Artificial intelligence researchers from nearly 30 countries are boycotting a South Korean university over concerns a new lab in partnership with a leading defence company could lead to "killer robots". More than 50 leading academics signed the letter calling for a boycott of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and its partner, defence manufacturer Hanwha Systems. The researchers said they would not collaborate with the university or host visitors from KAIST over fears it sought to "accelerate the arms race to develop" autonomous weapons. "There are plenty of great things you can do with AI that save lives, including in a military context, but to openly declare the goal is to develop autonomous weapons and have a partner like this sparks huge concern," said Toby Walsh, the organiser of the boycott and a professor at the University of New South Wales. "This is a very respected university partnering with a very ethically dubious partner that continues to violate international norms."

The ability to identify sentiment in text, referred to as sentiment analysis, is one which is natural to adult humans. This task is, however, not one which a computer can perform by default. Identifying sentiments in an automated, algorithmic manner will be a useful capability for business and research in their search to understand what consumers think about their products or services and to understand human sociology. Here we propose two new Genetic Algorithms (GAs) for the task of automated text sentiment analysis. The GAs learn whether words occurring in a text corpus are either sentiment or amplifier words, and their corresponding magnitude. Sentiment words, such as 'horrible', add linearly to the final sentiment. Amplifier words in contrast, which are typically adjectives/adverbs like 'very', multiply the sentiment of the following word. This increases, decreases or negates the sentiment of the following word. The sentiment of the full text is then the sum of these terms. This approach grows both a sentiment and amplifier dictionary which can be reused for other purposes and fed into other machine learning algorithms. We report the results of multiple experiments conducted on large Amazon data sets. The results reveal that our proposed approach was able to outperform several public and/or commercial sentiment analysis algorithms.

Technology used by Nasa for studying faint stars and galaxies could be used to trap poachers in a rare collaboration between astronomers and ecologists. The system combines flying drones, infra-red thermal imaging, and artificial intelligence to monitor animals at night when most poaching occurs. In an early field trial in South Africa, it was used to detect elusive riverine rabbits, one of the most endangered mammals in the world. Researchers hope in future the heat-sensitive drones will make it easier to track animals such as rhinos and spot poachers hunting them under cover of darkness. Technology for studying faint stars and galaxies could be used to trap poachers in a rare collaboration between astronomers and ecologists.

It might not have been the best day to release a trailer for the latest Call of Duty: WWII downloadable content, but if you're in the business of selling simulated gun violence as entertainment, there's never really a good day. So here it is, the trailer for Call of Duty: WWII's new DLC pack, The War Machine. As you'll see, it lets players experience diverse gameplay modes like: Of course, with the exception of the zombie modes, these are not just random arenas to fire guns at other human beings, but semi-accurate recreations of locations where large numbers of human beings fired guns at each other in the past. So any distaste you might feel at digital images of a soldier burning to death needs to be tempered by the fact that players can learn historical facts about a great civilizational conflict (and one that video games have barely scratched the surface of). For instance, did you know the rate of fire on the German MG 15 was carefully tuned until it could keep a perfect triplet beat to accompany "This is my World," by Esterly, a song that wouldn't even be recorded until 2016? Did you know it was a bad idea to stand in the blast trench of a V2 launch site during ignition?

A couple of years ago, Zipline created a national drone delivery system to ship blood and drugs to remote medical centers in Rwanda. Now it has developed what it claims is the world's swiftest commercial delivery drone, with a top speed of 128 kilometers an hour (a hair shy of 80 miles per hour). Zipline is hoping its new fixed-wing aerial robot, which is both speedier and easier to maintain than its predecessor, will help it win business in an industry that's attracted plenty of big players. They include Amazon, which has been testing its Prime Air drone delivery service for years in the UK and elsewhere, and Project Wing, part of Alphabet's secretive X lab, which is using its drones to deliver pharmaceuticals and burritos in a pilot project in Australia. Soon these and other companies will be able to experiment more in America, too.

Are you a woman interested in Machine Learning and Data Science? We meet to socialize and to discuss machine learning and data science in an informal, vendor-neutral setting. Our purpose is to grow the talent and community of women in these fields. We plan to meet quarterly in the evenings. Topics will include presentations from practitioners about their work in machine learning and data science, talks from academics about their related research, and tutorials.

We've been following Zipline very closely for the last few years. The delivery drone startup has been operating in Rwanda since October of 2016, using small autonomous fixed-wing aircraft to paradrop critical blood products to rural medical clinics. The system is able to get blood from a centralized distribution center to where it's needed in minutes, independent of time of day, traffic, or weather. Zipline now manages 20 percent of rural Rwanda's blood supply, and has flown more than 300,000 kilometers (km) worth of commercial deliveries, carrying some 7,000 units of blood. Today, Zipline is announcing major upgrades to its entire delivery system, introducing a bigger drone that can deliver blood faster and more efficiently than ever.

Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are becoming popular in multilingual societies. This trend induces portmanteau of South Asian languages with English. The blend of multiple languages as code-mixed data has recently become popular in research communities for various NLP tasks. Code-mixed data consist of anomalies such as grammatical errors and spelling variations. In this paper, we leverage the contextual property of words where the different spelling variation of words share similar context in a large noisy social media text. We capture different variations of words belonging to same context in an unsupervised manner using distributed representations of words. Our experiments reveal that preprocessing of the code-mixed dataset based on our approach improves the performance in state-of-the-art part-of-speech tagging (POS-tagging) and sentiment analysis tasks.

Diamond Bank – Nigeria's fastest growing retail bank – has launched an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chatbot, leveraging pioneering technology to reach more customers with an enhanced service in Nigeria. The Chatbot named'Ada' uses AI technology to provide a human-like interaction and personalized experience for Diamond Bank customers. As Ada learns from past interactions, Diamond can offer more relevant and timely solutions that are really simple for customers to use. Ada enables transactions such as airtime purchase, bill payments, stock trading, and money transfers all via a social network platform. Already live on Facebook Messenger, the most popular social chat programme, Ada will also be on other messaging platforms in the coming months.

Neil Sahota is an IBM Master Inventor and World Wide Business Development Leader in the company's Watson Group. He works to create solutions powered by Watson, the supercomputer that he helped to develop which famously competed on the TV quiz show Jeopardy! Sahota is a big believer in the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the lives of people and the health of the environment, and while technology won't solve all human or ecological problems, it has an important role to play, prompting Mongabay to ask him for an interview. Erik Hoffner for Mongabay: At our conservation tech site Wildtech, we increasingly publish news about how AI and machine learning can be applied to conservation, from using eBird to track songbird populations to applications that can curtail illegal rainforest logging. What are your favorite examples of how AI can aid the environment?