This week, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced a challenge to push the limits of robotic design and control. DARPA's Subterranean Challenge will require teams to have robots maneuver objects through three different environments: a series of caves, a bunker-like "urban environment," and a labyrinth of confined tunnels. While the robots will be remote-controlled, they'll need some serious autonomous skills. They will need to rapidly map and explore unfamiliar environments even when communications are spotty and conditions are challenging for sensors. The teams will be allowed to use as many different types of robot as they like, but this will mean dealing with greater complexity in communications and coordination.

A screen shows a demonstration of the cognitive level of a facial recognition software at the Ericsson AB booth at the Mobile World Congress Shanghai in Shanghai, China, on Thursday, June 28, 2018. The global videos surveillance market is expected to post a compound annual growth rate of close to 11% during the period 2018-2022 according to Technavio. The potential benefits of leveraging artificial intelligence (A) in the physical security industry have pros and cons on both sides, but the debate over the ethical ways to leverage AI and surveillance continues as more and more surveillance systems are getting the brains to match what they see. AI startups like Boulder AI, which offers a vision-as-a-service and IC Realtime, which lets you search and analyze your video feeds from CCTV system; are gaining traction. Alongside the Chinese facial recognition startups like Megvii's Face with $600 million in private equity; SenseTime with $62o million from a series C; and, Yitu Technology with $300 million from a series C, the potential uses of facial recognition technology are well funded.

Local authorities have established areas around the airport that are safe to fly for drone operations and qualify for automatic authorization,

Proponents of 5G say it will offer ultra-fast connections, speedier data downloads, and be able to handle millions more connections than 4G mobile networks can cope with today. One use for 5G is self-driving cars, but will they really need it? The telecoms industry envisions autonomous cars equipped with hundreds of sensors collecting and receiving information all at once over a network. It calls this concept "Vehicle-to-everything" (V2X). To achieve this, the car needs to detect blind spots and avoid collisions with people, animals or other vehicles on the road.

Supervised machine-learning models boast remarkable predictive capabilities. But can you trust your model? Will it work in deployment? What else can it tell you about the world? Models should be not only good, but also interpretable, yet the task of interpretation appears underspecified.

Ask poverty attorney Joanna Green Brown for an example of a client who fell through the cracks and lost social services benefits they may have been eligible for because of a program driven by artificial intelligence (AI), and you will get an earful. There was the "highly educated and capable" client who had had heart failure and was on a heart and lung transplant wait list. The questions he was presented in a Social Security benefits application "didn't encapsulate his issue" and his child subsequently did not receive benefits. "It's almost impossible for an AI system to anticipate issues related to the nuance of timing," Green Brown says. Then there's the client who had to apply for a Medicaid recertification, but misread a question and received a denial a month later.

Today's artificial intelligence systems, including the artificial neural networks broadly inspired by the neurons and connections of the nervous system, perform wonderfully at tasks with known constraints. They also tend to require a lot of computational power and vast quantities of training data. That all serves to make them great at playing chess or Go, at detecting if there's a car in an image, at differentiating between depictions of cats and dogs. "But they are rather pathetic at composing music or writing short stories," said Konrad Kording, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. "They have great trouble reasoning meaningfully in the world." Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

AI robots and self-driving cars might steal the headlines, but the next big leap in technology will be advances in voice services, according to Google's head of search, Ben Gomes, who says that a better understanding of common language is crucial to the future of the internet. "Speech recognition and the understanding of language is core to the future of search and information," said Gomes . "But there are lots of hard problems such as understanding how a reference works, understanding what'he', 'she' or'it' refers to in a sentence. It's not at all a trivial problem to solve in language and that's just one of the millions of problems to solve in language." Gomes was speaking to the Guardian ahead of Google's 20th anniversary on 24 September, more than seven years after Google launched its first voice service as simple speech-to-text for search. Now built into Google's search and its AI voice assistant which is embedded in billions of smartphones around the globe, voice recognition has become essential in developing countries with low literacy rates.

Google looks to make a big splash at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show, touting the Google Assistant. Apple TV has Siri, Amazon's Fire TV has Alexa, and now, Roku has joined forces with the Google Assistant to bring an established voice to its popular streaming players and branded TVs. Roku, the No. 1 streaming player, had offered its own voice search, but Google's Assistant, generally accessed via Google Home speakers, is more widely used by the public. Roku, in announcing new products for the fall Monday, didn't specify a time frame for the change, only saying it would be "soon," and for most existing devices. Additionally, the Roku TVs will have more functionality with Google, allowing viewers to say "Hey, Google," to turn their TV on and off, turn up the volume, mute, switch inputs and change channels, but only if the set is connected to an antenna.