England's South Central Ambulance Service (SCAS) is rolling out robotic paramedics to perform mechanical CPR, the BBC's Science Focus reports. The model, dubbed the LUCAS 3, can perform chest compressions on patients, freeing up paramedics to perform other urgent tasks. "These devices don't fatigue or change the delivery in any way, meaning high quality CPR can be delivered for as long as is required while freeing up the paramedic, keeping them seated and belted and able to focus on other critical aspects of patient care on a journey," John Black, the ambulance service's medical director, said in a statement. "It ultimately acts as a robotic third crew member for our teams." Rise of the robot paramedics: The administration of proper and consistent chest compressions can greatly improve the odds of a patient's survival, especially in cases of cardiac arrest.

Eric Schmidt, who leads a U.S. government initiative to integrate AI into national security, warned Monday that the EU's AI transparency requirements would be "very harmful to Europe." Speaking at POLITICO's AI Summit, Schmidt criticized the provisions of the EU's AI bill that require algorithms to be transparent. "It's just a proposal, but if you would adopt it without modification, it would be a very big setback for Europe," said Schmidt, who chairs the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) and is a former CEO of Google. The EU's proposal "requires that the system would be able to explain itself. But machine learning systems cannot fully explain how they make their decisions," Schmidt said.

A military drone may have autonomously attacked humans for the first time without being instructed to do so, according to a recent report by the UN Security Council. The report, published in March, claimed that the AI drone – Kargu-2 quadcopter – produced by Turkish military tech company STM, attacked retreating soldiers loyal to Libyan General Khalifa Haftar. The 548-page report by the UN Security Council's Panel of Experts on Libya has not delved into details on if there were any deaths due to the incident, but it raises questions on whether global efforts to ban killer autonomous robots before they are built may be futile. Over the course of the year, the UN-recognized Government of National Accord pushed the Haftar Affiliated Forces (HAF) back from the Libyan capital Tripoli, and the drone may have been operational since January 2020, the experts noted. "Logistics convoys and retreating HAF were subsequently hunted down and remotely engaged by the unmanned combat aerial vehicles or the lethal autonomous weapons systems such as the STM Kargu-2," the UN report noted.

The days of drivers sneaking dangerous downward glances at directions on their phones may soon come to an end. Automakers are poised to introduce technology on new cars, trucks and SUVs that projects directions onto the windshield and draws a circle around pedestrians or deer on the roadway. Depending on the vehicle, these augmented reality windshields may also display vehicle information, identify ice patches and, eventually, serve as a screen for entertainment purposes when self-driving cars become a reality. Brands poised to debut the technology include Kia, Hyundai, Cadillac and Audi. Advocates say that the windshields show how technology can be used to reduce driver distraction, keeping drivers' eyes on the road instead of darting toward an infotainment screen or phone.

Researchers, industry executives, and government officials have long puzzled over how self-driving cars might change the planet. If you could do something else while stuck in traffic, would it change the way you use your car? Would you be willing to live farther from work? Alternatively, would the advent of shared self-driving cars prod you to ditch your personal vehicle for shared Ubers, making trips more efficient? Self-driving cars aren't here yet, and it will likely be years, or decades, before most Americans have access to the technology, which is still in development.

The following paper, "Simba: Scaling Deep-Learning Inference with Chiplet-Based Architecture," by Shao et al. presents a scalable deep learning accelerator architecture that tackles issues ranging from chip integration technology to workload partitioning and non-uniform latency effects on deep neural network performance. Through a hardware prototype, they present a timely study of cross-layer issues that will inform next-generation deep learning hardware, software, and neural network architectures. Chip vendors face significant challenges with the continued slowing of Moore's Law causing the time between new technology nodes to increase, sky-rocketing manufacturing costs for silicon, and the end of Dennard scaling. In the absence of device scaling, domain specialization provides an opportunity for architects to deliver more performance and greater energy efficiency. However, domain specialization is an expensive proposition for chip manufacturers.

Moore's Law and Dennard scaling are waning. Yet the demand for computer systems with ever-increasing computational capabilities and power/energy-efficiency continues unabated, fueled by advances in big data and machine learning. The future of fields as disparate as data analytics, robotics, vision, natural language processing, and more, rests on the continued scaling of system performance per watt, even as traditional CMOS scaling ends. The following paper proposes a surprising, novel, and creative approach to post-Moore's Law computing by rethinking the digital/analog boundary. The central idea is to revisit the idea of data representation and show how it is a critical design choice that cuts across hardware and software layers.

In May 1948, women were strikingly prominent in ACM. Founded just months earlier as the "Eastern Association for Computing Machinery," the new professional society boldly aimed to "advance the science, development, construction, and application of the new machinery for computing, reasoning, and other handling of information."36 No fewer than 27 women were ACM members, and many were leaders in the emerging field.a Among them were the pioneer programmers Jean Bartik, Ruth Lichterman, and Frances Snyder of ENIAC fame; the incomparable Grace Murray Hopper who soon energized programming languages; Florence Koons from the National Bureau of Standards and U.S. Census Bureau; and noted mathematician-programmer Ida Rhodes.26 During the war, Gertrude Blanch had organized a massive human computing effort (a mode of computation made visible in the 2016 film Hidden Figures47) and, for her later service to the US Air Force, became "one of the most well-known computer scientists and certainly the most visible woman in the field."24,25 Mina Rees, a mathematics Ph.D. like Hopper and Blanch, notably funded mathematics and computing through the Office of Naval Research (1946–1953), later serving as the first female president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1949, Rees was among the 33 women (including at least seven ACM women) who participated in an international conference at Harvard University, chairing a heavyweight session on "Recent Developments in Computing Machinery."29