twitter feed gives advice on traffic and gifts, and the Macy’s app sends special deals for every five minutes a shopper stays in a store.

“The crazy mad rush to camp out and the crazy mad rush to hit the doorbusters have really made people think, ‘I’m just going to stay home on Black Friday,’ ” said Carey Rossi, editor in chief of ConsumerSearch.com, a review site. “This is going to invite some people back and say, ‘You know what? It doesn’t have to be that crazy.’ ”

Part of the retailers’ strategy is to slap back at online stores like Amazon.com, which last year used apps to pick off shoppers as they browsed in physical stores. But the stores are also recognizing that shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving need not require an overnight wait in line, a helmet and elbow pads. A smartphone gives shoppers enough of an edge.

“This takes away that frantic Black Friday anxiety,” said Lawrence Fong, co-founder of BuyVia, an app that sends people price alerts and promotions. “While there’s a sport to it, life’s a little too short.”

Denise Fouts, 45, who works repairing fire and water damage in Chandler, Ariz., was already using apps, including Shopkick, Target’s app and one called Black Friday, before Thanksgiving to prepare for Black Friday. “There still are going to be the crowds, but at least I already know ahead of time what I’m going specifically for,” Ms. Fouts said.

Last week, Macy’s released an update to its app with about 300 Black Friday specials and their location. In the Herald Square store, for instance, the $49.99 cashmere sweater specials will be in the Broadway side of the fifth-floor women’s department.

“With the speed that people are shopping with on Black Friday, they need to be really efficient about how they’re spending their time,” said Jennifer Kasper, group vice president for digital media at Macy’s.

When shoppers keep the app open, Macy’s will start sending special deals to the phone every five minutes. The deals are not advertised elsewhere.

Walmart has had an app for several years, but recently introduced an in-store mode, which shows things like the current circular or food tastings when a shopper is near a certain location. Twelve percent of Walmart’s mobile revenue now comes from when a person is inside a store.

For Black Friday, the app will have a map of each store, with the precise location of the top sale items — so planners can determine the best way to run. “The blitz items are not where you think they would be, because for traffic reasons, maybe the hot game console is in the lawn and garden center,” said Gibu Thomas, senior vice president for mobile and digital for Walmart Global eCommerce.

Target is also testing a way-finding feature on its app at stores that include some in Seattle, Chicago and Los Angeles. If a shopper types in an item, the app will give its location.

Other app makers are betting that shoppers want apps that pull in information from many stores.

RedLaser, an eBay app, lets shoppers use their phones to compare prices and recently started using location data to give shoppers personalized promotions when they walk into stores, including items not on store shelves at Best Buy, for instance. RetailMeNot, which offers e-commerce coupons, now has offline coupons that will pop up on users’ cellphones when they step near 500 malls on Black Friday.

“Consumers are not going to download 40 different apps for 40 different stores,” said Cyriac Roeding, co-founder of Shopkick, a location-based app that gives shoppers points, redeemable for perks, when they walk into stores or scan certain items.

For Black Friday, Shopkick is publishing what it calls a little black book with the top doorbusters. Shoppers will earn extra points and rewards for shopping on Black Friday.

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Military Analysis: For Israel, Gaza Conflict Is Test for an Iran Confrontation

Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

An Israeli missile is launched from a battery. Officials said their antimissile system shot down 88 percent of all assigned targets.

WASHINGTON — The conflict that ended, for now, in a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel seemed like the latest episode in a periodic showdown. But there was a second, strategic agenda unfolding, according to American and Israeli officials: The exchange was something of a practice run for any future armed confrontation with Iran, featuring improved rockets that can reach Jerusalem and new antimissile systems to counter them.

It is Iran, of course, that most preoccupies Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama. While disagreeing on tactics, both have made it clear that time is short, probably measured in months, to resolve the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program.

And one key to their war-gaming has been cutting off Iran’s ability to slip next-generation missiles into the Gaza Strip or Lebanon, where they could be launched by Iran’s surrogates, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, during any crisis over sanctions or an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Michael B. Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States and a military historian, likened the insertion of Iranian missiles into Gaza to the Cuban missile crisis.

“In the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. was not confronting Cuba, but rather the Soviet Union,” Mr. Oren said Wednesday, as the cease-fire was declared. “In Operation Pillar of Defense,” the name the Israel Defense Force gave the Gaza operation, “Israel was not confronting Gaza, but Iran.”

It is an imprecise analogy. What the Soviet Union was slipping into Cuba 50 years ago was a nuclear arsenal. In Gaza, the rockets and parts that came from Iran were conventional, and, as the Israelis learned, still have significant accuracy problems. But from one point of view, Israel was using the Gaza battle to learn the capabilities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad — the group that has the closest ties to Iran — as well as to disrupt those links.

Indeed, the first strike in the eight-day conflict between Hamas and Israel arguably took place nearly a month before the fighting began — in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, as another mysterious explosion in the shadow war with Iran.

A factory said to be producing light arms blew up in spectacular fashion on Oct. 22, and within two days the Sudanese charged that it had been hit by four Israeli warplanes that easily penetrated the country’s airspace. Israelis will not talk about it. But Israeli and American officials maintain that Sudan has long been a prime transit point for smuggling Iranian Fajr rockets, the kind that Hamas launched against Tel Aviv and Jerusalem over recent days.

