Sometimes it takes something unexpected to shift people's perspectives. That's what a group of MIT and Harvard Law School researchers were aiming for when they set out to reframe fairness in AI by studying its use on the powerful rather than the powerless. They presented the results of their research in January at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Barcelona. In the US, over half a million people are locked up despite not yet having been convicted or sentenced--a result of pretrial detention policies. Ninety-nine percent of the jail growth since 2002 has been in the pre-trial population, much of this because of an increased reliance on bail money, according to a report by the Prison Policy Initiative.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced plans to provide up to $40 million over three years for new research in data, artificial intelligence and machine learning to address the challenges of producing and managing data at DOE scientific user facilities. "Major scientific facilities at our DOE national laboratories are generating vast and growing amounts of data for researchers every day," said Dr. Chris Fall, Director of DOE's Office of Science. Proposals are expected to focus on each of a range of different challenges, including extracting information from complex data sets, managing facility operations in real time, and optimizing experiments through the creation of virtual laboratory environments, among other topics. "Artificial intelligence's ability to analyze and divine insights from massive data sets has the power to transform the world around us," said Cheryl Ingstad, Director of DOE's Artificial Intelligence & Technology Office. "DOE is determined to lead by example in AI application by turning this power on ourselves to optimize the way we operate facilities and push the boundaries of scientific discovery."

In the opening session of his 2020 introductory course on deep learning, Alexander Amini, a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), invited a famous guest: former US President Barack Obama. "Deep learning is revolutionizing so many fields, from robotics to medicine and everything in between," said Obama, who joined the class by video conference. After speaking a bit more on the virtues of artificial intelligence, Obama made an important revelation: "In fact, this entire speech and video are not real and were created using deep learning and artificial intelligence." Amini's Obama video was, in fact, a deepfake--an AI-doctored video in which the facial movements of an actor are transferred to that of a target. Since first appearing in 2018, deepfake technology has evolved from hobbyist experimentation to an effective and dangerous tool. Deepfakes have been used against celebrities and politicians and have become a threat to the very fabric of truth.

A new hospital ward run entirely by robots has opened in Wuhan, China, in a bid to protect medical staff from contracting the coronavirus. On 7 March, about 200 patients exhibiting early symptoms of covid-19 were ushered into the new ward, which is in a converted sports centre in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus outbreak started. The robots deliver food, drinks and drugs to the patients, and keep the ward clean.

Many plants naturally bend towards bright light. Now a robot has been built that copies a technique plants use to do the same thing. Creating a robot that can sense and adjust automatically to its environment without any need for programming or maintenance is one of the major goals of robotics. A machine that could control and regulate itself in this way can then behave like a living organism, says Bilge Baytekin at Bilkent University in Turkey.

Call of Duty is officially launching its battle royale offensive Tuesday. A new free game, Warzone, will be available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and on PCs via Battlenet – with crossplay across those three platforms. In addition to the Battle Royale mode, which allows up to 150 players, a second mode called "Plunder" has you competing to collect the most in-game cash and completing in-game missions or contracts. Both games take place in a massive environment called Verdansk, based on the "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare" game, according to an announcement and description of the game on the Activision blog. Tthe best streaming service for you?:How cable alternatives compare for cord-cutters The city has "well over 300 points of interest" and distinct zones including the Gorengard Lumber Yard and the Gora Dam, as well as other urban and rural settings.

The US Navy is developing a robot submarine that is controlled by artificial intelligence that could kill without human control or input. The project is being run by the Office of Naval Research and has been described as an'autonomous undersea weapon system' according to a report by New Scientist. Details of the killer submersible were made available as part of the 2020 budget documents, which also revealed it has been named CLAWS by the US Navy. Very few details about the'top secret' project have been revealed beyond the fact it will use sensors and algorithms to carry out complex missions on its own. It's expected CLAWS will be installed on the new Orca class robot submarines that have 12 torpedo tubes and are being developed for the Navy by Boeing.

While the coronavirus is hurting many companies in china, on in particular is thriving because of the disease. Neolix, a driverless delivery service, has experienced a spike in demand as it helps reduce physical contact and fills in at a time of labor shortages – many workers in the country have been quarantined. The autonomous vans are being used to deliver medical supplies, disinfect streets and delivery food to people who are in the heart of the outbreak. The startup has booked orders for more than 200 vehicles in the past two months and before that, it had only produced 125 units since last May, founder Yu Enyuan said in an interview with Bloomberg. The tiny vans, which are essentially four-wheeled robots outfitted with trunks for storage, are capable of navigating their environment without any human pilot.

Amazon is cracking down price gougers on its platform who are looking to make a profit from the coronavirus that is wreaking havoc across the globe. The tech giant has pulled more than 530,000 listings from the site and suspended over 2,500 US sellers. The firm announced on Friday it is working with state attorneys general to identify and prosecute third-party sellers who are taking advantage of fears of the spreading coronavirus to engage in price-gouging on the Amazon website. Amazon also said it has begun manual audits of products in its online stores to spot sellers that evade its automated systems, which check for items that are'unfairly priced.' Amazon is cracking down price gougers on its platform who are looking to make a profit from the coronavirus that is wreaking havoc across the globe.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a subtype of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) mostly used for image classification. CNNs follow the biological principle of the replication of a structure capable of identifying patterns to identify these patterns in different locations. It was inspired by the model of cats' visual system proposed by the Nobel prizes winners Hubel and Wiesel at "Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat's visual cortex", published in 1962. One of the works that used this inspiration was the Fukushima's Neocognitron, in 1980, although the word Convolution was not used at the time. Therefore, it is not a coincidence that CNNs are very successful in image recognition.