An artificial intelligence-powered robot tasked with assisting astronauts was launched into space for the first time ever Friday to join the crew of the International Space Station. Roughly the size of a volleyball and weighing 5 kilograms, CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile Companion) will float through the zero-gravity environment of the space station because of a system of fans. CIMON is able to answer voice commands and can research a database of information about the ISS. The robot can even assess the moods of its human crewmates and interact with them accordingly. "An observational pilot study with the [CIMON] aims to provide first insights into the effects of crew support from an artificial intelligence in terms of efficiency and acceptance during long-term missions in space," NASA said in a statement Friday after the successful launch.

In deepest September, the thick of the pistachio harvest, the autumn sky was usually veiled with dust thrown high as the shakers and receivers vibrated through the trees. But for weeks now, the machines had stopped. This left the whole orchard--almost a hundred thousand acres--more vulnerable to aflatoxin than ever. It was nice to see the stars again. It was also time for the robots to come back to work. "You know, this kind of thing doesn't happen in Iran," Stephens said. Dash's client was the biggest farmer in North America. He wore snakeskin and sandalwood and a linen suit that glowed in the predawn shadow. "What's in Iran?" Dash asked. His gaze wandered over the rows of heavily laden trees. "You ever been to Iran?" Everything about him screamed sales rep: his acid-peel face, his giant watch, the snap of taurine gum between his smiling jaws. The blockchain they developed to track the uranium suddenly developed sentience, and your agency is the only thing keeping us meatsacks from being turned to glass." Brand reps tended to treat Dash as though her work with inorganic species had contaminated her humanity in some irreversible way. Brand reps for agri-bots were apparently no different from the others. "Presuming that a machine intelligence wants to turn us into glass presumes that it cares what happens to us at all," she said. "Any theoretical intelligence would have as much reason to care about us as a cancer cell cares about a human lung.

A WAVE of automation anxiety has hit the West. Just try typing "Will machines…" into Google. An algorithm offers to complete the sentence with differing degrees of disquiet: "...take my job?"; "...take all jobs?"; "...replace humans?"; "...take over the world?" Job-grabbing robots are no longer science fiction. In 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford University used--what else?--a machine-learning algorithm to assess how easily 702 different kinds of job in America could be automated. They concluded that fully 47% could be done by machines "over the next decade or two".

New research from Google's UK-based DeepMind subsidiary demonstrates that deep neural networks have a remarkable capacity to understand a scene, represent it in a compact format, and then "imagine" what the same scene would look like from a perspective the network hasn't seen before. Human beings are good at this. If shown a picture of a table with only the front three legs visible, most people know intuitively that the table probably has a fourth leg on the opposite side and that the wall behind the table is probably the same color as the parts they can see. With practice, we can learn to sketch the scene from another angle, taking into account perspective, shadow, and other visual effects. A DeepMind team led by Ali Eslami and Danilo Rezende has developed software based on deep neural networks with these same capabilities--at least for simplified geometric scenes. Given a handful of "snapshots" of a virtual scene, the software--known as a generative query network (GQN)--uses a neural network to build a compact mathematical representation of that scene.

For those lucky enough to get in, the UAE AI Summer Camp that starts on Sunday and runs through the summer may well prove a transformative experience. Funded by the Ministry of State for Artificial Intelligence Office and with speakers from the likes of Microsoft and IBM, and aimed at school and university students and government executives, the Camp sold out in 24 hrs - and small wonder. Attendees will get access to cutting-edge tech and be able to build systems like AI chatbots that converse with humans. As someone who began working on AI systems more than 25 years ago, I understand the excitement of getting computers to mimic brain-like abilities, however crudely. But I also know that AI enthusiasts are prone to overlooking the single biggest obstacle to the adoption of the technology: human nature.

Spain-based AI-powered retail intelligence platform Nextail has landed $10 million in a Series A round led by KEEN Venture Partners LLP, with participation from Sonae IM and existing investor Nauta Capital. The company plans to use the capital injection to further develop its product and double the headcount to over 100 people. Nextail focuses on the sector of fast fashion, where process optimisation is important to bring the most current designs to a store as quickly as possible. It uses AI techniques and prescriptive analytics to provide actionable insights for inventory planning and merchandising. The company claims that its clients see their sales increasing between 5-10 percent, in-store stock coverage reduced by 30 percent and stockouts reduced by 60 percent within the first 30 days of using the platform.

The European Commission published on April 25 2018 a Communication outlining the strategy of the EU for Artificial Intelligence. This post looks at the document, its structure and main points. While the first two chapters deal with a general introduction an AI scenarios and Europe's competitive posture in the international landscape (not great), the third part details the way forward the Commission is proposing and it's by far the most interesting. The first instinct, as always, is to throw money at the problem (the problem being Europe is lagging behind in this field, even if the first part of the document does not say it in so many words). So, in the paragraph titles somewhat pompously "Boosting the EU's technological and industrial capacity and AI uptake across the economy" an ambitious program of investments is outlines.

It's been an exciting, but complex year in the data world. Just as last year, the data tech ecosystem has continued to "fire on all cylinders". If nothing else, data is probably even more front and center in 2018, in both business and personal conversations. Some of the reasons, however, have changed. On the one hand, data technologies (Big Data, data science, machine learning, AI) continue their march forward, becoming ever more efficient, and also more widely adopted in businesses around the world.

The random-forest technique has emerged in recent years as a powerful way to analyze large data sets while avoiding some of the pitfalls of other data-mining methods. It is based on the idea that some future event can be determined by a decision tree in which an outcome is calculated at each branch by reference to a set of training data. However, decision trees suffer from a well-known problem. In the latter stages of the branching process, decisions can become severely distorted by training data that is sparse and prone to huge variation at this kind of resolution, a problem known as overfitting. The random-forest approach is different.

Artificial intelligence is having a moment in London. Last week, to coincide with London Tech Week, an annual showcase of the city's digital prowess, London hosted CogX, a 6,000-person-strong event that bills itself as the "Festival of All Things AI," and the AI Summit London, which lays claim to the mantle of "the world's largest AI event for business." The events have non-stop panels, parties, and big-name sponsors like SoftBank, Accenture, IBM and Google. Underpinning much of the buzz over artificial intelligence in London and elsewhere is the implicit premise that AI is the transformative technology of the moment, or maybe of the decade, or even of the century or, well, just about ever. Promises like the AI Summit's claim that the technology goes "beyond the hype" to "deliver real value in business" only drives the corporate feeding frenzy among executives desperate not to be left behind.