In 2018, several high-profile controversies involving AI served as a wake-up call for technologists, policymakers, and the public. The technology may have brought us welcome advances in many fields, but it can also fail catastrophically when built shoddily or applied carelessly. It's hardly a surprise, then, that Americans have mixed support for the continued development of AI and overwhelmingly agree that it should be regulated, according to a new study from the Center for the Governance of AI and Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. These are important lessons for policymakers and technologists to consider in the discussion on how best to advance and regulate AI, says Allan Dafoe, director of the center and coauthor of the report. "There isn't currently a consensus in favor of developing advanced AI, or that it's going to be good for humanity," he says.

All major UK airports now have or will soon have military grade anti-drone equipment, the government says. It comes after the military were called in to help when drone sightings caused delays for around an hour at Heathrow on Tuesday. And drone sightings at Gatwick caused major disruption affecting 140,000 passengers before Christmas. Earlier, the defence secretary said it would "not be right" to ask the RAF to respond to similar incidents in future. Gavin Williamson said all commercial airports needed to invest in anti-drone technology.

Toyota today revealed some of the inner workings of an automation package meant to help drivers rather than replace them. The company also said that if that package had been in operation, it could have prevented or mitigated a recent three-car accident in California. The announcement came at CES 2019, which takes place this week in Las Vegas. Toyota has often spoken of its two-stage research project for self-driving cars. In the long run, it plans to offer a truly driverless technology called Chauffeur.

This week at CES 2019, UBTECH Robotics (which was valued at $5 billion as of mid-2018) is announcing a major update to a walking robot first demonstrated at CES 2018. UBTECH's Walker has gained a torso, arms, hands, and a head, and is now as humanoid as bipedal robots get. UBTECH has posted a couple of new videos, and answered some questions about Walker's capabilities and where our expectations should be. "Walker is your agile smart companion--an intelligent, bipedal humanoid robot that aims to one day be an indispensable part of your family. Standing 4.75 feet (1.45 m) tall and weighing 170 lbs (77 kg), the new version of Walker is more advanced than ever, including arms and hands with the ability to grasp and manipulate objects, a refined torso with improved self-balancing, smooth and stable walking in difficult environments, and multi-modal interaction including voice, vision, and touch. Walker has 36 high-performance actuators and a full range of sensing systems that work together to insure smooth and fast walking."

Usually, CES robots are a little sad, but Temi is different. Instead of pretending their robot can do a bunch of things it can't, like hold a conversation, the team at Temi focused on the things it can. The Temi Robot has 16 sensors (including LiDAR) that help it recognize people and map out your home. With the tap of a button it can follow you, or go anywhere you ask it. When it gets there, it can play music or media, wirelessly charge devices, act as an Alexa device, and work as a video chat or telepresence bot, among other things.

Police will be handed extra powers to combat drones after the mass disruption at Gatwick airport in the run-up to Christmas. Gatwick was repeatedly forced to close between 19 and 21 December due to reported drone sightings, affecting about 1,000 flights. In response the government has announced a package of measures which include plans to give police the power to land, seize and search drones. The Home Office will also begin to test and evaluate the use of counter-drone technology at airports and prisons. The exclusion zone around airports will be extended to approximately a 5km-radius (3.1 miles), with additional extensions from runway ends.

In the beginning, archaeologists believe, the first breads were created using some of the most rudimentary technologies in human history: fire and stone. In the region that now encompasses Jordan, one of the world's most ancient examples -- a flatbread vaguely resembling pita and made from wild cereal grains and water -- was cooked in large fireplaces using flat basalt stones, according to Reuters. The taste is "gritty and salty," Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, a University of Copenhagen postdoctoral researcher in archaeobotany, told the news service. "But it is a bit sweet, as well." More than 10,000 years later, bread has clearly evolved but, perhaps, not as dramatically as the technology being used to bake it.

During the twentieth century, discoveries in mathematical logic revolutionized our understanding of the very foundations of mathematics. In 1931, the logician Kurt Gödel showed that, in any system of axioms that is expressive enough to model arithmetic, some true statements will be unprovable1. And in the following decades, it was demonstrated that the continuum hypothesis -- which states that no set of distinct objects has a size larger than that of the integers but smaller than that of the real numbers -- can be neither proved nor refuted using the standard axioms of mathematics2–4. They identify a machine-learning problem whose fate depends on the continuum hypothesis, leaving its resolution forever beyond reach. Machine learning is concerned with the design and analysis of algorithms that can learn and improve their performance as they are exposed to data.

Two scientists at the University of Washington School of Medicine have developed a software program that represents the first use of deep artificial neural networks in squeak detection. University of Washington (UW) School of Medicine researchers have developed a software program to identify and decode rodent vocalizations. The DeepSqueak deep neural network converts audio signals into an image, or sonogram, which could be further refined with machine-vision algorithms developed for self-driving cars. Said the UW School of Medicine's Russell Marx, "DeepSqueak uses biomimetic algorithms that learn to isolate vocalizations by being given labeled examples of vocalizations and noise." According to co-developer Kevin Coffey, the program could distinguish between about 20 kinds of rodent calls.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Mercedes-Benz's is not aiming to be the first manufacturer to develop a self-driving car but it wants to be among the first two players able to scale up the technology, Mercedes-Benz executive Christoph Schroeder told German paper Welt am Sonntag.