The adoption of artificial intelligence is growing fast in Latin America, with businesses of all sizes deploying the technology to tackle critical issues despite the challenges faced by the regional ecosystem, according to a new report. According to the study by MIT Technology Review produced in partnership with Genesys on trends in AI adoption and the current state and the future of data sharing in Latin America, "there are many opportunities for the region, if it moves quickly." Latin firms are using AI to tackle critical regional issues, including food security, smart cities, natural resources, and unemployment, according to the study, with the level of sophistication of AI projects at almost the same level as other regions. About 80% of large businesses in the region reported having projects underway, with early benefits including increased operational efficiency and management decision-making. This compares with 87% in North America and 95% in Asia-Pacific. The researchers predict that by 2022, AI projects are expected to accelerate, with almost two-thirds of respondents in Latin countries saying they expect 21%-40% of their processes to use AI three years from now, with the areas of fastest growth being logistics and supply chain management, as well as sales and marketing.

The New York City Council today voted in favor of the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, a bill that requires the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to disclose their use of surveillance technologies. The POST Act also mandates that the NYPD develop policies on how it deploys those tools, as well as establish oversight of the department's surveillance programs to ensure they remain compliant. The passage of the POST Act, a three-year-old piece of legislation written with input from local activist organization Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), comes as cities around the country reexamine law enforcement policies following widespread demonstrations against abuse. Residents and activists on Tuesday urged the Detroit City Council to reject a contract that would extend the city police's use of facial recognition technology. On Wednesday, racial justice and civil liberties groups called on members of the U.S. Congress to end funding for surveillance technology law enforcement is using to spy on demonstrators.

What could your company achieve with the worlds most advanced robot dog working for you? One of New Zealand's leading Artificial Intelligence development companies, AwareGroup has secured a partnership deal with the operations arm of Boston Dynamics. Rocos Robotics Platform and AwareGroup will work together to provide five New Zealand companies with the opportunity to develop and deploy SPOT robots for any number of practical use-cases. Inspect progress on construction sites, create digital twins, and identify hazards. Remotely inspect and identify supporting awareness and operations.

Chinese Academy of Sciences and the City University of Hong Kong led a research team that developed an AI-powered machine learning approach capable of generating lifelike human portraits from simple sketches. Current deep image-to-image translation techniques may be faster at generating human face images from sketches, but they often overfit their inputs, or in other words, require a professional artist to sketch the face first. Other deep learning based solutions for sketch-to-image translation interpret input sketches as fixed constraints and then attempt to recreate the missing texture information between strokes. This new approach learns the space of plausible face sketches from real ones and finds the point in this space that best approximates the input sketch treating it as a'soft' constraint used to guide image synthesis. It consists of three modules: CE (Component Embedding), FM (Feature Mapping), and IS (Image Synthesis). Recent deep image-to-image translation techniques allow fast generation of face images from freehand sketches.

As artificial intelligence (AI) matures and new applications boom amid a transition to Industry 4.0, we are beginning to accept that machines can help us make decisions more effectively and efficiently. But, at present, we don't always have a clear insight into how or why a model made those decisions – this is'blackbox AI'. In light of alleged bias in AI models in applications across recruitment, loan decisions, and healthcare applications, the ability to effectively explain the workings of decisions made by AI model has become imperative for the technology's further development and adoption. In December last year, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) began moving to ensure businesses and other organizations are required to explain decisions made by AI by law, or face multimillion-dollar fines if unable. Explainable AI is the concept of being able to describe the procedures, services, and outcomes delivered or assisted by AI when that information is required, such as in the case of accusations of bias.

The Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration has asked vendors for information on platforms that use automation, cloud-based software and artificial intelligence and could help TSA hire, retain and manage employees, Bloomberg Government reported Wednesday. A request for information posted Monday says TSA will use the responses to inform its acquisition strategy to advance the modernization of its human capital management platforms for its 67K personnel. The proposed procurement's scope includes hiring, recruitment, applicant assessment, onboarding, payroll, employee benefits, performance management, separation, background checks and retirement planning. The agency plans to consolidate three professional services and information technology contracts that have obligated $388M in funds to support human resources functions. Accenture, Deloitte and PSI Services are the incumbents on those contracts.

For vessels that journey into the polar seas, keeping control of the spread of sea ice is critical, which means that large resources are spent to collect data and determine future developments to provide reliable sea ice warnings. "As of now, large resources are needed to create these ice warnings, and most of them are made by The Norwegian Meteorological Institute and similar centres", Sindre Markus Fritzner tells us. He is a Doctoral Research Fellow at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Fritzner is employed at the Department of Physics and Technology and has recently submitted a doctoral thesis where he has looked at the option of using artificial intelligence to make ice warnings faster, better, and more accessible than they are today. The ice warnings used today are traditionally based on dynamic computer models that are fed with satellite observations of the ice cover, and whatever updated data can be gathered about ice thickness and snow depth.

Amazon Web Services has added a 3D visualization capability to its SageMaker data labeling tool used to build training data sets for machine learning models. AWS said this week its SageMaker data labeling service called Ground Truth introduced in 2018 now includes a workflow for labeling of point clouds, a set of data points generated by tools like 3D scanners or Lidar sensors. Among the applications is labeling huge 3D data sets used to train models incorporated into self-driving car navigation systems. Those data sets can grow to hundreds of megabytes, making labeling extremely arduous. The new 3D point cloud labeling tool is billed as a custom workflow that includes a built-in editor and new "assistive" labeling features, the company (NASDAQ: AMZN) said in a June 10 blog post.

The most advanced framework for dense pose estimation for chimpanzees. It will help primatologists and other scientists study how chimps across Africa behave in the wild and in captive settings. The framework leverages a large-scale data set of unlabeled videos in the wild, a pretrained dense pose estimator for humans, and dense self-training techniques. This is a joint project in collaboration with our partners the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI EVA) and the Pan African Programme: The Cultured Chimpanzee, and their network of collaborators. We show that we can train a model to detect and recognize chimpanzees by transferring knowledge from existing detection, segmentation, and human dense pose labeling models.

A 30ft-long whale that died after it became stranded in a Welsh estuary was a one-year-old male calf that was struggling to find food, an autopsy has revealed. The fin whale, named Henry by rescuers, is thought to have been recently weaned by his mother and started to live independently - as they stop receiving milk at around six to seven months old - before becoming beached. The young male died on the sands of the Dee Estuary, North Wales, on June 14. He had beached at least twice over the previous two days. A post-mortem was carried out by the Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP) to identify the cause of death and find out why the whale ended up out of the sea.