Artificial intelligence (AI) seems poised to run most of the world these days: it's detecting skin cancer, looking for hate speech on Facebook, and even flagging possible lies in police reports in Spain. But AIs aren't all run by mega-corporations and governments; you can download some algorithms and play with them yourself, with often hilarious results. There's the faux Coachella poster full of fake band names, created by feeding a bunch of real band names into a neural network and asking it to come up with some of its own. There are the recipes created in a similar way, where "barbecue beef" calls for "1 beer - cut into cubes." Humans aren't nearly as creative as we think.

A centre for artificial intelligence and public policy is looking to address the unique issues New Zealand will face, and is currently facing, in the era of AI. The centre has been launched in Otago and will explore policy options for managing the introduction of technologies, to maximise their benefits and minimise potential harms. Co-director of the centre, Professor James Maclaurin, said New Zealand's size sets it apart from other countries and it is important to have people acting in an advisory role. "Europe has just passed its general data protection regulations but it is a very big player so if they pass laws Facebook and Google really have to listen to them. "New Zealand is a different environment."

Meet Norman, the'psychopath AI' that's here to teach us a lesson The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

In the Netherlands, a cobot scales a 26-foot-high bar to tap bottles of homemade gin, whiskey and limoncello so that bartenders don't need to climb ladders. In Singapore, robots give soft-tissue massages. Cobots made up just 5% of the $14 billion industrial-robot market in 2017, according to research by Minneapolis-based venture-capital firm Loup Ventures. Loup estimates sales will jump to 27% of a $33 billion market by 2025 as demand for the robotic arms rises. About 20 manufacturers around the world have started selling such robots in the past decade.

The facial-recognition cameras installed near the bounce houses at the Warehouse, an after-school recreation center in Bloomington, Indiana, are aimed low enough to scan the face of every parent, teenager and toddler who walks in. The center's director, David Weil, learned earlier this year of the surveillance system from a church newsletter, and within six weeks he had bought his own, believing it promised a security breakthrough that was both affordable and cutting-edge. Since last month, the system has logged thousands of visitors' faces – alongside their names, phone numbers and other personal details – and checked them against a regularly updated blacklist of sex offenders and unwanted guests. The system's Israeli developer, Face-Six, also promotes it for use in prisons and drones. "Some parents still think it's kind of '1984,' " said Weil, whose 21-month-old granddaughter is among the scanned.

In a bid to ease tensions over trade, in particular U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum that infuriated other G7 members, officials were working on language about the international rules-based system that would lead the way to reforming the World Trade Organization, the official said.

News emerged last summer that Google had snapped up computer vision startup AIMatter, the Belarusian company behind the popular funky photo-effects app Fabby. While Fabby continues today under Google's guidance, the app was really a public-facing showcase for AIMatter's underlying technology, which is basically a neural network-powered platform and SDK for detecting and processing images. And that is what Google was really buying into as it battles it out with other major technology companies to secure the most promising AI brain power. The acquisition further highlights the burgeoning computer vision startup scene in Eastern Europe, which saw Facebook acquire Belarusian startup Masquerade; Snapchat snap up Looksery, which has Ukrainian roots; and Russia's Prisma gain widespread attention for its computer vision-powered art photo app. Nearly one year after AIMatter's sale to Google, VentureBeat caught up with Yury Melnichek, the Belarusian serial entrepreneur who was a founding investor in AIMatter and who previously worked as a software engineer at Google and eBay.

Epileptic seizures strike with little warning and nearly one third of people living with epilepsy are resistant to treatment that controls these attacks. More than 65 million people worldwide are living with epilepsy. For more information see the IDTechEx reports on digital health 2018 and wearable technology. Now researchers at the University of Sydney have used advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning to develop a generalised method to predict when seizures will strike that will not require surgical implants. Dr Omid Kavehei from the Faculty of Engineering and IT and the University of Sydney Nano Institute said: "We are on track to develop an affordable, portable and non-surgical device that will give reliable prediction of seizures for people living with treatment-resistant epilepsy."

Next week professional services firm Accenture will be launching a new tool to help its customers identify and fix unfair bias in AI algorithms. The idea is to catch discrimination before it gets baked into models and can cause human damage at scale. The "AI fairness tool", as it's being described, is one piece of a wider package the consultancy firm has recently started offering its customers around transparency and ethics for machine learning deployments -- while still pushing businesses to adopt and deploy AI. (So the intent, at least, can be summed up as: 'Move fast and don't break things'. "Most of last year was spent… understanding this realm of ethics and AI and really educating ourselves, and I feel that 2018 has really become the year of doing -- the year of moving beyond virtue signaling. And moving into actual creation and development," says Rumman Chowdhury, Accenture's responsible AI lead -- who joined the company when the role was created, in January 2017.

While we've already covered a lot of AI stories this week a few slipped under the radar so, as is traditional, here's the roundup of some news you may have missed. Google turns peacenik: Under fire for helping the US military use AI to better bomb people, Google has not only stepped away from that particular Pentagon contract but also this week released a set of seven principles for the development of AI. CEO Sundar Pichai made a point of noting that they are "not theoretical concepts; they are concrete standards that will actively govern our research and product development and will impact our business decisions." And they are pretty good: be socially beneficial (the AI equivalent of'Do no evil'?); They also sparked Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey to ponder out loud whether they were something the tech industry as a whole could get around.