Last month, Nissan Motor Corp said its board remained committed to the carmaker's alliance with Renault SA and Mitsubishi Motors Corp, after directors met to discuss the ongoing investigation into former chairman Carlos Ghosn and ways to bolster governance.

For several decades, various types of artificial intelligence have been facing off with people in highly competitive games and then quickly destroying their human competition. AI long ago mastered chess, the Chinese board game Go and even the Rubik's cube, which it managed to solve in just 0.38 seconds. Now machines have a new game that will allow them to humiliate humans: Jenga, the popular game ---- and source of melodramatic 1980s commercials ---- in which players strategically remove pieces from an increasingly unstable tower of 54 blocks, placing each one on top until the entire structure collapses. A newly released video from MIT shows a robot developed by the school's engineers playing the game with surprising precision. The machine is quipped with a soft-pronged gripper, a force-sensing wrist cuff and an external camera, allowing the robot to perceive the tower's vulnerabilities the way a human might, according to Alberto Rodriguez, the Walter Henry Gale career development assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. "Unlike in more purely cognitive tasks or games such as chess or Go, playing the game of Jenga also requires mastery of physical skills such as probing, pushing, pulling, placing, and aligning pieces," Rodriguez said in a statement released by the school.

An android child struggles to control his emotions. Robots threaten to take away human jobs. These dark themes were explored by this year's Super Bowl commercials, with brands such as TurboTax, Olay and Sprint capitalizing on fears that technology is encroaching on our lives. Inc.'s Alexa, an increasingly ubiquitous digital assistant sold by one of the world's most powerful companies. Amazon had its own commercial, where it poked fun at Alexa.

A new study suggests that text-based CAPTCHAs are no longer safe. Researchers from Northwest University and Peking University in China, and Lancaster University in the U.K., say they developed a machine learning algorithm that can crack most text-based CAPTCHAs within 0.05 seconds. Northwest University's Fang Dingyi said the algorithm exhibited a more than 50% success rate on decoding text-based CAPTCHA schemes used by 50 popular websites within that timeframe. The tool uses a generative adversarial network that teaches a CAPTCHA generator program to produce large numbers of CAPTCHAs to train a solver. Said Fang, "This research suggests one can easily launch an attack on a new CAPTCHA scheme using [artificial intelligence]. It means that this first defense of many websites is no longer reliable."

The person controlling the robot wears an electroencephalography (EEG) cap, which measures the brain's electrical activity via the scalp. They then look at a screen that has several pre-selected metal seams for the robot to weld. When their chosen option flickers, it generates a specific electrical response in the brain detectable by the EEG.

If a local tech industry critic has his way, San Francisco could become the first US city to ban its agencies from using facial recognition technology. Aaron Peskin, a member of the city's Board of Supervisors, proposed the ban Tuesday as part of a suite of rules to enhance surveillance oversight. In addition to the ban on facial recognition technology, the ordinance would require city agencies to gain the board's approval before buying new surveillance technology, putting the burden on city agencies to publicly explain why they want the tools as well as the potential harms. It would also require an audit of any existing surveillance tech--things like gunshot-detection systems, surveillance cameras, or automatic license plate readers--in use by the city; officials would have to report annually on how the technology was used, community complaints, and with whom they share the data. Those rules would follow similar ordinances passed in nearby Oakland and Santa Clara County.

Intel announced Nauta, an open source deep learning project based on Kubernetes. The project comes with select open source components and Intel-developed custom applications, tools, and scripts for building deep learning models. According to Intel, Nauta provides a multi-user, distributed computing environment for running deep learning model training experiments on systems based on Intel Xeon processor. The software foundation for the distributed platform is built on Kubernetes – industry's leading container orchestration engine. Mainstream deep learning tools and frameworks such as TensorFlow, TensorBoard and Jupyter Hub are tightly integrated with the platform.

In the 11 months since 17 teachers and students were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, campuses across the country have started spending big on surveillance technology. The Lockport, New York, school district spent $1.4 million in state funds on a facial-recognition system. Schools in Michigan, Massachusetts, and Los Angeles have adopted artificial-intelligence software--prone to false positives--that scans students' Facebook and Twitter accounts for signs that they might become a shooter. In New Mexico, students as young as 6 are under acoustic surveillance, thanks to a gunshot-detection program originally developed for use by the military to track enemy snipers. Earlier this month, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission released its report on the safety and security failures that contributed to fatalities during last year's shooting.

The Galapagos Islands are famous for their exotic wildlife, which in most cases is not nearly as afraid of humans as it should be. Humans have done some seriously horrible things to the animals living there, like packing thousands of giant tortoises upside down on ships because they would stay alive without food or water for months and could then be eaten. People traveling to and living in the Galapagos have caused other serious problems to the fragile ecosystem: In addition to devastating oil spills, humans have introduced numerous invasive species to the islands. In particular, goats, which were brought on purpose, and rats, which were brought accidentally, have been catastrophic for endemic animal populations. For decades, the Galapagos National Park Directorate (DPNG) has been working to remove invasive species island by island, including tens of thousands of feral goats, pigs, and donkeys.