For a few seconds, it seems real. Then, on the horizon, the landscape gives way to rugged coastline, and, as the plane flies closer, we glimpse the rippling waves glinting in the evening sun. In real life, I have not seen the ocean for five months and, although I'm just sitting in my kitchen watching a virtual presentation of a video game, I feel a surge of emotion. When the latest instalment in Microsoft's decades-old Flight Simulator series was first shown at the E3 video game event last year, it drew gasps from the audience. Using two petabytes of geographic data culled from Bing Maps, together with cutting-edge, machine learning algorithms running on the company's Azure cloud computing network, the game presents a near-photorealistic depiction of the entire planet.

Washington – The United States and close ally Australia held high-level talks on China on Tuesday and agreed on the need to uphold a rules-based global order, but the Australian foreign minister stressed that Canberra's relationship with China was important and it had no intention of injuring it. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper held two days of talks in Washington with their Australian counterparts, Foreign Minister Marise Payne and Defense Minister Linda Reynolds, who had flown around the world for the meetings despite the COVID-19 pandemic and face two weeks of quarantine on their return. At a joint news conference, Pompeo praised Australia for standing up to pressure from China and said Washington and Canberra would continue to work together to reassert the rule of law in the South China Sea, where China has been pressing its claims. Payne said the United States and Australia shared a commitment to the rule of law and had reiterated their commitment to hold countries to account for breaches, such as China's erosion of freedoms in Hong Kong. She said the two sides had also agreed to form a working group to monitor and respond to harmful disinformation and would look at ways to expand cooperation on infectious diseases, including access to vaccines.

Washington – U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took fresh aim at China on Thursday and said Washington and its allies must use "more creative and assertive ways" to press the Chinese Communist Party to change its ways, calling it the "mission of our time." Speaking at the Nixon Library in former President Richard Nixon's birthplace in Yorba Linda, California, Pompeo said the late U.S. leader's worry about what he had done by opening the world to China's Communist Party in the 1970s had been prophetic. "President Nixon once said he feared he had created a'Frankenstein' by opening the world to the CCP," Pompeo said. Nixon, who died in 1994 and was president from 1969 to 1974 opened the way for the establishment of U.S. diplomatic relations with Communist China in 1979 through a series of contacts, including a visit to Beijing in 1972. In a major speech delivered after Washington's surprise order this week for China to close its Houston consulate, Pompeo repeated frequently leveled U.S. charges about Beijing's unfair trade practices, human rights abuses and efforts to infiltrate American society.

Our second annual list highlights promising, private, U.S.-based companies that are using artificial intelligence in meaningful business-oriented ways.

Through the pixel fuzz of a sputtering Zoom connection, it's hard to be sure if the eyes staring out from the laptop screen are human. Lars Buttler is a real person, but he is the CEO of AI Foundation, a company that makes fake ones: trainable, artificially intelligent agents that might one day take the place of a human personal assistant, a customer service representative, or you yourself (if you aspire to omnipresence or digital deathlessness). When Buttler appeared in a Zoom call last week, there was something strange about the light hitting his shaved head, and the stark white office behind him definitely wasn't part of the material world. His speech was awkward, with overlong pauses and canned jokes that fell on a silent audience, but video calls are like that, at least for now, while people adjust to working lives forced into the ether. His eyes seemed awake and alive in a way that the faces of the other participants in the Zoom call--venture capitalist, a tech founder, and an activist, all of them puppeted by artificial intelligence--were not.

In the late winter and spring of 2019, a group of Indigenous scholars met in Hawai'i to think through concepts around artificial intelligence (AI) and how they related to the Indigenous experience. Co-organized by Jason Edward Lewis, professor in the Department Design and Computation Arts, the multidisciplinary group included participants from Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Concordia graduate students Scott Benesiinaabandan (MFA Studio Arts) and Suzanne Kite (PhD INDI) as well as Concordia research associate Skawennati also participated. The first session in March largely consisted of brainstorm workshops about how and where Indigeneity intersects with AI. The second, in May, focused more on writing and laying the foundations of what would become the now-completed Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper.

In this work, we study adaptive data-guided traffic planning and control using Reinforcement Learning (RL). We shift from the plain use of classic methods towards state-of-the-art in deep RL community. We embed several recent techniques in our algorithm that improve the original Deep Q-Networks (DQN) for discrete control and discuss the traffic-related interpretations that follow. We propose a novel DQN-based algorithm for Traffic Control (called TC-DQN+) as a tool for fast and more reliable traffic decision-making. We introduce a new form of reward function which is further discussed using illustrative examples with comparisons to traditional traffic control methods.

The cinematic depictions are pretty clear. From I, Robot to The Terminator series to The Matrix, humans, either wittingly or unwittingly, manage to clash with the machinery that had previously served them. It's a narrative that, like some of our best mythos, puts us at the center of the action and more often than not shows the supremacy of human ingenuity under pressure. Because it's Hollywood, and Hollywood specializes in fictions. Well, at least part of it is a fiction.

Terms like'Data Science', 'Machine Learning', and'Data Analytics' are so infused and embedded in almost every dimension of lifestyle that imagining a day without these smart technologies is next to impossible. With science and technology propelling the world, the digital medium is flooded with data, opening gates to newer job roles that never existed before. However, quite often it is witnessed that beginners get confused over similar terms being used interchangeably, like'Data Science' and'Data Analytics'. This post will give you a clear idea about what some of the prominent concepts and job roles in Data are, and how they differ from each other! The most popular field that has emerged in the wake of digital disruption is'Data Science'. Data being oil and fuel of all the operations, companies are making the most of the accessible data that had never been used before.

An AI speech recognition bot designed to analyze speech and compile it into a database broke when it tried to analyze Trump's speech patterns, its creator told The Los Angeles Times. Factba.se is a project that aims to track every word from Donald Trump available, from speeches and interviews to Facebook posts and his vast catalogue of tweets. Since the project began three years ago, the team have collected over 1,000 hours of video and transcribed over 10,594,000 words from 1976 until now. To do this, CEO of FactSquared Bill Frischling created Margaret, an AI bot for transcription. Frischling tried his AI bot on a short section of a Trump speech commemorating the anniversary of the Battle of the Coral Sea.