When the 300-foot Maersk Launcher docked in San Diego early Monday morning, it unloaded a cargo of hardened black blobs scooped from the bottom of the sea. The blobs are not rocks, but naturally-occurring metallic nodules that could one day yield metal deposits of cobalt, manganese, and nickel--not to mention scarce rare earth minerals. As worldwide demand rises for electric vehicle batteries and wind turbines, along with next generation technologies and weapon systems, demand for these metals has taken off. And the seabed is a prime target for those mining operations. Of course, it's no small feat to bring these potato-sized nodules from the bottom of the remote Pacific Ocean, and then sail them to a processing plant where the metals can be extracted.

A lot has been written about problems with artificial intelligence recently; speech recognition failing to correctly deal with Irish accents, image recognition that cannot detect faces of colour, all kinds of biases in AI decision making, or autonomous vehicles causing accidents. In response, some have called for more rigorous testing, quality assurance, and trust certification of AI products and services and their providers. For example, in his recent keynote at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) event in Sydney, Dr Alan Finkel, Australia's chief scientists, proposed a solution to "overcoming our mistrust of robots in our homes and workplaces". In his talk Dr Finkel proposed a trust certification for AI, whereby providers would submit to a voluntary auditing process to establish the quality of their AI-based products, as well as the ethical standards that their organisation embodies. Dr Finkel claims that "true quality is achieved by design, not by test and reject," so we should ensure that AI products are reliable before we release them into the wild.

An action plan and ethical framework are critical to ensuring that people are educated and upskilled on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This is according to New Zealand Minister for Government Digital Services and Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media Clare Curran. Curran spoke about the issue at the launch of the Artificial Intelligence: Shaping a Future New Zealand report, which outlines the opportunities and challenges for New Zealand in adopting AI. "An ethical framework will give people the tools to participate in conversations about AI and its implications in our society and economy," Curran said. "As a first step and because of the importance of ethics and governance issues around AI, I will be formalising the government's relationship with Otago University's NZ Law Foundation Centre for Law and Policy in Emerging Technologies. "There are economic opportunities but also some pressing risks and ethical challenges with AI, and New Zealand is lagging behind comparable countries in its work in these areas.

Proportional representation (PR) is often discussed in voting settings as a major desideratum. For the past century or so, it is common both in practice and in the academic literature to jump to single transferable vote (STV) as the solution for achieving PR. Some of the most prominent electoral reform movements around the globe are pushing for the adoption of STV. It has been termed a major open problem to design a voting rule that satisfies the same PR properties as STV and better monotonicity properties. In this paper, we first present a taxonomy of proportional representation axioms for general weak order preferences, some of which generalise and strengthen previously introduced concepts. We then present a rule called Expanding Approvals Rule (EAR) that satisfies properties stronger than the central PR axiom satisfied by STV, can handle indifferences in a convenient and computationally efficient manner, and also satisfies better candidate monotonicity properties. In view of this, our proposed rule seems to be a compelling solution for achieving proportional representation in voting settings.

Any Star Wars fan knows that the chances of successfully navigating an asteroid field are approximately 3,720 to 1. The odds are probably significantly higher against today's autonomous drones, which fly quite a bit slower than sublight speed and without the mad skills of Han Solo. Researchers at MIT believe they have hit upon a solution--more than one, actually--to train drones to move quickly through a crowded, complex environment, though we're probably light years away from navigating through hostile star systems. One solution, dubbed "Flight Goggles," involves streaming a virtual reality environment to the drone as it flies through empty space. "The system is at the intersection of motion capture equipment, drone technology, and high-bandwidth communications," Sertac Karaman, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, told Singularity Hub. "We had to develop a number of hardware and software components to make it work."

Current approaches to explaining the decisions of deep learning systems for medical tasks have focused on visualising the elements that have contributed to each decision. We argue that such approaches are not enough to "open the black box" of medical decision making systems because they are missing a key component that has been used as a standard communication tool between doctors for centuries: language. We propose a model-agnostic interpretability method that involves training a simple recurrent neural network model to produce descriptive sentences to clarify the decision of deep learning classifiers. We test our method on the task of detecting hip fractures from frontal pelvic x-rays. This process requires minimal additional labelling despite producing text containing elements that the original deep learning classification model was not specifically trained to detect. The experimental results show that: 1) the sentences produced by our method consistently contain the desired information, 2) the generated sentences are preferred by doctors compared to current tools that create saliency maps, and 3) the combination of visualisations and generated text is better than either alone.

"Digitizing" store shelves is a new imperative for Coca-Cola and other CPG companies. In the face of changing consumer behavior and the new retail playbook scripted by Amazon, CPG brands have raced to hop on the "digitization" bandwagon to erase the advantage e-commerce has over brick-and-mortar retail. Now add this area to their get-even list: store shelves. For decades, CPG companies like Coca-Cola have conducted manual audits and surveys to see if, how and where stores stock their goods on shelves, as well as find out if their goods are next to rivals' products and if any out-of-stock items have been replenished. Thanks to technology, this old-school and time-consuming process, prone to human errors, is increasingly being dropped as CPG brands seek to bridge the gap between what they can see in stores and online.

This September, delivery drones will begin to fly the friendly skies of Vanuatu. And this isn't a one-shot demonstration, like many of the stunts we've seen from the likes of Amazon and Google. This is an attempt to make drones part of the medical infrastructure. The South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, a string of 83 volcanic islands spread over 1600 kilometers (995 miles), has just issued a "request for tender" to drone companies around the world. The companies are invited to submit bids for bringing vaccines to scattered hospitals and health clinics on three islands.

The need to provide an enhanced customer experience is the primary factor augmenting the growth of the AI in BFSI market. As the competition among the market players is mounting day-by-day, companies have started to focus on providing a better experience to the customers to gain the customer loyalty. This encourages financial institutes to integrate advanced analytics tools and solutions to analyze customer data to fulfil their requirement, understand the customer experience, and to make smarter predictions about their behavior and requirements. Furthermore, companies are also looking forward to connecting with the customers on their choice of channels to provide a more seamless experience. Furthermore, as digitalization is spreading across the globe, customers are becoming more empowered.

As we pawn more and more jobs off on robots, there are a few you'd think we'd keep for ourselves, like beer taster. But brewers often need an automated way to ensure product quality, and a research team in Australia has developed a cheap method to help them. Their latest study assesses a freshly poured beer's frothy top. Why focus on the bubbles? Because foam affects people's enjoyment of beer and sparkling wine even more than taste and aroma do.