The missile defense campaign that ensued over Israeli territory is being described as the most intense yet in real combat anywhere — and as having the potential to change warfare in the same way that novel applications of air power in the Spanish Civil War shaped combat in the skies ever since.

Of course, a conflict with Iran, if a last-ditch effort to restart negotiations fails, would look different than what has just occurred. Just weeks before the outbreak in Gaza, the United States and European and Persian Gulf Arab allies were practicing at sea, working on clearing mines that might be dropped in shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz.

But in the Israeli and American contingency planning, Israel would face three tiers of threat in a conflict with Iran: the short-range missiles that have been lobbed in this campaign, medium-range rockets fielded by Hezbollah in Lebanon and long-range missiles from Iran.

The last of those three could include the Shahab-3, the missile Israeli and American intelligence believe could someday be fitted with a nuclear weapon if Iran ever succeeded in developing one and — the harder task — shrinking it to fit a warhead.

A United States Army air defense officer said that the American and Israeli militaries were “absolutely learning a lot” from this campaign that may contribute to a more effective “integration of all those tiered systems into a layered approach.”

The goal, and the challenge, is to link short-, medium- and long-range missile defense radar systems and interceptors against the different types of threats that may emerge in the next conflict.

Even so, a historic battle of missile versus missile defense has played out in the skies over Israel, with Israeli officials saying their Iron Dome system shot down 350 incoming rockets — 88 percent of all targets assigned to the missile defense interceptors. Israeli officials declined to specify the number of interceptors on hand to reload their missile-defense batteries.

Before the conflict began, Hamas was estimated to have amassed an arsenal of 10,000 to 12,000 rockets. Israeli officials say their pre-emptive strikes on Hamas rocket depots severely reduced the arsenal of missiles, both those provided by Iran and some built in Gaza on a Syrian design.

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Scandal-Scarred BBC Names Opera Chief as Leader

LONDON — The British Broadcasting Corporation sought to overcome its worst crisis in years on Thursday by appointing a former BBC news executive who went on to head the Royal Opera House as its new director general, urging him to rebuild public trust shredded by a scandal over botched reporting of sexual abuse.

The appointee, Tony Hall, 61, will replace George Entwistle who resigned earlier this month and became the most prominent casualty of the affair.

When Lord Hall takes over in March, the BBC said, his principal task will be to restore faith and confidence in the integrity of an organization that is not only a national institution and Britain’s public broadcaster, but also a sprawling bureaucracy financed by a compulsory license fee levied on most television-set owners.

Chris Patten, head of the supervisory BBC Trust which made the appointment, said Lord Hall, a former head of news at the BBC during a 28-year career before he joined the opera 11 years ago, was “the right person to lead the BBC out of its current crisis.”

His experience in journalism would be “invaluable as the BBC looks to rebuild its reputation,” Lord Patten said. According to British news report, Lord Hall was the only candidate the BBC Trust approached about the job.

The appointment won enthusiastic approval from a wide spectrum of politicians, media commentators and current and former BBC staff members. Many noted that Lord Hall had a record of innovation that included overseeing the launch of the BBC Web site, the broadcaster’s 24-hour news channel, and Radio 5 Live, a widely popular, news-and-sport  radio channel.

They pointed, too, to his record for turning around the fortunes of another prized British institution, the Royal Opera House, where he assumed control at a time of artistic and financial disarray and succeeded in stabilizing — as well as popularizing — what has long been seen as one of the world’s top opera houses.

Steve Hewlett, a former editor of “Panorama,” one of the BBC’s leading investigative programs, said Lord Hall had a reputation among BBC program-makers as “straightforward, honest, a man with no side to him” and “no pushover” in handling contentious issues.

“I think he brings to the BBC what is desperately needed, weight,” he said.

Ben Bradshaw, a former culture minister who was previously a BBC reporter, described Lord Hall as “a very good, calm operator,” “a good motivator” and decisive in stressful situations. “He’s a very safe pair of hands, and very decent, fair-minded individual,” Mr. Bradshaw said.

Lord Hall’s predecessor, Mr. Entwistle, resigned on Nov. 10 after disclosures that a flagship BBC current affairs program, “Newsnight,” had wrongly implicated a former Conservative politician in accusations of sexual abuse at a children’s home in North Wales in the 1970s and 1980s.

The error compounded earlier disclosures that the same program had canceled an investigation a year ago into accusations of sexual abuse of minors by the television host Jimmy Savile at a time when other departments at the corporation were planning Christmas tributes to Mr. Savile, who died in October 2011 at age 84.

Mr. Entwistle had been in office at the BBC for less than two months when he quit. He took over from Mark Thompson who became president and chief executive of The New York Times Company on Nov. 12.

In a statement to the BBC staff, Lord Patten said: “The past eight weeks have been very traumatic for the BBC.”

He added: “The key challenge will be re-establishing our reputation with the public.”

The scandals at “Newsnight” pushed the BBC to begin a series of internal inquiries about its culture and practices in the decades of suspected abuse by Mr. Savile and into its specific reasons for canceling the investigation into Mr. Savile last year.

Lord Patten said: “While there are still very serious questions to be answered by the ongoing inquiries, it is in the interests of license fee-payers that the BBC now starts to refocus on its main purpose — making great programs that audiences love and trust.”

John F. Burns reported from London, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

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