WASHINGTON: The Pentagon has created a new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) that will have oversight over almost all service and defense agency AI efforts. The JAIC will report to Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy, the establishing memo by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Shanahan says. Its ambit is not quite untrammeled; any projects under $15 million remain the authority of the service or agency. The JAIC will establish a common set of AI "standards…. Undersecretary for Research & Engineering Mike Griffin, a far more prominent proponent of AI and other cutting-edge technologies who has warned China and Russia are catching up to the US, "will continue to promote development of new AI technologies, systems, and concepts" but without any clearly specified role in the new center.

According to a new market research report "AI in Education Market by Technology (Deep Learning and ML, NLP), Application (Virtual Facilitators and Learning Environments, ITS, CDS, Fraud and Risk Management), Component (Solutions, Services), Deployment, End-User, and Region - Global Forecast to 2023", published by MarketsandMarkets, the global market to grow from $537.3 Million in 2018 to $3,683.5 Million by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 47.0% during the forecast period. The AI technology is playing a crucial role in enhancing and improving teachers' and students' knowledge. Additionally, the increasing adoption of the AI technology for various applications in the education sector and growing need for multilingual translators integrated with the AI technology are expected to drive the growth of the AI in education market. The Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology segment is expected to grow at a higher CAGR during the forecast period. In the education sector, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology is playing a crucial role to synthesize the educational data for generating the final output.

Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray have all struggled with serious injury. But future tennis stars could potentially be spared such discomfort with the help of new motion-capture technology, according to bio-mechanical experts from Coventry University. The software uses 3D optical tracking equipment, similar to that used for Hollywood movies, and then applies its own algorithms to measure loads imposed on joints, bones and muscles, according to the team. The resulting data can help improve training and, crucially, it could help players avoid injury. With Wimbledon getting into full swing next week, researchers have developed a motion capture system that can help tennis players avoid injury.

A newly launched AI Global Governance commission (AIGG), tasked with forming links with politicians and governments around the world to help develop and harmonise rules on the use of AI, has suggested that at least one key regulation should be that any decisions made by an AI system'must be tracked back to a person or an organisation'. Although the view was only the early product of meetings yesterday ahead of the AIGG launch event, which is backed by the UK Parliament's APPG AI group and the Big Innovation Centre, it could become something of a standard ethical line for the many legal projects now developing in this area. Earlier this month the Law Society launched its own Public Policy Commission on Algorithms and Justice, for example, one of several AI ethics initiatives around the world. Ensuring that any algorithmic decision is traceable and can be tracked back to a person or organisation could provide society with a greater sense that at least someone is responsible for the actions of an automated system, and that important decisions were not being made in a regulatory vacuum and without any recourse for legal action against a party that caused harm to another. In fact, one could argue that not being able to assign responsibility to the actions of an algorithm would in effect undermine the justice system and put AI's outputs on a par with'an act of nature', i.e. beyond the ability of society to apply rules. The AIGG meeting also stressed that regulators needed to move a lot faster than they are, nationally and globally, because AI technology and its use was now moving a lot faster in terms of its development and actual use in society.

BALI, INDONESIA - JUNE 29: Mount Agung erupts on June 29 emerging volcanic dust continually leading to its alert level, in Lempuyangan area, Karang Asem, Bali, Indonesia on June 29, 2018. A team of scientists have developed a neural network to diagnose volcanic eruptions -- and it has bigger implications than you might expect. Computer vision is finding its way into everything these days -- from Facebook's implementation of new facial recognition features to Amazon's retail tracking to Google's major announcements at I/O 2018. And for good reason: we increasingly live in a visual world, and with the rise of augmented reality as a computing platform, having algorithms that understand the world around us will be pivotal for making something like AR truly valuable for everyday users. But computer vision can also be used to understand natural disasters.

Board games aren't quite as sexy as their digital counterparts, but the hobby has nevertheless seen a resurgence in recent years. NPD Group reported that board game sales in the U.S. grew by 28 percent in 2016, cafes dedicated to the hobby are cropping up all over the country (and the world), and three out of the top ten most-funded projects on Kickstarter are tabletop games. Much of this can be attributed not just to the increased desire for real-life social interaction, but the rise of good-quality titles that are far superior to outdated classics like Monopoly and Candyland. But there is one problem with all of these new and exciting games: You need to learn how to play them. Unlike video games, which you can figure out by jumping into a tutorial and pressing a few buttons, tabletop versions often require you to read the instructions.

If you were miffed about Britain's National Health Service (NHS) giving your sensitive data away to Google's DeepMind, how you respond to today's news is probably a crapshoot. The NHS has announced that it will begin anonymizing said data that's been used to analyze blood test results and to detect risk of acute kidney injuries and other ailments. To be clear, these are separate events (the data use and today's announcement), but one led to the other. In 2016, the NHS and DeepMind caught their fair share of criticism over how data was shared with implied -- not explicit -- consent from 1.6 million patients. "The new de-identification process (known as De-ID) will protect patient privacy by de-identifying a person's records in a consistent way," according to a statement from the NHS.

Dawn was barely breaking on Friday morning over Cape Canaveral in Florida, when Matthius Biniok looked across a bay of water at the rocket that was about to take his floating robot into space. "I feel a little bit like a father that is losing his son," he said from the operational room at the Kennedy Space Centre, 21 minutes before lift-off. Binjok was an artificial intelligence engineer from Germany who had built the brain of CIMON, a spherical robot about the size of a basketball that would propel itself around the zero-gravity environment of the International Space Station by shooting jets of air. Spearheaded by EADS' Airbus, which built the "body" and much of the AI-powered software behind it, CIMON would be the first-known space robot to assist astronauts, an early iteration of HAL 9000 or souped-up version of Wilson depending on your movie preference. Just in front of Binjok on Friday morning, around 100 engineers and scientists mingled on the Kennedy Center's fourth-floor viewing terrace and noticed streaks of pink lighting up the dark sky behind the white crest of a SpaceX's Block 4 Falcon 9 rocket, as the sun prepared to rise.

Health care start-up Babylon Health has said that its artificial intelligence (AI) is able to diagnose medical conditions as accurately as a doctor, but physicians have called the claims "dubious." Babylon has created a chatbot that lets you talk with an AI that can interpret symptoms and tell a person what the problem is. It is not an official medical diagnosis, however. The British company fed its chatbot questions from the official exam set by the the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) in the U.K. The RCGP is a membership body for family doctors in the U.K. and overseas. Any doctor practicing in Britain must pass this exam.

A science fiction-inspired robot hardwired to assist astronauts will launch from Florida early Friday morning to become the first personal, artificial intelligence-powered companion in space. The Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, or CIMON, is an English-speaking droid roughly the size of a basketball that will help German astronaut Alexander Gerst conduct experiments on the International Space Station. "What we're trying to do with CIMON is to increase the efficiency of the astronaut," Matthias Biniok, an engineer for chip maker IBM and one of the lead architects behind CIMON's artificial intelligence, told Reuters. CIMON will verbally communicate step-by-step instructions to Gerst during three planned science experiments on the space station's European module. Currently, astronauts read these instructions from a laptop, which Biniok says is an arduous process that a responsive, hands-free companion like CIMON can replace.