Think that AI will help put a stop to fake news? The Department of Defense is funding a project that will try to determine whether the increasingly real-looking fake video and audio generated by artificial intelligence might soon be impossible to distinguish from the real thing--even for another AI system. This summer, under a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the world's leading digital forensics experts will gather for an AI fakery contest. They will compete to generate the most convincing AI-generated fake video, imagery, and audio--and they will also try to develop tools that can catch these counterfeits automatically. The contest will include so-called "deepfakes," videos in which one person's face is stitched onto another person's body. Rather predictably, the technology has already been used to generate a number of counterfeit celebrity porn videos.

They call Amazon the everything store--and Tuesday, the world learned about one of its lesser-known but provocative products. Police departments pay the company to use facial-recognition technology Amazon says can "identify persons of interest against a collection of millions of faces in real-time." More than two dozen nonprofits wrote to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to ask that he stop selling the technology to police, after the ACLU of Northern California revealed documents to shine light on the sales. The letter argues that the technology will inevitably be misused, accusing the company of providing "a powerful surveillance system readily available to violate rights and target communities of color." The revelation highlights a key question: What laws or regulations govern police use of the facial-recognition technology?

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Olympic gymnast Simone Biles has a signature move that is named after her because she is the only woman on earth capable of performing it. The move starts as a layout double flip, but more than halfway through suddenly develops a twist that rotates her body through an extra 180 degrees to land face first. The only visible source of this sudden change in rotation is a small motion of one hand as her arm goes from straight to bent.

Most people visit the Swiss Alps to ski or hike, maybe to launder money. British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews went to find Frankenstein. Author Mary Shelley dreamed up her legendary science fiction tale while staying near the Alps, and their snowy peaks serve as a backdrop for the story. Mathews, a fan, brought along her old copy to read, letting the text guide her journey through the landscape. "My eyes scanned the barren white lands for Frankenstein's creature, crossing the glacier at'super-human speed'," she writes in the introduction to her new photo book, In Search of Frankenstein - Mary Shelley's Nightmare. "I imagined catching a darting figure in my peripheral vision or coming across a makeshift cabin that had sheltered the fugitive for the night."

As Microsoft has been focused on developing speech recognition and natural language technology for over two decades, the company has a goal of expanding its vision where computers around the world can see, hear, talk and understand as humans. This led to the introduction of the Cognitive Services framework in 2016. The Cognitive Services framework revolves around the development of bots and the integration of speech recognition and natural language understanding into intelligent assistants. There are now over 1 million developers using Microsoft Cognitive Services and over 300,000 developers using the Azure Bot Service.

As Japan positions itself to take advantage of the growing trend in drones, another sector is popping up in the promising market -- drone schools. Industries ranging from agriculture to security are setting their eyes on the benefits of the device. And although the aerial vehicles are capable of autonomous flight, skilled pilots need to be on hand in case something goes wrong. "The industrial use of drones will grow more to replace some work previously handled by humans," said Kazunori Fujiwara, a spokesman at the Drone Pilot Association, a Tokyo-based group that promotes pilot education. "There are still not enough pilots. It's been just three or four years since drones started spreading, so we need to raise greater awareness," he said.

Artificial intelligence owes a lot of its smarts to Judea Pearl. In the 1980s he led efforts that allowed machines to reason probabilistically. In his latest book, The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect, he argues that artificial intelligence has been handicapped by an incomplete understanding of what intelligence really is. Three decades ago, a prime challenge in artificial-intelligence research was to program machines to associate a potential cause to a set of observable conditions. Pearl figured out how to do that using a scheme called Bayesian networks. Bayesian networks made it practical for machines to say that, given a patient who returned from Africa with a fever and body aches, the most likely explanation was malaria.

Apple hasn't shed much light on how its HomePod-connected speaker is selling, but research firm Strategy Analytics has some insight. The $349 speaker, Apple's high-end answer to the Amazon Echo and Google Home, doesn't look to be sizing up to an iPhone, iPad or even Apple Watch-sized hit. Strategy Analytics says Apple sold 600,000 HomePod speakers -- which first went on sale in February -- during the first quarter, representing 6% market share of the smart speaker market. At the same time, Amazon shipped some 4 million Echo speakers, representing 43.6% market share, to 2.4 million speakers for Google, which had 26.5% share. This is quite a drop for Amazon, which had 81.8% market share in the same quarter a year ago, to Google's then 12.4%.

Rats use brain cells called grid cells to help them navigate, and this ability has been recreated by an AI program.Credit: Al Fenn/LIFE Coll./Getty Scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) to recreate the complex neural codes that the brain uses to navigate through space. The feat demonstrates how powerful AI algorithms can assist conventional neuroscience research to test theories about the brain's workings -- but the approach is not going to put neuroscientists out of work just yet, say the researchers. The computer program, details of which were published in Nature on 9 May1, was developed by neuroscientists at University College London (UCL) and AI researchers at the London-based Google company DeepMind. It used a technique called deep learning -- a type of AI inspired by the structures in the brain -- to train a computer-simulated rat to track its position in a virtual environment.

North Korea has been secretly selling facial recognition software, a new report states. This photo shows a German official identified by a computer with an automatic facial recognition system that was not mentioned in the report. North Korea has been secretly selling facial recognition software, a new report states. This photo shows a German official identified by a computer with an automatic facial recognition system that was not mentioned in the report. North Korea has been secretly selling facial recognition technology, fingerprint scanning and other products overseas. That's what researchers at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies found by investigating the country's information technology networks.