Tuya employee Ella Yuan demonstrates the company's facial recognition system at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 9, 2019. Three US senators are calling for the Chinese Internet of Things platform operator to be added to a list of sanctioned Chinese companies, citing national security concerns.

The competition is part of a wider effort across the tech industry to ensure artificial intelligence technologies act ethically. The social networking company said in a blog post that the bounty competition was aimed at identifying "potential harms of this algorithm beyond what we identified ourselves." Following criticism last year about image previews in posts excluding Black people's faces, the company said in May a study by three of its machine learning researchers found an 8% difference from demographic parity in favor of women, and a 4% favor toward white individuals. Twitter released publicly the computer code that decides how images are cropped in the Twitter feed, and said on Friday participants are asked to find how the algorithm could cause harm, such as stereotyping or denigrating any group of people. The winners will receive cash prizes ranging from $500 to $3,500 and will be invited to present their work at a workshop hosted by Twitter at DEF CON in August, one of largest hacker conferences held annually in Las Vegas.

It seems counterintuitive, but robots may be a growing bright spot for American manufacturing. The latest example is an announcement by a leading autonomous delivery company that it will create two new facilities in southern Nevada as it moves to scale production of its latest autonomous delivery vehicle. Overall, the market for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs) is forecasted to generate over $10bn by 2023 according to Interact Analysis, and that prediction relies on data from before the COVID-19 pandemic. Delivery robots in particualr are quickly coming of age as COVID lingers and touchless fulfillment becomes the norm. Sidestepping municipal red tape, enterprising companies like Starship Technologies have launched pilot programs in controlled access spaces, such as college campuses.

Spear phishing is a social engineering technique targeted towards a targeted individual to divulge confidential information. But creating highly targeted mass spear-phishing emails could take a lot of effort and time. In a recent test conducted by a team of researchers, it was found that they could use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to devise targeted phishing emails. At the end of the research, the team revealed that AI/ML could be used to develop spear-phishing campaigns at a devastating scale. In the recently held Black Hat Defcon security conference in Las Vegas, a team of researchers hailing from the Singapore Government Technology Agency presented the results of their AI/ML generated phishing email test.

A company has started selling its pizza-making robot to restaurants. Now it has to convince chefs it's worth the money. Last week, Seattle-based Picnic announced that it's now accepting pre-orders for its pizza-assembling robot. The announcement happened at the International Pizza Expo in Las Vegas, an annual gathering of more than 13,000 pizza professionals. The "Pizza System" consists of a collection of modules that dispense sauce, cheese, and toppings onto dough.

In 2017, Kyle Vogt, the founder of GM-backed autonomous car company Cruise, promised that the startup would begin testing driverless vehicles in New York City by 2019. That didn't come to pass -- Cruise put the brakes on the pilot in August 2018 -- but driverless cars have scaled significantly in the years since Vogt's pronouncement. Last month, Ford and Argo AI announced they would work together to launch self-driving cars on Lyft's ride-hailing network in Miami and Austin, Texas. Motional, a joint venture of Aptiv and Hyundai, plans to start testing autonomous vehicles in Los Angeles following a deployment in Downtown Las Vegas. And Intel's Mobileye recently became among the first to pilot self-driving cars in New York City, beating rival Cruise to the punch.

Autonomous vehicles are being thoroughly tested on public roadways in a number of states in the USA, such as California, Florida, Nevada, and Texas. The CA DMV crash report data were used to create a selection of crash AV severity designs concentrating on the injury for all crash typologies. Abstract This paper examines the formation control of linked autonomous vehicle armies relocating multi lanes making use of distance‐based development control methods based upon rigid graphs and V2V communication. For the vehicle dynamics with nonlinearities and bounded disruptions, a flexible controller is designed for managing driving/braking torque to accomplish the longitudinal rate result of the speed planner. Abstract This paper examines the possible effects of dynamic cordless power transfer systems on the metropolitan roadway connect with a particular focus on billing and energy consumption implications.

Any digital health conference features its share of machine learning evangelism. Technology executives give fervent testimonials about its power to save lives and money, to predict episodes of severe illness, to help hospitals root out inefficiency. This year's gathering of the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) in Las Vegas was no different. But in between the glowing anecdotes, an aggressive counter narrative emerged: Machine learning needs a watchdog. Throughout the four-day conference, the largest annual event in health care technology, industry leaders called for better ways to evaluate the usefulness of machine learning algorithms, audit them for bias, and put in place regulations designed to ensure reliability, fairness, and transparency.

If you (or a family member) is heading to college this fall, you should brace for something unexpected. Robots are coming to college campuses and often to dorm rooms as on-campus delivery takes off. A leader in the space has been Starship Technologies, which is adding four additional college campuses to its delivery portfolio: University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), University of Kentucky (UK), University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University's Daytona Beach, FL campus. The company will have a global fleet of over 1000 robots, and it has been shrewd in exploiting relationships with institutions that side-step civic regulatory regimes. The service has already started with an initial set of merchants and hours at UNR and Embry-Riddle and will be fully operational when students return for classes.

Motional has announced it wants to more than double its number of employees in the state, and most of them will work in Los Angeles as human operators for self-driving cars that will learn, inch-by-inch, mile-by-mile, how to drive themselves. Until Motional gets the required permits from the California DMV, the self-driving car fleet will have to always have human drivers behind the wheel and ready to step in at a moment's notice. Motional is already testing vehicles in Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Singapore. Initially, the vehicles will map the roads, and self-driving tests will be conducted once that stage is completed. The first stage will focus on the Santa Monica area, where Motional has set up an office and an operations facility. Furthermore, Motional will hire people for its new research and development office in San Francisco, so those interested in career opportunities in this field should check out the company's website.