Last month, over 3,000 Google employees signed a letter taking a stand against Google's collusion with the United States' drone assassination program, which has killed and maimed tens of thousands of people throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Google employees demanded that the company end its participation in "Project Maven," a system of mass drone surveillance integrated with the US drone warfare program, declaring, "We believe that Google should not be in the business of war." It called for the adoption of a policy stating that "neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology." Google's collusion with the drone assassination program highlights the growing integration of the major technology companies with the US military, which, having declared a new era of "great-power competition" with Russia and China, sees pressing Silicon Valley into its war plans as the only way to regain its military power on the world stage. Just as ominous is Google's role in mass domestic surveillance and censorship.

What do animals and galaxies have in common? The similarity is now helping conservationists monitor endangered animals that are often targeted by poachers. By deploying small drones with infrared cameras attached, scientists are developing tools for wildlife officials to watch these wild animals without disturbing them. At night, when poachers are most likely to strike, wildlife guards have a difficult time spotting animals in the dark. But on infrared cameras, they're impossible to miss.

Amazon has been working on its voice-enabled virtual assistant, Alexa, for years. It's how the company's Fire TV, its Echo smart speakers, and other Amazon devices are able to answer our questions--and know what we want. While we know Alexa is always listening, how does she think? And how much of what she hears does she "remember?" He's been at Amazon since 2004 and has led the Alexa team since 2011. In our interview, we discussed how Alexa understands our commands, what he makes of users' growing concerns over privacy, and why Alexa was laughing so creepily for some users recently.

As stragglers settle into their seats for general biology class, real-time captions of the professor's banter about general and special senses – "Which receptor picks up pain? An interpreter stands a few feet away and interprets the professor's spoken words into American Sign Language, the primary language used by the deaf in the US. Except for the real-time captions on the screens in front of the room, this is a typical class at the Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York. About 1,500 students who are deaf and hard of hearing are an integral part of campus life at the sprawling university, which has 15,000 undergraduates. Nearly 700 of the students who are deaf and hard of hearing take courses with students who are hearing, including several dozen in Sandra Connelly's general biology class of 250 students. The captions on the screens behind Connelly, who wears a headset, are generated by Microsoft Translator, an AI-powered communication technology. The system uses an ...

Look at China, which in 2017 outlined plans to become the global leader in AI by 2030 and has already made tremendous progress. Lung cancer is the most common cancer in the country and Chinese life insurer Ping An has developed AI that this year broke records for detecting lung nodules in CT scans. The hope is that this will help staff improve detection of lung cancer. Diagnostics is just one part of healthcare that is being transformed, and we've highlighted five applications for AI that could have a transformative effect on people around the globe. Those of us in countries with relatively good access to affordable healthcare might be so used to seeing a doctor face to face that a health appointment with an AI-powered machine sounds a little sinister. After all, healing people is associated with human touch.

SEATTLE, April 05, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Applexus Technologies, a full-service business and technology solutions company based in the Seattle area, announced the launch of a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) practice to provide AI software and services to clients. The newly launched team is part of Applexus Product and Innovation. The new practice supports a wide variety of AI services and solutions, through custom and packaged solutions, using emerging technologies such as deep learning, machine learning and big data analysis. The Applexus Chief Technologist and AI practice leader is Dr. Thomas Koickal, one of the longest-serving global practitioners of machine learning based technologies. His career of more than 20 years has included work at the University of Edinburgh, UK and Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, a research center of the Indian Space Research Organization.

On Day 1 of SXSW, the Fashion Innovation Alliance joined experts from L'Oréal, Heuritech and by REVEAL for a panel on AI for luxury, fashion and beauty--a topic that proved so popular SXSW had to turn people away as the room reached capacity well before the 11 A.M. panel began. The session represented the diversity of tech, fashion and beauty in terms of race, gender, geography and areas of expertise. Panelists traveled from Paris, New York, San Francisco and Washington, DC--all with varied backgrounds in the science of beauty, fashion, retail, machine learning and law. The session also included two female founders in tech--Megan Berry of by REVEAL and attorney and fashion tech strategist Kenya Wiley. The panelists' expertise and representation showed the value of diversity when developing innovative products for luxury, fashion and beauty.

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.