PRESIDENT TRUMP'S recently announced artificial intelligence initiative does not include the word "China." But that country's progress in the race to machine-learning supremacy has prompted calls for the United States to start running faster. Though Mr. Trump's plan is light on actual planning, the Pentagon released its own report last week that provides more detail. Taken together, the documents are promising. Mr. Trump's order directs agencies to assess their spending, reprioritize existing funds toward artificial intelligence and consider that priority in their upcoming budget proposals.

The members of the Global University Leaders Forum community convened at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2019 to discuss their role in our ever-changing world. Here are six topics that were top of the agenda as the members considered the future of the university and its role in society. Today data is omnipresent and often overwhelming. By way of example, Domo's Data Never Sleeps 6.0 reported that in 2018 Google conducted an average 3.8 million searches per minute. Though not all graduates will enter data-related fields, universities are starting to work towards increasing data literacy in their student body by adding data science courses and challenges for social science majors so that graduates can effectively communicate with their data-oriented peers and co-workers.

The release of a text-generating AI has triggered new discussions around the ethics of AI.Andrew Mason, Flickr. OpenAI, the AI research institute founded by Elon Musk, developed an AI which can generate the most realistic paragraphs of text to date. Here's an excerpt generated by the AI when prompted to discuss a fake unicorn discovery: The scientist named the population, after their distinctive horn, Ovid's Unicorn. These four-horned, silver-white unicorns were previously unknown to science. Now, after almost two centuries, the mystery of what sparked this odd phenomenon is finally solved.

Growing a moustache, liberally applying make-up and dying your hair are all effective ways of hiding your identity. Scientists have found that small, simple and deliberate alterations to a person's appearance are surprisingly effective in identity concealment. People were asked to judge whether two photographs that showed the same person and the study discovered the disguises reduced the ability to match faces by around 30 per cent. Scientists have found that small, simple and deliberate alterations to a person's appearance are surprisingly effective in identity concealment. Models were recruited for the study and given money to make their transformation as convincing as possible.

Narrow AI is where we have been. General AI is where we are going. Narrow AI refers to AI which is able to handle just one particular task. A spam filtering tool, or a recommended playlist from Spotify, or even a self-driving car -- all of which are sophisticated uses of technology -- can only be defined via the term'narrow AI'. Even Watson, IBM's media-friendly supercomputer which can beat human experts at Jeopardy!

Ice is the enemy of turbines everywhere. Some wind farms report energy production losses of up to 20 percent due to icing, according to Canadian wind-industry consultancy firm TechnoCentre Éolien (TCE), and that's not the worst of it. Over time, ice shedding from blades can damage other blades or overstress internal components, necessitating costly repairs. There's a clear and present use case, then, for an AI system that detects wind turbine icing. Fortunately, that's just what a team of researchers recently described in a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government will leverage latest tools and insights drawn from Artificial Intelligence to improve the quality of governance for more than 1.34 billion Indian citizens. The government will also update the legal and regulatory framework to better protect the privacy and ownership of citizen's data, said commerce minister Suresh Prabhu. Addressing a conference on AI in New Delhi on Monday, Suresh Prabhu said that India was transporting more data than the cumulative data transported by both US and China. Without naming any company, the minister said the top six companies were using this massive amount of data for value addition and monetisation. "AI is the technology of today and the one who masters it will rule the world," said Suresh Prabhu, adding that every country is developing an AI strategy and India too is working on developing a strategy for the use of AI for the common good.

There are lots of reasons why colonizing space seems compelling. The popular astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson argues that it would stimulate the economy and inspire the next generation of scientists. Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX, argues that "there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multiplanetary…to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen." And the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has conjectured that if humanity fails to colonize space within 100 years, we could face extinction. To be sure, humanity will eventually need to escape Earth to survive, since the sun will make the planet uninhabitable in about 1 billion years.

The following figure highlights the consistent and impressive performance of the NP Machine Learning model across the US market (Russell 3000) over the last 15 years.

In 1950, Norbert Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings was at the cutting edge of vision and speculation in proclaiming: But this was his book's denouement, and it has left us hanging now for 68 years, lacking not only prescriptions and proscriptions but even a well-articulated "problem statement." We have since seen similar warnings about the threat of our machines, even in the form of outreach to the masses, via films like Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), The Terminator (1984), The Matrix (1999), and Ex Machina (2015). But now the time is ripe for a major update with fresh, new perspectives -- notably focused on generalizations of our "human" rights and our existential needs. Concern has tended to focus on "us versus them" (robots) or "gray goo" (nanotech) or "monocultures of clones" (bio). To extrapolate current trends: What if we could make or grow almost anything and engineer any level of safety and efficacy desired?