In 1971, Terry Winograd wrote the SHRDLU program while completing his PhD at MIT. SHRDLU features a world of toy blocks where the computer translates human commands into physical actions, such as "move the red pyramid next to the blue cube." To succeed in such tasks, the computer must build up semantic knowledge iteratively, a process Winograd discovered was brittle and limited. The rise of chatbots and voice activated technologies has renewed fervor in natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) techniques that can produce satisfying human-computer dialogs. Unfortunately, academic breakthroughs have not yet translated to improved user experiences, with Gizmodo writer Darren Orf declaring Messenger chatbots "frustrating and useless" and Facebook admitting a 70% failure rate for their highly anticipated conversational assistant M. Nevertheless, researchers forge ahead with new plans of attack, occasionally revisiting the same tactics and principles Winograd tried in the 70s. OpenAI recently leveraged reinforcement learning to teach to agents to design their own language by "dropping them into a set of simple worlds, giving them the ability to communicate, and then giving them goals that can be best achieved by communicating with other agents."

A cyber attack on a commercial aircraft is "only a matter of time", US government researchers have claimed in a report. "Potential of catastrophic disaster is inherently greater in an airborne vehicle," the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory – a laboratory within the Department of Energy - suggested. It was one of a series of a series of documents and slides from the Department of Energy and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as other agencies, which were obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request by the Motherboard website. GCHQ to brief England over Playstation and smartphone cyber-attacks Britain'must be prepared to launch cyber attacks on enemies' If Russia launches a cyber attack on the UK, this is what we can do UK anti-doping agency hit by cyber attack Britain'must be prepared to launch cyber attacks on enemies' The same research from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory also claimed that it was "a matter of time before a cyber security breach on an airline occurs." It is not the first time concerns have been raised about the security vulnerabilities of commercial aircraft.

A funny thing has happened to Google and Amazon on their path toward high-tech success: They have become crucial cogs in the U.S. national security establishment. Both companies are expanding teams of employees with security clearances to work on projects that include deploying artificial intelligence and building digital "clouds" to offering law enforcement facial recognition tools that can even read the mood of people caught on camera. The security establishment's embrace of Big Tech has ruffled the feathers of traditional defense contractors and roiled employee ranks, in Google's case, over whether the company is being drawn into what disguntled employees called "the business of war." Defense industry analysts say the Pentagon views Big Tech, and particularly Google with its deep bench of artificial intelligence researchers, as vital to the nation's future safety. "They are becoming a critical part of national security, without question," said Alexander Rossino, a senior principal research analyst at Deltek, a Herndon, Virginia, firm that offers software and services to defense?

The postdoctoral position is for a term of 2 years. Research activities are organized into groups and strategic European and National projects as documented here http://www.ntnu.edu/idi/research. Further information can be found at the department's and the group's web pages. As part of their strategic partnership, DNB and NTNU are funding 1 postdoc and 3 PhD positions in a joint R&I project focusing on research in Big Data analytics and machine learning. With this project, the two parties will create an attractive environment for education, research and innovation, executed in close collaboration with the ongoing research and innovation efforts at the Telenor-NTNU AI-Lab.

The competition for the world's fastest computer, ranked twice a year by computer scientists in the U.S. and Germany, is a point of national pride. The last time a U.S. computer held the top spot was in November 2012. The next ranking on June 25 comes against a backdrop of escalating tensions between the U.S. and China over trade and leadership in artificial intelligence and 5G wireless networks, advanced technologies deemed vital to national security. The new supercomputer, dubbed Summit and housed at the agency's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, can perform 200,000 trillion calculations a second, according to IBM--200 petaflops in industry parlance. That is eight times more powerful than Titan, a supercomputer made by Cray Inc., the lab's previous top performer.

Google has unveiled a set of principles for ethical AI development and deployment, and announced that it will not allow its AI software to be used in weapons or for "unreasonable surveillance". In a detailed blog post, CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google would not develop technologies that cause, or are likely to cause, harm. "Where there is a material risk of harm, we will proceed only where we believe that the benefits substantially outweigh the risks, and will incorporate appropriate safety constraints," he explained. Google will not allow its technologies to be used in weapons or in "other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people", he said. Also on the no-go list are "technologies that gather or use information for surveillance, violating internationally accepted norms", and those "whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights". The move follows widespread internal and external criticism of Google's involvement in Project Maven, the Pentagon's aerial battlefield intelligence programme, which some saw as a step towards the weaponisation of AI.

Google's collaboration with the Department of Defense to develop AI system's for the US military's fleet of war drones, dubbed Project Maven, proved a double-edged sword for the technology company. On one hand, the DoD contract was quite lucrative, worth as much as $250 million annually. On the other hand, public backlash to the news that the company was helping the government build more efficient killing machines was immediate, unwavering and utterly ruthless. A dozen employees quit the company in protest, another 4,000 petitioned management to terminate the contract outright. The uproar was so deafening that Google had to come out and promise to not renew the deal upon its completion next year.

The PlayStation Vita is hanging on by a thread. Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida said in 2015 there was no hope for a follow-up to the handheld console, and since then, the Vita machine has been quietly winding down. Sony is halting production of physical Vita games across Europe and North America on March 31st, 2019, though Sony Japan will continue to churn out carts in the domestic market -- for now. The Vita has garnered a cult following since its Japanese launch in 2011 (2012 for Western audiences). It entered the scene pitched as a powerful handheld with a digital marketplace, OLED display and a broad variety of touch- and movement-based input methods. Major franchises flooded the device, including Persona, Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed and LittleBigPlanet, and it became a welcome home for indie games like Hotline Miami, Murasaki Baby, OlliOlli and Fez.

For a couple of days this week, I attended the EmTech NEXT conference at MIT, which is organized by MIT Technology Review. The focus of the event was that fabled idea "The Future of Work," and if you are on the side of the humans, the future seems pretty bright. Virtually every speaker (MIT folks, AI and robotics leaders) came out in favor of augmentation over automation. They say that AI and robots won't take our jobs, but rather augment them by doing the things we humans don't do so well. I must say that I was a bit surprised that augmentation has become the consensus view among experts.

Waymo hasn't quite launched its self-driving taxi service in Phoenix and San Francisco yet, but it's already settings its sights on another continent. The Alphabet-owned company's CEO, John Krafcik, has revealed that Waymo aims to make its way to Europe after launching in the US later this year. He made the announcement at the Automotive News Europe Congress in Turin, Italy, where he also said that if the company does enter the European market, it will likely be with the help of a partner. "There is an opportunity for us at Waymo to experiment here in Europe, with different products and maybe even with different go-to-market strategies. It's possible we will take a very different approach here than we would in the U.S." Krafcik admitted that the Waymo brand wouldn't be as strong in Europe, where there are already bunch of well-established automakers. Brand recognition could make or break its business across the pond, so its European autonomous taxi service might not carry the Waymo name at all.